Number Board Plus - Jim Waterman

Congratulations to Jim Waterman who wins the official first entry to this year's CSSCGC (ignoring the entry that must not be mentioned). It would have been submitted on the stroke of midnight if not for those accursed email gremlins who removed the attachment. As a result, the actual entry arrived a tardy one-minute past midnight.

There are clear instructions on how to load the game, type Load"", easy enough except I couldn't find the speech marks, I tried the Spectrum shift + P, but that didn't work, and now the command line is becoming a mess, but I can't delete it as I'm somehow now in the middle of the line and need to get to the end first. 

Luckily the game playing instructions mention the positions of the Lambda cursor keys. C,V,B,N. I managed to get to the end and delete the line. Wikipedia then assisted me with an image of the Lambda keyboard, I needed Shift + 5 for speech marks. Only 3 minutes in and I manage to get the game loaded.

File:Front of Lambda 8300.Png. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Front_of_Lambda_8300.png

There are two instant impressions, the first is colour, my ZX81 never looked this good in my childhood. The second is the way the title screen smoothly scrolls into place. This game has polish. The opening screen tells us that it is heavily based on a ZX80 game by Robert Bumstead. There is much more detail in the accompanying notes which will be in the download. Instantly it scores crap points for being someone else's game, but just as quickly loses some for admitting it.

There isn't much more on the opening screen except the instruction to press H for a harder game or any other key for a more normal level. I start by wimping out and pressing anything but H. The opening screen is cleared and a board of random numbers appears on the screen. The left-hand column is red and the right-hand is green, is there significance to this? Is it a colour limitation picking up colour from the screen border? An artistic flourish? I will leave that for you to decide, answers would be welcome on the back of a postcard from Margate. 

In the top left is a graphic that looks a little like a racing car. There was some mention in the instructions of your score being affected by how long you take, so I'm guessing this is a racing game. I'm picturing the car zipping across the screen and needing to turn quickly, maybe a little like Snake. There are also three 'grumphers' a green pacman ghostlike creature, yellow four-legged spider and a red bow. The instructions told me I needed to collect these in a certain order but I have already forgotten.

I'm pleased to discover I don't need to hold shift to activate the cursor keys, and actually, as I'm playing using an emulator on a laptop with plenty of palm rest space I find them quite easy to use. My opening assumption is that I will press a direction and the car will move in that direction until I stop pressing.

Assumptions are the enemy of enjoyment. This is not Fast and Furious, The Number and Grumpher collecting edition. The car only moves once per key press. When you press a key, the car is replaced with a black square and after a couple of sips of tea later it reappears in its new location. Key presses are not buffered, you need to enter them each time the car reappears.  (It took 5 goes to realise I can hold the cursor key down). I soon realise it is going to take a while to get across the board to the X in the bottom corner which I am assuming is the goal (I'm sure the instructions would have told me but I only man-read them). I decide to collect the grumphers in the order they appear between me and the goal and slowly make my way across the screen. In the bottom corner, the sum of the numbers I have collected slowly ticks up and the grumphers collected appear next to it. 

I have no strategy on this first game. I'm also pausing to write up my experience, by the time I get to the end and the sum of numbers collected is multiplied by the time taken, it is 71400. The game plays me a pretty little tune. This is so far from my ZX81 days. My score is a new low score and I get to type my name in. I'm told I can press enter for another game. Like any rebellious computer user I type a couple of random letters which causes the game to stop, at this point, I decide to list the game before playing again. After a brief look, I press run to continue.

As promised in the notes despite being rerun the game has remembered my previous lo-score. This time I have a challenge and leap into action with all the speed of a racing snail. Looking ahead at the numbers coming up I plot a route to the first grumpher, there is no time to stop and think as I head towards the second, on my way to the third I mess up my cursor keys and head up instead of down picking up a couple of penalty numbers and wasting valuable time (okay it sounds more exciting than it is). Finally, I'm home free and heading towards the exit X. I have achieved an all-time low 16562. Another dose of the pretty tune and I'm again typing in my name. I type in "Superwinner", or try to, despite all the letters being uppercase by force of habit I press shift for the first letter and start typing out keywords. After deleting these and starting again I press enter, the lowest scorer is superw, 6 letter names only, but at least it doesn't crash 

Okay before I go for the pleasure of a rematch against myself, I'm going to try to collect the grumphers in the wrong order. Yes, I have finally re-read the instructions. I skip the first grumpher, collect the next two and head for the exit, after a series of sad beeps I am told it was an EPIC FAIL and that I need to pick them up in the correct order.

Pressing enter to re-run doesn't give the option to change the difficulty level, this appears to be a one-shot deal at the start of the game. My new strategy is to press the next direction key as soon as the car reappears on screen. For some reason the numbers are printed in yellow for this turn, not white like the others, this makes the yellow grumpher harder to see (Is this deliberate or not? More answers on postcards please). Either luck of the randomised numbers or my new plan paid off. A new low score of 14018. After entering my name I deliberately press anything but enter to crash the game so I can restart and play hard level.

The grumphers appear to show up in the same order but more awkwardly placed. My hard score score is a whopping 29832.

So what do I make of all this?

Technical Ingenuity - 95%

For a start, the game is described as 'Heavily based on a ZX80 game by Robert Bumstead'. A thinly disguised rip-off would put this game in a strong position. However, the original can be found here and weighs in at 180 lines. It employs a clever use of peeking at the characters on screen each turn. However, the remake ends on line 9999 to give some idea how much it has been expanded.

Initially, it appears the game is written in basic which should help boost it towards the crap end of games, however, Jim has weakened his position here, as the accompanying notes point out

"- alpha1: Drew the new very-much-graphically-enhanced screen. It takes 49 seconds to generate in FAST mode and... *5m10s* to do so in SLOW mode! I think this needs machine code..."

Come on Jim, what are you thinking? Any reduction of the end user's pain is going to dock crap points. 

"- alpha5: Added more machine code to make a SCREEN$ facility (which the original ZX80 Number Board game uses)"

There is altogether too much machine code going in for my liking, this is hiking up the technical level.

There is also gratuitous usage of the extra features of the Lambda 8300, such as sound, colour and extra memory. In all the biggest limitations of this game are the limitations of the machine it runs on.

Achievement - 89%

I am forced to ask myself at this point what is the author trying to achieve? It appears to me that he is stretching the limits of the machine and his current level of familiarity with programming it. This appears not so much the attempt to write a crap game for the Lambda 8300, but the best that can be achieved within its limits. If this is the case then I think he has done well.

Fun - 19%

I haven't played the original, though I have read the code. Casting myself back to the ZX81 and type-ins. I would have typed this in back in the day as it was short enough to attempt. I would have been annoyed by the typo in the listing, but I would have played it more than once. In today's world, the game is exceedingly crap and dull. 

However, Jim's notes contain the following:

"- alpha8: Added the need to capture the Grumphers along the way, and lose the game if they're not collected in the order green-yellow-red."

Oh dear! Attempting to make the original game more fun is a bad sign. Luckily this doesn't detract from the crap factor as noted in the next section.

Crap Factor - 80%

Polishing a turd comes to mind. The basic concept of the game is okay, but it is not the right game for this machine. The tedious progress of your racing car towards the end goal makes any desire to replay fade faster than a thermally printed listing. Bearing in mind that I have played this far too often ruining a wet and windy New Year's Day, I feel qualified to declare it a crap play.

Roundup

Pros -

• Sound.
• Colour.
• The ability to multiply, trying to fight for the lowest score.

Cons - 

• Overall, the game plays like an arthritic slug, down to machine limitations.
• Since the board is properly randomly generated, you are not able to truly challenge your previous attempts equally. 

A weighted score of the above factors and my level of revulsion at the thought of playing another go leads me to award this a respectable 25% crapness.

For extra challenge, turn off Lambda colour mode

You can download the game here and try to beat my score of 14018, but remember I have played this game so you don't have to.