Games World

Paul Brett with the latest gaming news.

Although it has generally been a quiet couple of months in the RISC OS gaming world I still have details on a nice selection of RISC OS games, all included some new games, in the software section of RISC World, for you to play.

Feud - Justin Fletchcer

This is an updated version of an old game, but I really should let Justin tell you in his own words...

"This was an old game I wrote on the BBC. It's... interesting. This particular version was munged together from the ROMFS and Disc versions to make something that works. The joystick code (player 2) has been made to work with the RISC OS Joystick modules and was tested with Chris Bazley's FakeJoystick module. If you want to laugh at "where I came from" then you can look at the sources. It makes some interesting reading. Quite how I made it work, I don't know. However, looking at it now, I'm quite pleased that it did work. I've made it run more slowly by adding a delay to it. It's not that clever."

"The bulk of the code is unchanged from the BBC; it's really only the memory access that's been changed to use either system variables or reloaded data rather than writing to shared memory. I've intentionally left all typos and misspelling of 'Feud' for posterity."

"The original version was written when I was in Newark, which puts me in the upper juniors, or first year secondary school. About 10 or 11, I guess (1986-1987). I believe that the ... uh... design (oh yes there was design in this) was about 2 months and implementation was another 3 or 4. Obviously whilst I was doing other things. Like playing other games. Which I was really bad at. There are no date stamps on BBC applications (I didn't start using such stamps until after I wrote this). This port and application was made to work 18th December 2003. I'm 27 now."

Feud

RISC OS Invaders

It was recently bought to my attention that a number of RISC OS 4 users do not know about the special version of Space Invaders hidden inside the operating system. Now thanks to Jon Ripley anyone an easily play Space Invaders on RISC OS 4. The Invaders launcher comes in 2 versions, one is a file that you simply double click on to launch Space Invaders, the other is a module that launches the game whenever Ctrl+Alt+I are pressed.

Space Invaders is only hidden in RISC OS 4, and only works when the desktop is running.

RISC OS Invaders

Scavenger - Darren Salt

Here is a rather fun platform game that I can't recall seeing before, it's certainly not in the games collection on my harddisc, but is now. It's a very simple game, just run round the levels avoiding the badies and collect the goodies. Once you have collected all the goodies on a level a ladder will appear at the top of the screen, climb that to get to the next level. The animation in Scavenger is especially good and I must confess that I have spent the last forty five minutes playing it when I should have been writing this article.

The keys are:

Z- left
X - Right
/ - down
' - up
Left ALT - dig left
Right ALT- dig right
Space - Start/pause.

Scavenger

Finally I am going to finish off this issue with a gaming classic....

TwinWorld

Although it's an old game, it's most certainly a platforming legend. For full game instructions, please refer to the StrongHelp file supplied with the game. To view the help, click the Menu button of the mouse over the TwinWorld icon, then select 'Help' from the 'Application' menu. Note that you must have a copy of StrongHelp 2 (included) in order to view the help. To see the diagram in the section entitled 'The Scoreboard' you also need Acorn's DrawFile module.

TwinWorld

Signing off

See you next time for more RISC OS gaming, and perhaps news on the most significant gaming release for years, if I am allowed to tell you....

Paul Brett