ZX Computing


The 1K Artic Games Pack
By Artic Computing
Sinclair ZX81

 
Published in ZX Computing #17

The 1 Artic Games Pack

This cassette consists of 11 'games', although I use the term loosely. They can be summarised by the word 'rubbish', but I will go through them one by one.

The first game, Slot Machine, is a crude representation of a 1p-a-go fruit machine. You pay 1p for it to pick three numbers and display them in the windows of the machine, which doesn't appear until you press newline to insert the first 1p. The handle stays stationary as the numbers change. You win by either getting three in a row, or by the numbers adding up to seven. It either announces you're bust, or, if you've got a total of 25p you will have bust the bank. This is printed about 10 times and then the machine runs out of memory. The end.

Game 2, Art, is a familiar program where you plot a picture by moving either a PLOTting or UNPLOTting cursor around. I hadn't got far with mine, when it also ran out of memory.

Game 3, Slalom, is where you have to move a small representation of something through a gate, represented by two o's and as many times as you can. It does know when you've crashed however.

Catch Me If You Can is a game where you have to guide an 'X' onto a randomly moving 'O' that doesn't know where it is.

Space Pirate, game 5, is where you have to guide a three-character 'ship' which descends from the top onto a randomly moving ship at the bottom, but you have to get it exactly right. You are told how much loot you took, and after 10 dockings or misses, you are told your total, and you move on to the next game.

Spacefire 1 is where you control an arrow on the left and try to shoot the randomly moving ZX81 with your laser, but you can only fire when it doesn't fire at you.

Game 7, Spacefire 2, is exactly the same except the ZX81 moves from right to left towards you each go, and if you don't shoot each other by then, it returns to the right and tries again.

Car Crash is a substandard car driving program where you have to control an inverse V through a constant width road without hitting the edge or a V coming the other way. You can only see a fraction of the road at a time. When you crash, it multiples the number of SCROLLS it made by 100 metres and tells you how far you drove.

Man-eating budgies is one of the few games where the whole screen is in permanent use. You have to crash into 'O's without crashing into any of the weird three character shapes that are nothing like budgies.

In Maze, you have to move in your own time through successive lines of random blotches/spaces, until you have either hit a blob or gone through 50 blocks. You can either move horizontally, or move down another line, or fall asleep.

Program 11, Wall, is a primitive attempt at 'Break-out'.

Of the games, only one auto-ran, at least two ran out of memory, and they all had trouble listing. Games 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were all made worse by the fact that there was a CLS statement in the main loop! How crude!! There were, however, two good things to be said for all of the programs: Firstly, they all loaded ok, and secondly, they all used the cursor keys - my favourite.

I don't know about charging £6 for this package; it's hardly worth sixpence and it wouldn't come as a surprise to me to learn that this has been withdrawn from sale to prevent too much long-term damage to Artic Computing. It is a complete mystery to me how this found its way onto the shelves. Surely Artic would have known that nothing of any substance would be possible to write within 1K of ZX81 Basic!!!

Brian Owen