Be Excellent To Each Other

Scores on the doors so far please Isla:



zaphod79: 18850
Chinny: 13300
Sheepeh: 13325
Jon: 12,000 (approx)
Lave : 3950

13325.

I suspect I can do better than that, though. Moving between those bubble things is a reet bastard.

If thats level 3 then they are , thing is because you go back to the start of the level you get a pile of points on level 1 and its almost better to go and do level 1 on your last life because you'll have about 10k just from getting to the end and then getting thrown back

Any more clues about the powerups ?

BTW Chinny - I think your gamercard link is broken it doesnt seem to have updated correctly - shouldnt it look like this ?

I did my mock-up manually for satirical purposes and have no idea or inclination to make a real one I'm afraid.

Shouldn't it have Zylitol as your most recently played game, though?

No. For many many reasons........

I do realise you made it as a joke , however the real gamercard just puts your last game played as the first little image and shuffles everything else one back (which i did on the image) , i thought it would be a nice way to track the previous titles played in this challenge - its a 2 minute job with MSpaint (or mac equivalent) to update it or save the file i made earlier (i just used the box art from Zynaps)

I would also suggest adding a link to this thread on your sig to try and encourage people to come here and participate ?

Good idea. I'll think of something when I have a moment.

<bump> - remember this finishes tomorrow - last chance to get to the top of Chinny's greasy pole !

His pole proved too great for me, there was too much. I demand a speccy game next.

Okay - I'll pick a speccy game if i'm the winner for this week.

Right - no one seems to have beaten my score so i declare myself the winner <crowd applauds widely>

Although I'd like to pick an Atari game Chinney hasn't approved it and Dimril bells would like a speccy one so i'll pick the classic "Pssst" from waaaay back in 1983

A year of some great and no so great releases :

Apple released the Lisa
IBM released Lotus 123
Microsoft released The Word
And Nintendo let loose their first NES console in Japan



Instructions :

Robbie the robot, sits in his garden, fetching the old bag of compost to help his prize Thyrgodian Megga Chrisanthodil grow. When suddenly, the whole garden is invaded by the most devilish, destructive insects you could imagine. But, Robbie is prepared!

Equipped with three spray cans of the latest insect repelling drops, smoke and streamers, Robbie bravely fights to keep all of the deadly garden pests at bay.

All he has to do is figure out which spray kills each insect outright, as the wrong spray will only stun them momentarily. If Robbie leaves his plant unattended the insects will swarm all over it, eat the leaves and the plant will wilt, shrivel back and die.

Little vermin. Leave my plant alone, Oy! My plant's dying. No! No! Nasty bugs sucking the life from my Thyrgodian Megga Chrisanthodil, making her shrink, wilt and die. I'll soon put a stop to their little game, quick Spray-O-This'll sort 'em out. There! Take that and that, Ha! Ha!

Mustn't die, mustn't die. It's got to flower, it must do. It said on the packet. "takes between two and five minutes to grow", it can't be much longer, won't be long now.

Why! you little... Quickly get the Super Space Slug Spray and then the Leech Laser. Quick, quick. They breed so fast, can't hold them back for long. Hurry! Hurry!.. Arrggg...

The WOS page for the game is here : http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0009401
and Wikipedia page here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pssst

You can use any speccy emulator but i'd suggest ZXSpin (http://www.zxspin.com/) or Speculator (http://www.spectaculator.com/) the game can be downloaded from here :

http://www.massault.org/loot/documents/ ... st.tap.ZIP

Or if you want to try it here are two different Java versions :

http://www.twinbee.org/hob/play.php?snap=pssst

http://www.liaquay.co.uk/spectrum/psst.html

Keys are the less than intuative Q W R E T

Oh and I've found both Speccy DS (http://speccyds.wordpress.com/) and ZXDS (http://zxds.raxoft.cz/) both make a great job of turning your Nintendo DS into a portable spectrum

Chinny's updated Gamercard for this week :

Awesomes. One of the Rare games I haven't played (ho ho!)

God, I haven't played that in years - I think I used to have it on cartridge. Just had a quick go on that java version, so here's a modest score to start you off.

Sorry, not on the ball. Been abit tied up. Well done for the win!

On reflection I think Speccy, CPC and C64 are easier for the majority unless there is a strong feeling that we need other formats.

Anyway, must try this game later in the week when things calm down!

AARRGGHH! Counter-intuitive keys alert! Why the hell does it have key E and R to go Up/Down? That's menkle.

Hey its a throwback and remember this is a very early game - if you look at the speccy keyboard :



You can see that 5 6 7 8 all have arrows on them and was copied from the ZX81 , thats how you controlled things , up down left and right in a row !

If you download the game you can use just about any set of keys you want on an emulator - just set up the kempston interface to use them

Heres another java version with a slightly larger screensize :

http://www.liaquay.co.uk/spectrum/psst.html

I also found this one :

http://www.ciunga.it/jxspeccy/arc.html

Which automatically sets the kempston interface to be your cursor keys , however Pssst is not available as Ultimate / Rare are not happy with it being distributed :-(

So it looks like you need a local copy and an emulator :-(

I find the 'sinclair' type arrangement of left, right, down, up, fire more intuitive that the left, down, up, right, fire that the cursor keys give you.

Also, if I remember my speccy programming well, that at a low level, the keyboard was read as several blocks of 5 keys. 12345, 67890, qwert, yuiop and so on. And so only reading the qwert set made matters much easier for the programmer.

Bump and score update ...

In first place ...

Devilsnowman with 27630 !

And in last place ...

Devilsnowman with 27630 !

Can Devilsnowman hang onto his lead ?
Can Devilsnowman come back from last place ?

tune in later to find out ...

ooh, the tension!

Sorry, been busy. WIll attempt to give it a blast asap.

The score is definitely there to be beaten 'cos I only had one go.

I'll give it a go later. Today has been marred by the annoying neighbour being a bitch and me wishing I didn't live next door to the annoying snidey nosy menopausal bitch queen from hell.

Then why don't you remove her house. With fire. With a bit of luck she'll remain among the flames, putting the burning sensation down to another "hot flush".

And don't worry about your house burning as well. From seeing the house fires that took place in my old street this doesn't happen very often at all.

3575 as a first attempt because I'm having control problems. STOP LAUGHING!

OK, for tonight I'm posting 13600. Quite an enjoyable game but a pain on this Apple wireless keyboard. Have managed to get the keys to a more reasonable QAOP!

18330. I'm improving.

575, I'm so very bad at this.

4100. Those keys are horrible, and my joypad isn't playing along for some reason.

EDIT: A mildly less poor 6105.

Find an emulator where you can remap the Kempston joystick controls. I'm using Fuse.

Scores on the doors so far this week:

Chinnyhill10 - 58630
Devilsnowman - 27630
Zaphod79 - 20960
Sistersanta - 13460
Dimrill - 575

Cheers for the tips Chinny, that really helps out. 13460 now.

20960

58630

played did via zx advance a couple of times, i suck at it, so won't publish a score

I've had communications from a sinister operative that suggests that in order to encourage people to play even if they can't beat the top score, we should run a league.

So we'll now be awarding points for your placing each week (and this will be back dated):

1st place - 10 points
2nd place - 6 points
3rd place - 4 points
4th place - 2 points
5th place - 1 point

Each "season" will last 12 weeks.


Ergo the rankings after 2 weeks:



Rank Name Pts
1= Zaphod79 14
1= Chinnyhill10 14
3= Dimrill 6
3= Sheepeh 6
5 Jon 2
6 Lave 1

575, I'm so very bad at this. But I'm improving on Wii Fit.
\

By my reckoning, one day left on this. Get your scores in!

45595

That gives us a scores update of:

Chinnyhill10 - 58630
Zaphod79 - 45595
Devilsnowman - 27630
Sistersanta - 13460
Craster - 3360
Dimrill - 575

And remember, points are awarded for the top 5 places. So if you haven't played yet and have the coordination of Joey Deacon, you should still be able to knock Dimrill off that 5th place spot. [note scores have been updated since I first made this post]

Wahey!

3360.

Just had a thought, all these Christmas names could screw up the league table if I loose track of who is who. So when posting scores please be careful you include you real names somewhere.

I'm now awaiting Dimrill to better your score. The race for 5th place could be exciting!

Final scores for Psst:

Chinnyhill10 - 58630
Zaphod79 - 45595
Devilsnowman - 27630
Sistersanta - 13460
Craster - 3360
Dimrill - 575


This weeks compo draws to a close and it appears I have to choose a game for the new week. Hoorah (Booo - Ed).


The league table after 3 weeks of play looks like this. The big news is that Craster denied Dimrill that chance to claim a clear 3rd spot instead of tying with Sheepeh.

Rank Name Pts
1 Chinnyhill10 24
2 Zaphod79 20
3= Dimrill 6
3= Sheepeh 6
5 Devilssnowman 4
6= Sistersanta 2
6= Jon 2
8= Craster 1
8= Lave 1

New game details to follow in the next few hours. STAY TUNED!

This weeks game is:


Eric and the Floaters,

on the Sinclair Spectrum for the ease of everyone. It's Super Bomberman, but on the Speccy!

All the files you need are here and you can even play it online from links on that page.
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0001639

Keyboard controls seem quite reasonable (if slightly odd as with all Speccy games of this era).

2510 as a first try.

what's wrong with QAOP [space] for these sorts of games I could handle that!

Malc

Most good emulators will let you redefine the joystick to any keys you want, hence why Psst wasn't a pain for me. But Floaters default keyboard controls make far more sense than the barking mad ones in Psst!

Indeed I gave up after about 2 seconds of that.

I might try giving the emu a whirl later (wayhey!) but I was just using one of the java links before.

Malc

Nice game - i don't like level 4 (auto bomb dropping) , and dont like that the 'floaters' can move through the bombs but i do like being able to take out 'part' of a wall and then have a blast go through that gap without letting the baddie out and it has a nice feel to the game.

7000



For anyone who's interested in early Hudson stuff i can also recommend "Stop the Express" from here :http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004916