If you thought 2023 was crap, think again!

 Reading the accompanying email this is clearly going to be a challenge "I trust you aren't dyslexic and can read backwards, otherwise your brain might wilt and die. instructions are in the game, have "fun"" Since I do suffer from a level of dyslexia (the worst possible name for a condition for people who have issues with spelling) I am immediately in the risk category of brain wilt and death. I bravely face the challenge and load up the accompanying TZX file.  The game starts with a by-now, well-known flourish the need to RUN to start. Instantly I enter a world of spelling differences. I soon grasp that my kingdom is under attack by a mad wizard and I need to kill him. A strong start to an adventure.  I'm asked if I want instructions and I type Y and indeed my brain wilts a little trying to work out what "strunctoins: splick glacj oakaoapalalaladimadingdong" means. I am so busy trying to fathom this out I have missed the message at the bottom of t...

Often I find the emails that accompany the games to be as/more amazing as/than the games they accompany. "I was going to ask god to bless this one but even he has standards so I guess you'll have to do." The inference is that I have no standards and that I am likely to bless this program. One of those two things is wrong. From the start this heads on to my not a game pile, in this case not a utility either. The program opens by needing me to type RUN. After that, I am greeted with the screen below. Points are given for the attempt to center the text and removed for the random vowel usage. With no further instructions, I press enter and get greeted with the word SCORE:. A second press draws a circle on the screen. A final press tells me I bit the bagel 3.3874512times. Extra point for the lack of spacing. Pressing Space and Enter to restart results in a dismal beeping, anything else spares you the beeps. After this 0 OK, 81:1 Fortunately, it doesn't look like I need to ...

I'm beginning to think there should be an award for the tersest email accompanying an entry. If so this entry would be a serious contender. "Enjoy the game. Have a colorful 2024" Attached to the email was a TZX file called Level Up 48K. So far not too much to go on, so I loaded it up. One blink later and it was done, so fairly short. Even better the screen looked like this So no autorun. At this point there are only two real options LIST or RUN. Naturally, I listed the contents, 11 lines of basic. Normally I would hesitate to show the code here to avoid ruining the pleasure of listing it yourself. But the content will be easy enough to guess from the rest of this review. Bonus points will be awarded for not turning off the green paper. The game (can it be called a game?) seems to be a sad reflection of mankind's current progress. At least with the first crap game you got to press M, there was a goal of sorts to mow a lawn. There was even some level of graphics. Not so...