Tic-Tac-Toe - Shaun Bebbington
The first ZX80 entry of this year's competition is this version of one of possibly the oldest games written for a computer.
From a technical point of view, it's quite an accomplishment to
implement any sort of computer opponent in so little space; so the game
loses out there in the crapness stakes. However, it helps that the
artifical (un)intelligence is really bad at the game; with its skills
appearing to be mainly reliant on the ZX80's random number generator.
The text display (there are no 'graphics' as such (unless you count the
cursor)) are about as good as you'd expect for Tic-Tac-Toe; although by
cunningly avoiding using any such tricks as inverted characters to
highlight pieces or seperating the spaces from each other, the game
regains immediate crapness points for being quite difficult to actually
read the board.
Written to run in just the 1K of RAM included in the base ZX80, the game
is impressively short and has dispensed with any of the uncessary
niceties that are all too prevelant with today's games; such as a title
screen, frivulous congratulatory messages or actually checking if either player has won.
Yes, that's right - the game just keeps on going until the board is
full, regardless of whether there's a winner or if it's even possible
for anybody to win. I suppose if I was being generous I could call this
an innovative variant on the standard game, where you have to get more
lines than your opponent; or try to stop your opponent getting a row.
Thanks to the 'free-form' nature of AI you can essentially set your own
rules. Bold and refreshing challenge to an established gaming paradigm
or shoddy programming? You decide.
Loading:LOAD
Controls:
Choose sqaure: | 1-9 followed by NEWLINE
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Quit game: | Type enough characters to cause an out of memory error.
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Egolf - Anders Carlsson
Challenge Entry "Stand at E's"
Another entry in the Stand at E's Challenge, is this delightful version
of golf; providing all the fun of a good walk ruined without the
inconevience of having to actually go outside, or interact with other
human beings.
In order to meet the challenge rules, Anders has managed to re-implement
not only a random number generator but also an acceptable substitute
for the basic trigonometric functions using lookup tables and some
impressively complicated maths. He's also cunningly avoided using the ©
symbol on the title screen and there is no sound (since nobody has yet
figured out a way to implement this in BASIC without using Extended
mode); and has chosen not to abuse any loopholes to provide colour
graphics. This means that the three holes are represented using
monochrome ASCII-art with such intuitive choices as T for tee; r for
rough; W for Water and p for, er, ball.

This is the first entry I've received that has accompanying
instructions, which at first glance might make the game seem less crap.
Fortunately, the details in the instructions (particularly the club
distance and terrain effects) are not listed on screen during play - so
you need to keep looking up values from the instructions, then
multiplying the club distance by the power ratio; then multiplying by
the percentage decrease for the surface you're playing from. It's
possibly the first golf game I've ever played where accurate shots
require a scientific calculator.

For added excitement, every club appears to be a wedge; as they send the
ball happily sailing over everything in it's path - even on the green;
making what should be an easy two metre putt an exercise in precision
artillery targeting. Expect to spend many happy hours chipping the ball
backwards and forwards over the hole from one side of the green to the
other; before finally achieving a centaduodecuple bogey (or more likely a
"subscript wrong" error message).
I actually quite enjoyed this game, although it was more reminiscent of an O-level maths class than an actual game of golf.
Loading:LOAD ""
Controls:
Choose club, power and angle: | 0-9, ENTER.
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Shoot Out - PROSM
Next up, is a short (only 412 bytes) BASIC (in all senses of the word)
game (in the loosest possible definition of the word), which to quote
its author is "meant to simulate armed murder by someone with bad aim".
It would be fair to add that the would-be assassin would also appear to
have access to a sawn-off chain-gun and several ISO shipping containers
full of ammunition.
No time is wasted on flashy title screens, rambling instructions or even
clearing the screen; once the game loads it's straight into the
'action'. The action in this case being to manouvure the mysteriously
named 'P' (Person? Protagonist? Percy?) to avoid the totally random and
unpredictable scattering of 'X's.
In the proud tradition of Steel Battalion, Binding of Isaac and er,
Treasure Island Dizzy, your brave protagonist is a one-hit wonder; a
single shot, and it's Game Over (or more accurately: 9 STOP statement
); which I suspect is what would happen in reality if you were hit by a human-sized capital letter.
Unless my knowledge of mathmetical probability is fundamentally flawed
(which is very possible since I had A-Level Maths on a Friday afternoon
in a classroom that was located far too conveniently close to a pub with
a very lax approach to age verification); you're just as likely to be
shot by moving as you are by staying perfectly still. So you can happily
load the program, then go away and have a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake;
safe in the knowledge that your score will not be adversely affected by
your abscence.
One intriguing quirk (or glaring bug resulting from shoddy programming)
is that moving off the edge of the screen not only reverse the controls,
but renders you completely invincible; meaning you can rack up such
huge scores as 6: Number too big
. I can genuinely imagine
this being published in Sinclair Programs back in 1983 - accompanied by a
huge drawing of an armed robber and a paragraph of gushing praise for
the game; which very much epitomises the level of crapness that this
competition is all about.
Loading:LOAD ""
Controls:
Left: | 5 (or sometimes 8)
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Right: | 8 (or sometimes 5)
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Up: | 7 (or sometimes 6)
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Down: | 6 (or sometimes 7)
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