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Text File
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1989-09-30
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80 lines
SHAREWARE REVIEW
PROGRAM: VGABOMB
AUTHOR: Rad Delaroderie
REGISTRATION: $5.00
WHERE FOUND: Third Stage BBS (314) 949-5790
RESTRICTIONS: VGA ONLY
RATING: 7.8
VALUE: S (P)oor - (A)verage - (S)uper
It all started with a simple game called Hangman. No pictures, just text. I
then wandered into text adventure games. Growing bored of these bland,
unchallenging games, I moved to the strategic games, you know, the types of
games like battleship and checkers where you know the computer is cheating,
but just can't prove it. I then found this "strategic strategy" game, which
in the days of green monitored, tape drive driven PET computers were hard
to come by. It was simply called artillery.
The objective of artillery was to shoot at another gunning position and
blow it up. This sounds like an easy task, but you had to control the angle
and speed of your artillery shell, and deal with wind conditions. The game
challenged and excited, but soon began to bore. Seeing little o's flying
towards a # sign didn't exactly seem too fun.
VGABOMB brings back life into that unanimated, inept game. Using VGA colors
and varying battle fields, VGABOMB makes the basic game of artillery fun!
USE: VGABOMB uses no command line commands. Usually I would applaud such a
move, but in this case I would liked to have seen them. The game lacks
CONTROL. A user cannot control the sound, or the number of games
played. (The program is set in concrete to ten)
When the first screen is shown, the top six lines are used as a status
pad. All pertinent information such as angle of your gun, speed of
your gun, wind conditions, number of men left, and key controls are
displayed.
The rest of the screen displays your battlefield. Two artillery guns
(blue and red) are separated by a large mountain, and placed randomly
on each side. The moon, shining above, gives you an eery light to
shoot by.
Shooting your gun is as easy as moving your left and right arrow keys
and hitting the return key. By moving the arrow keys you can control
your angle and speed in which the gun shoots. Hitting return leashes a
shot that leaves a trailer of your "team" color.
VGABOMB just doesn't let you fire until you hit. Nope. It keeps track
of how many men you have on your "team." You start out with 100, but
every time you fire the gun you are docked 10 men because the gun is so
loud. You can also be docked men for a close hit from an opposing
player or yourself.
Hitting the opposition, or yourself, dead on allows you to be updated
on various statistics. Number of casualties, number of games played,
number of games won, etc. are all displayed on this tote board. After
playing ten games you are presented with an overall tote board for the
series.
The program, as mentioned earlier, lacks control. Control for sound,
number of players, games played, shot allowed, etc. would have
greatly increased VGABOMB's score.
SUMMARY: GOOD POINTS BAD POINTS
----------- ----------
√ Neat Game ≈ No Control
√ Price ≈ Lack of One Player Version
√ Documentation
RATING FOR VGABOMB.ZIP:
1----------5---------10:
██████████████████
7.8
Lacking the control expected in a game, VGABOMB suffered. Strong points
like play, documentation, and price pulled its score up.
(C) 1989 Patrick Grote