Meldonium

Post date: 09-May-2016 19:32:39

Game by: Anders Carlsson

Reviewed by: Gabriele Amore (tidied up by and eventually posted around two months later by Simon Ferré)

Ladies and Gentlemen here comes... MELDONIUM!

Actually, the first thing that crossed my mind when read the title of this game was the famous anti-diarrheal medication IMODIUM, and quite frankly I thought it was a more than appropriate reference, given the general feel of this whole competition (I still fondly remembered how Davey Sludges took literally the meaning of “crap” in his series of games published in 2014!).

But, no: as I read the instructions (in that puny, typo-fraught, .txt file that came along with the game) I discovered that “This ia side-scrolling shoot 'em up in which you control a spaceship at the middle of the screen. Your goal is to collect as many hearts as possible, without smashing into the pills. (or get caught by WADA)”.

After all I could have guessed that by looking at this wonderful loading screen, if only I knew what that white thing on the bottom left was (OK: I know it is supposed to be a starship but I am not so sure even now... to me it looks more like a squashed-down version of Popeye’s fishing boat...). But then again: what would pills (after all I was not too far from the truth when thinking about Imodium... except that as I discovered on Wikipedia, Meldonium is a medication used to treat angina and myocardial infarction) and hearts do in deep space?? Only God knows (and Anders of course, but he would not give us any hint about this unfortunately).

Anyhow, the game itself is one of the best I saw so far (from the point of view of what a crap games should be of course). It is so uneventful (the wonderful graphics and animations notwithstanding) that even though I left it running for the last 2 hours or so (just about the time it took me to write this meaningless review) I still have 2 lives:

I guess that is something you would expect when you program a Shoot ‘em up in BASIC... but I suspect that Anders went the extra mile in making his script exceptionally slow so that you could play this game while watching a movie, chatting with friends on Facebook, sipping a cup of tea, learning German, looking at messages in your mail-box (and answering some of them) and so on and so forth... GOOD JOB!

All in all Meldonium is a great shoot ‘em up, in fact the only one that (staying faithful to its name) will surely not cause you an heart attack! And if you decide to play it at 14 MHz (as suggested by Anders) it is bound to deliver hours of fun for the whole family (even including infarctuated grandpas!)

Gabriele Amore

Full (uncorrected) instructions provided by Anders are thus:

This ia side-scrolling shoot'em up in which you control a spaceship

at the middle of the screen. Your goal is to collect as many hearts

as possible, without smashing into the pills. (or get caught by WADA)

While this game will play on a 3.5 MHz ZX Spectrum with 16K or better,

the recommended configuration is a 14 MHz model if possible.

Controls are as follows:

Q - Move spaceship up

A - Move spaceship down

O - Turn direction of movement to the left

P - Turn direction of movement to the right

Space - Fire bullet

If you already are facing the direction you are turning into, your

speed increases. In order to reverse direction, you need to hold the

reverse button for longer to first decrease the speed before turning.

There may only be one bullet on screen at the same time. It will keep

moving in the direction it was fired, irregardless if you reverse the

direction of movement afterwards.

Scoring is as follows:

10 points - Spaceship running into a heart

20 points - Bullet shooting through pills

50 points - Bullet shooting through a heart

The bullet will not stop once it has hit a target, which means many

hearts or pills may be hit by a single bullet.

You have five spaceships to go, before the game ends.