D.N.A. DILEMMA for 48K Spectrum
Written by Jim Waterman, 3 - 4 April 2020
for comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Competition 2020
EXTRA BONUS MICRODRIVE VERSION INCLUDED (for a laugh)
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Background
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CORONA CAPERS is an upcoming, all-singing-all-dancing crapstravaganza for the 128K Spectrum models! Featuring AMAZING ACTION! And coming to the 2020 CSSCGC very soon, by which I mean in about a week's time when I can get it finished, debugged given a lot more polish and frippery than my programming deserves!
(Note: action may not be amazing. Blame Codemasters for the hyperbole. And the gratuitous capital letters. They did that. A lot.)

This is not that game.

It is, instead, half of one of the sub-games that I wrote in one evening, tested until it worked, then found it was so hair-tearingly difficult that I thought it a better idea to remove it and come up with a better idea. I've never been any good at those crap 4 x 4 sliding-grid jigsaws, but I thought I'd make one anyway, and in a 5 x 5 grid at that - but, because so many of the characters are the same - i.e. there are only four, spread all over the 24 tiles - I was thinking this would be a lot easier. I was quite spectacularly wrong.

But I hate waste - so much I've put it in gratuitous capitals in the PRINT AT statements in the on-screen instructions. And there was no way I was going to let this routine languish on my hard drive until I'm old and grey and need a walking stick (which is a lot further away than it is for some of you reading this bumph, I can tell you). So, the next morning, I woke up early (not hard when the sun's blazing through the window at 6 am), ripped the routine out on its own, stripped out all the PLAY statements and replaced them with BEEPs, made sure the GOTOs and GOSUBs worked (one of them was particularly devious), and added the high score routine and the instructions.

It's now as bashed into shape as any truly crap game deserves to be - maybe even a bit more. Think of Ian "HubNut" Seabrook and the way he lavishes attention on crap cars from the past, like a Skoda Favorit estate or a CityRover. (Look on YouTube if you don't already know.) He knows they're crap, he doesn't care, he likes what he does. So do I, with crap Spectrum games.

Enjoy, if at all possible.