16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Y'know, other stuff, Sinclair related.
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Morkin
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16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by Morkin »

...Incredibly I've only just got through around a third of these tapes now; I originally only owned a few issues and ditched them after the glut of similar-style BASIC offerings. For some reason I thought there were only about 10 released - I was waaay off there.

So far, I'd say that the tapes have on the whole gradually improved, though perhaps not at the same speed as commercial software.

Anyway, let's see what we've got this month.

August 1984.

At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, astonishment as Zola Budd collides with Mary Decker, ending her (MD) race prematurely. Still mind-boggling to think of the success she had while running barefoot:

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In other news, former car maker John DeLorean is cleared of drug trafficking charges in his trial in Los Angeles. Though I guess it's not the only time that a Delorean has been involved in illegal activity..

In the charts George Michael asserts his post-Wham domination of UK pop, with second place going to the classic wedding-in-a-community-hall-with-disco-DJ anthem, Agadoo. And I bet I've got you all singing it in your heads now too... Heheh.... :evil:

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And in Crash, a new kid on the block smashes into the top 5, though the Willys still reign supreme.

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...Incidentally, I'm not exactly sure how Kosmic Kanga was awarded a Crash Smash in this issue, but hey, I digress...

So onto this month and as mentioned previously, I never got this far with the 16/48 tapes, so all this should be new ground. Let's get started.

Previously I've been skipping over the contents, but after [mention]R-Tape[/mention]'s revelations about some interesting contents-content in a previous edition, I made a point to go back and check later once I'd finished the tape, to avoid spoilers. There were one or two interesting things that I've mentioned later for individual programs.

As promised last month, this tape is a bumper issue, with a few more programs to load up.

So straight onto the first offering, which is...

ELEVATOR
by Christopher Sutherland

As recent episodes have involved some machine code in the games, I've been keeping my eyes on the loader for any hint of "Bytes:" appearing in the loader. We have it here, but my guess after seeing "Bytes: TEXT" was a nice font, and I'm proved right once the program loads.

Interestingly we have the instructions as a poem, for no obvious reason:

"Hence follow the instructions, in verse,
For an interesting game,
At which you may cry or curse,
But enjoy it all the same

Move your man around the screen,
To rescue all the men,
But if by spaceship he is seen
He loses energy (amount-ten) (chortle)

An alien can view our hero
When directly above or below
This drains energy, and at zero,
Game over - press for another go!

Safety you may gain,
Beneath the purple pillars.
But for you to reach your aim,
You must AVOID the killers.

Your energy will drop,
When on an elevator,
But don't give up,
As you can get some later...

After rescuing a man,
Your energy will mount.
On the 10th one saved you can
Shout: "I've won-I'm out!"


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OK, well I don't know the keys, but it gives me the idea of the game.

...Which hasn't actually loaded yet (jeez...) Right..! Here we go.

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To my (mild) disappointment the main part of the game is written in BASIC - though after breaking into the program later it looks like well-written BASIC at least. This assessment is based solely on my highly subjective and probably incorrect opinion - basically if I see a DEF FN function in a program I assume the programmer is clever and therefore knows what they're doing. :D

Anyway, as the poem indicates, you basically have to wait between the magenta pillars and time your moves when the top and bottom green killers have passed, to avoid being destroyed.

As there's no time limit whatsoever, this is more an exercise in player patience rather than arcade skill.

...On the subject of elevators and player patience:

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The above pic is a Mass Effect in-joke, in case anyone hasn't played it

Later I discovered that the game was timing me all along (sneaky Spectrum!), so I suppose there's an incentive to try to beat your best score (spoiler tags used in case you don't want to see the end screen):
Spoiler
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Not a bad game overall. But on reflection it's probably better if I put my thoughts into a rubbish poem.

<clears throat>

"Neither cursing nor crying
Was heard, while ascending
And descending elevators,
Just quiet whirring
From Spectaculator...

At the end of the game
A chance to replay
And beat my best time,
Nah - let's LOAD "" and play (the tape)..."
(yes, that's rhyming 'play' with 'play' but I ran out of inspiration...)

Moving on.

LETTER
From Mr D Goodall from Blackpool

...And eagle-eyed Morkin recognises one of the 'clear the screen' scrolling routine finalists at the start of this one...

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I had to read this about 3 times because I kept getting distracted by the little symbols/UDGs in the text.

Anyway, what's this silly game then? Well, it's called

SLALOM

This is probably what you expect it to be. Well, almost....

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Nope, that's not a bug, and the program hasn't crashed, like I thought (mainly because I didn't read the instructions properly). The idea is to plough through the numbers, and you score whatever number values you're ploughing through.

I was going to suggest this as a high score challenge, but crikey, does it hurt your eyes..! After about 2 minutes, the whole screen was a blur of yellow and blue and I needed a bit of a lie down...

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But if anyone wants to try to beat my score (and probably need an eye test afterwards), here you go:

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On a plus side, I thought I was going to just read a letter, and ended up playing a game, so I'm not complaining too much.

Next, we have...

LETTER 2
From Robert Walker, Edinburgh

Jeez, OK, so I would suspect as the series goes on there'd be more letters coming in, but somehow reading letters is a bit of a slog when you have to load them first. Even the early issues were full of claims of 'bulging sacks' (fnar). Let's see what we have here then.

Robert has sent in some homemade utilities. OK, so we've got:
  • a new character set
  • a CLS routine (fairly unexciting)
  • a 4-directional scroll routine (impressive)
Robert includes a recommendation for "40 Machine Code Routines", which inspired him to learn machine code. And behold it's even a book that I own:

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Oddly enough it does contain some scroll routines, that the writer has adapted. Which is more than I could ever do with machine code routines. I wonder if Robert eventually became one of the "generation that could code" and went onto bright computer-y pastures...

OK, next...

EDITORIAL

News this month is from the Computer Fair at Earls Court. One of my regrets from my Speccy days was never going to a computer fair/Microfair - at the time I didn't really live near London and it would've been a right pain to get there. Also I was obviously pretty young at the time and would've got lost on the bus/train or something.

Here's the highlight:

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Looking back, it must be hard to explain to someone 'of a younger ilk' how you could have visited the (sort of) equivalent of a modern day technology fair, and one of the highlights of your visit was seeing a tape recorder.

OK so that's the hardware, what about software? SHOW ME THE GAMES!!

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Huh..?

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Additionally:

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Controversial..! I'm sure a few people here will beg to differ re: the Mugsy comments. Though I think everyone's just been astounded by the prettiness of Sabre Wulf in August 1984.

Finally the results of The Long Way Home Trans-Mat drawing competition back in issue 5.
The winner, D Stone from Suffolk, wins £50. The runner up, S.G. Harman of Derby, wins £25 "but not immortal fame in the adventure".

Finally, 16/48 is doing back issues (£3 each), if anyone wants them.

LENSRAY

Hmmm... Sounds a bit educational to me....

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OK, let's just watch, and see what's going on. I'm prompted to pick real images, virtual images, or a mixture of both. Let's go for both.

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(Teehee, 'ho'... :D)

OK, so as expected, we have some physics. Or math(s). Or a combo. I don't know. Anyone good with lens stuff?

Also, there's a reference to Hi and Ho so I should be able to shoehorn a dwarf reference in here somewhere. But not now, it's off to wor... <snip> - Ed..

Even if I learned this stuff, I can't really remember any of it, though I suspect some brighter readers probably can. At any rate, I'll restrain from blurting out the dismissive & cliched "never used any of that in the real world, mate" and buckle down.

One of the slight annoyances is that the program doesn't *really* explain what the abbreviations Ho, f, u and v are, so I had to do the legwork and figure out what the different measurements are.

The second annoyance is that it pops up another equation for 'Hi' but doesn't give you enough time to read it, before plastering the actual results on top.

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Well, as the program doesn't seem to be actually teaching me anything I did a quick Google search to try to find the right formulas. Now, I'm not sure what level this is normally taught at (I don't remember it at GCSE) but it started looking a bit complicated for my liking.

Eventually I got something close to what the program was saying, apparently 1/v = 1/Hi - 1/u (or something). So then I had to do some sums using fractions to find the results.

I later discovered that if I'd taken the time to read the description of this program in the tape contents, it explains the abbreviations, but I still think that it should've been explained in the program itself really. Well, that's my excuse I'm making for my crap score anyway.

Anyway, I found the whole thing tedious, and started guessing the answers a bit. And I stand by my record:

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...but remember kids...

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Moving on swiftly...

REVIEW

Oh, wonder what it'll be...

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Trashman graphics are ace. I'm just going to briefly sit and look admiringly at the colourful screen graphics, as I know they're about to plaster the review text all over it...

One thing I've noticed is that on the whole the reviews are for decent games - but then I suppose you wouldn't waste a load of tape time reviewing not-so-good games, like Sqij!, Kosmik Pirate, Dizzy (starts running from angry mob).

Let's see what the 16/48 verdict is, I'm assuming it'll be a glowing recommendation...

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Eh??? Are you kidding? The controls in Trashman are fine, thankyouverymuch... The reviewer also says that you'd "need a good joystick" to play the game, but even with a joystick the controls are poor...

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Come on now, you haven't even played it properly... And besides, there's LITERALLY A PUB ON THE SCREEN BEHIND THE REVIEW TEXT...

<breathe, Morkin, breathe...>

The reviewer does compliment the graphics at least (how could they not?) and actually relents and admits it's a decent game. However, there's a bizarre recommendation:

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Obviously you try to make the odd game comparison, but Ant Attack vs Trashman? I'm not too sure where that has come from.

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Jeez... Anyway, this is the longest I've ranted about any of the programs on this tape, and it's a flippin' review, so I'll shut up now.

THE LONG WAY HOME - part 6 - COLONY

Wahaay, onto what made 16/48 famous (well, what it's largely known for at least)...

So, a short recap so far - Quantum Leap, "Oh boy" etc. So far we've been to the Marie Celeste, a strange pyramid, a prehistoric settlement and an enchanted castle.

Once again, 16K-ers don't have the pleasure of the graphics - though I'm not too sure how many people would realistically still be playing on a 16K Speccy in August 1984. To be fair, the magazine is sticking to its guns. Probably forced by its own name, though I doubt anyone would begrudge it changing its name to just '48', though we'd miss the flashy loading screen. Hell, Kanye & Kim have a child called "North West", I doubt anyone would care.

Anyway, given the title of this month's episode, I'm going to stick my neck out ("Ouch, my neck!") and predict a more futuristic time for this month's episode.

Let's see if I'm right...

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Yep. Interesting choice of year.. ;) Oh, and we start with a flint, some straw and and a bottle from the previous episode.
Spoiler
All of which turn out to be completely useless
So onto the adventure. Well you start "in an alien desert, the sky is purple, the sand is red." Surprisingly there's no graphics in my starting location, though it looks as if the author later relented in case we couldn't visualise it:

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...Oh, come on...! Not one for the portfolio methinks. Given the artist's clear ability from previous episodes, it's like asking Rembrandt to draw a stick man...

Anyway, as is tradition, it's not long before I meet my first demise (one of many I assume at this point).

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Of course, my mind instantly conjured up an Alien/Predator image, largely because in the Morkin man cave I have a canvas print of a Predator on one wall, and an Alien on another. Well, I can only assume that this creature has Predator-like instincts if I can't see it creeping up on me in a desert.

Anyway, I got the impression that this was a 'timed death' if you wander around in the open too long. I'm not sure if you can actually kill it despite Arnie's affirmation:

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In fact, I found four ways to die this episode, one of which was this:

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Well, I'm guessing that there's probably one of those stats that says that you're more likely to get killed on an escalator than by a shark, or an alien/predator hybrid or whatever.

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Incidentally, there's a sort of running gag in TLWH, where they always have 3 buttons on the Trans Mat unit - if you press the wrong one it's Game Over (maaan). The 'gag' is that only one button is correct, but
Spoiler
the colour you have to push is the same every episode
Turns out there are quite a few locations in this episode, though most of them are the slightly unexciting desert scene that act as 'dead end' locations. And there are some traditionally nice graphics dotted around the place.

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Image

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The graphics are nice, perhaps a bit samey colour-wise this month compared to previous episodes' high standards (limited by the landscape setting description I suppose).

I'd whipped up a simple map in about 10 minutes or so, though I probably didn't need to. And not long after....
Spoiler
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Wow...

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This episode was actually pretty easy - it took me about 30 minutes to complete, and that includes the time I took to draw the map. But I enjoyed it. There's essentially one 'main' puzzle, that's not overly difficult. If you never completed any text adventures before, you could probably finish this one easily enough, despite the multiple deaths. Though you might want to speed up your emulator to cope with the blippy bloppy sounds of the BASIC sentence parser.

So onto side B.

OF DUNGEONS & GREEN MEN

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50 points if anyone recognises the references. Nope? Anyone? Well, you should've read the contents properly. This month it's hints & tips for:

Circus, by Digital Fantasia

I never played this one... It's by Brian Howarth, a fairly prolific game author. It appears to be a Scott Adams adventure, games presented in a very particular style.

As the game hero/heroine, your car "splutters and grinds to a halt" whilst out driving. Turns out you're out of fuel, so set out on foot, petrol can in hand for "a gallon of four star". Clearly you're too embarrassed to call the RAC/AA, though given the circumstances perhaps you just want to avoid standing there while they point and laugh at you and call you an enormous fool.

And of course, you discover the eponymous Circus, at which point you try to remember if you did indeed roll up (roll up) the car windows (sorry, that was terrible).

As I haven't played this game before, I thought I'd skip the hints and put Circus on my playlist. If anyone's played it, let me know what you reckon. Rather than break from the tape, I decide to move on immediately, as it's a s0dding long tape this month.

TRANSMATE
by Z Strong

The mind boggles. Oh, it's basically The Vortex from The Adventure Game...

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In fact, the tape's contents tell us "Ian Oliver, producer of BBC2's "Adventure Game" was kind enough to sanction its production".

Wow, these Beeb peeps are being nice to us humble Spec-chums.. Perhaps they regret the decision not to have millions of Speccys scattered around school computer rooms around the UK... ;)

Fairly simplistic, at first I thought the computer was cheating, but I got there after a few attempts, to be greeted by the most unexcited-sounding congratulations screen I think I've seen in any game:

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All I have to say about that is "Doog yrev!" (a phrase I'm sure a lot of you will be familiar with). After playing, I had a browse through the Wikipedia entry to see who was on the different episodes, it certainly was a popular stamping ground for Beeb newsreaders and presenters. Though I guess back then they didn't have Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Dinner Date, I'm a Celebrity get me out of this Dancing on Ice etc. etc.

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Next, we have another

REVIEW

...and it's:

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A quick look at the archive entry tells me it's a utility that allows backups between tape & Microdrive. The only downside is that it won't cop... err... backup a lot of commercially produced programs, but as 16/48 says, "...but you wouldn't want to do that anyway. Would you?"

Basically I'm not too sure exactly what the point of this utility is, unless you're copying other people's programs, though perhaps I've missed something somewhere along the line. I suspect this thought wasn't lost on Romantic Robot either, who released the fantastic Multiface 1 a couple of years later, along with the advertising tagline "It's here..! The easy hardware solution to copying all those difficult-to-pirate games..!".

(Well, it would have been the tagline if I worked for them).

Ahem. So in conclusion:

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Fair enough I suppose. I guess it's cheaper than a second tape recorder...

Next we have

LETTER NUMBER PUZZLE
by Jim Elvery

No description, but I immediately have to make a choice between (1) Letters, (2) Numbers or (3) Colours.

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So I wonder what do I have to do...?

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...Oh... Right. OK, let's give this a go.

One thing I notice is that the tiles scroll smoothly. Bit of machine code going on there I think.

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Wahay...! Success..! Mostly through luck though, and it didn't tell me that I'd 'won' or anything. Perhaps I've done it wrong. Now let's see numbers...

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Oh...

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Maybe let's just check out the colours...

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Ummm... I'm not sure what I'm aiming for with this one? I suppose I could line up the colours or something:

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There - that'll do. Well, I'm afraid this hasn't been the most riveting exercise, or review of aforementioned exercise, but there you go. Let's pick up on a positive, which is that aside from printing the yellow board, the program appears to have been written entirely in machine code, and is fairly slick. It does actually make a bit of difference in playability.

Right... Next on the tape is

LISTVARS

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It's nice to see 16/48 getting more and more interested with machine code. Here we have a relocatable machine code routine that you call with RANDOMIZE USR xxxxx that tells you the values of all the variables in your progam.

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I suppose you could do this in BASIC, but it saves having to make your program bigger I suppose...

There really isn't much more to say about this. It does exactly what it says on the tin, as they say. Am getting the feeling that this tape is starting to tail off a bit....

COMPETITION

...And lo and behold, it's another scrambled picture.

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If you read the contents, you'll discover that the first 5 entries (which you have to send in on tape - I'm surprised they haven't encouraged people to send in Microdrive cartridges) will win the game, though we're told here it's the first 6, so perhaps they wangled an extra copy.

Well, I didn't do very well at the last one of these, and the format is exactly the same 'puzzle engine', so I got nowhere with this one. Basically you can vertically scroll two parts (each half) of the screen and horizontally scroll each third of the screen. It's pretty difficult, but feel free to give it a go if you like. But I don't mind admitting my failure. Besides, I've already got Sabre Wulf.. 8-)


YAHTZEE
by R.F. (aka Bob) Gavin

Well I suppose we know what to expect here. Unless you're a 16K owner, because sorry folks, this is 48K only...

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Woah..! Are we being informed that the hobby author of a program on a tape magazine managed to get an official 'nod' from the giants MB? I'd be astounded if you even got a reply nowadays from a similar request. It also shows that 16/48 are being pretty diligent about getting permissions for stuff.

Makes me wonder if the million other Yahtzee authors requested permission...

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...Perhaps the MB rep got so many requests they got fed up and said yes to them all...

I don't mind the odd game of Yahtzee, I'm a bit rusty with the rules but I'm sure it'll come back to me. Unfortunately I can't play against the computer it's a 2-player only... As it turns out the scorecard is massive, so perhaps there was no room for a computer AI...

As I've said in previous episodes I do wonder if anyone played any of these multi-player games on the tape mag. Right then, better invent an imaginary friend I suppose...

If anyone hasn't played this sort of Yahtzee before, it's a bit like poker with dice, only you have to try to get a collection of scoring hands (full house etc.). And some bits of it aren't really like poker. ("Thanks, that's really helped" - Ed)

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Initially I found I'd actually forgotten how to play it, but then remembered halfway through the first round. Something else I'd forgotten is that 6 rounds of Yahtzee between two players takes about a day and a half. But I persevered, like the dicey soldier that I am (hmmm, that sounds a bit wrong)... Oh, and I also sped up the emulator a bit as the scorecard was taking yonks to render.

In all the rounds I did manage to achieve 'Yahtzee' (5 of a kind) once, and was promptly obliged to shout it at full volume at my screen:

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I'm not kidding though, it really took aaages... I'm talking multiple rounds, and quite a few saved snapshots. But there's something quite relaxing constantly rolling dice while watching Traffic Cops or some other rubbish on TV.

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So that's it for this month.

In conclusion, not a bad one, though I was slightly disappointed at the bit-too-easy TLWH, and given that it was a bumper issue, the lack of arcade-style games to play. But always good to try a new magazine, one that I hadn't seen before.

I'm slightly hoping that at some point the machine code routines will blossom from things like double-printing and basic scroll/CLS routines to something a bit more... Well, 'game-y'... I suspect it won't happen but we can always hope, right..?
Last edited by Morkin on Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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PeterJ
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by PeterJ »

An excellent read [mention]Morkin[/mention]!
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

Yeah, a great (and funny) read, as always.

A think that impresses me much about this mag is the quality of the text adventures.
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R-Tape
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by R-Tape »

Morkin wrote: Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:22 pm ...Incredibly I've only just got through around a third of these tapes now; I originally only owned a few issues and ditched them after the glut of similar-style BASIC offerings. For some reason I thought there were only about 10 released - I was waaay off there.

So far, I'd say that the tapes have on the whole gradually improved, though perhaps not at the same speed as commercial software.
Now that's a post! Top stuff Morkin.

I remember a couple of lads at school tried the cross country in bare feet (they didn't repeat it). Little did I know that they were copying Zola Bud!

Elevator is pretty good. If I programmed something like this in BASIC now I'd be proud of it.
At the end of the game
A chance to replay
And beat my best time,
Nah - let's LOAD "" and play (the tape)..."
..and not overstay? shout hooray? Maybe not.
basically if I see a DEF FN function in a program I assume the programmer is clever and therefore knows what they're doing. :D
This!^ These are probably also the same people that know what's going on in LENSRAY.

D Goodall from Blackpool seems to have started the trend for emoticon overuse way back in 1984!
But if anyone wants to try to beat my score (and probably need an eye test afterwards), here you go:
(SLALOM) Ouch! 1747. Another game? No.

Your promise of an easy text adventure got me playing TLWH. I've solved a few puzzles but am currently a bit lost in the subway. At least I'm getting a good view of the easter egg graphics there.

An outstanding piece of minimalist art, that paints more than a thousand words. Obviously inspired by Rothko's Magenta on PAPER 2:

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"DIG SAND"
It's really far out man!
:roll:

I had a quick blast on Transmate, and it seems luck is far more important than skill.

One day, I will bother my arse to play a Yahtzee game. This is not that day.
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by Rorthron »

Morkin wrote: Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:22 pm Obviously you try to make the odd game comparison, but Ant Attack vs Trashman? I'm not too sure where that has come from.
Obviously they both use oblique projec-...

OK, I'll stop. :D

Great writeup.
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Re: 16/48 Tape Magazine 09 - August 1984

Post by Morkin »

R-Tape wrote: Sun Sep 06, 2020 1:41 pm
One day, I will bother my arse to play a Yahtzee game. This is not that day.
If you play this version, it'll take more than a day... :lol:
Rorthron wrote: Sun Sep 06, 2020 2:30 pm Obviously they both use oblique projec-...
Aaargh...!! :lol:
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