Jump to content
IGNORED

Does anyone really play the old BASIC games?


InfernalKeith

Recommended Posts

You said "XB gets faster the more graphics you add to the program". I add more graphics to a program and XB does not get faster. I add ridiculous amounts of graphics to a program and XB does still not get faster.

You are picking apart the words instead of understanding the concept.

 

Adding more graphics to TI Basic slows it down COMPARED TO XB.

 

In other words if I add 10 lines of GRAPHICS to TI BASIC and to XB the reduction in performance in TI BASIC is drastically more then XB.

 

The Video also drastically shows this happening as TI Basic is already slower so adding more thing to TI Basic slow it more then XB.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's interesting that you spoke of Not Polyoptic's ANT WARS. That was one of my favourite games and I still have the audio tape. I still try it at times and I know the I altered the colours and layout a bit -- plus shortened variables and combined lines -- for the XB environment back-in-the-day.

 

I look forward to your review.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here is the first draft of my "Ant Wars" review. I will be adding more to it to include information on 2-player games, plus a lot of screenshots. I plan to host my blog offsite. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

ANT WARS
Not Polyoptics, 1981
Reviewed 8/15/2014 by Keith Bergman
Long before SimAnt, Not Polyoptics devised "Ant Wars," their own simulation of life in warring ant colonies. Red and black ants scurry (well, stagger at a painful BASIC crawl, anyway) toward each others' holes, forage for limited food, and engage in battles in this interesting, if somewhat frustrating, early strategy game.
After a perfunctory title screen, a lawn is slowly drawn that encompasses the entire screen. There's no room left to display 'hit points,' how many turns have been taken, or other game stats, so Ant Wars relies on audio cues to convey much of the information players need. The red and black ants are randomly placed around the board, as are some morsels of food, and then round one begins.
There are ten rounds, though I've never played a game that lasts through all ten. The idea is to either kill all the ants on the opposing team, or overrun their hole (hive? warren? bungalow?) with ants of your own. You have five 'moves' per ant, per round. Each move or attack takes up one move. If you enter your hole, your opponent's hole, or land atop a piece of food, that ant's turn ends.
Each side starts out with seventeen ants, so things look and feel pretty chaotic at the beginning. Don't get too used to it -- with so many ants in close proximity, a lot of battles happen early on and many of those ants don't make it to round two or three. In addition, a spider randomly skulks around the board, indiscriminately taking out red and black ants and sometimes tilting the balance of power one way or another. The spider is optional -- and can be attacked and killed, at the cost of numerous ant lives. I'm not sure how taking on the spider alone would help at all, considering how weak it would leave your forces in the face of your enemy.
Each ant has a certain amount of strength, or stamina, or hit points. This is indicated not with a number but with a tone (the ant's "bellow," as the instructions put it). When it's a particular ant's turn, it flashes on screen and the tone emitted indicates the ant's health. The lower the tone, the stronger the ant. Eating food restores some health to an ant, as does retreating back into one's own hole (though the health benefits of the latter seem very slow to accrue).
When an ant moves onto an enemy ant, a battle begins. Each ant makes their "bellow" to indicate their level of health, then you hear the sounds again, reflecting each ant's health after that particular sortie. It takes a little getting used to, but soon you know what's going on, and the sound of a high-pitched ant "bellow" is enough to start you cursing. If an ant gets killed in battle it disappears, and there is no way to generate new ants in the game (the birds and the bees presumably being too big a challenge to fit into a 16K program).
Battles are heavily weighted in favor of the attacker, and it can be frustrating to have a relatively healthy ant attacked and killed by a weaker, battle-damaged foe. Strategy comes into play when moving, so you don't put yourself within the enemy's easy reach -- each ant has five "moves," so moving right next to an opponent just gives them all five moves to try killing you when their turn comes around. Turns alternate from ant to ant, from side to side, so if one side has more ants on the battlefield, they'll sometimes get to move multiple ants in a row before the weaker opponent can do anything.
If an ant makes it across the yard to your opponent's hole, it can enter and possibly win the game for your side. Once your ant enters the enemy hole, it is no longer in play for the rest of the game. The combined health of all the ants you've sent into that hole counts against the number of friendly ants who are inside your own ant hole on the other side of the lawn.
This seems to be a big weakness of the game's AI for several reasons. For one, when the computer plays (always as the black ants), it never sends its own ants into its own hole. Some of the troops will hover around the home hole, protecting it from incursion, but none ever enter it and provide fortification. Thus, if you've got a few ants in your home base, and you get one or two red ants into the black hole, it's easy to win the game even if you're outnumbered and on the ropes.
Also, the computer-controlled ants are decent at moving across the lawn and attacking you, but they're really bad at hole defense. There can be four or five surrounding the hole, and it's still easy to slip past them without being attacked and killed.
On top of all that, it seems almost impossible for the black ants to win by entering the red ants' hole. In one game I played, four black ants had entered my anthill. I had maybe two red ants in there. I got one red ant across the board, and as soon as it went into the black ants' hole, the game ended with me as the winner - despite the fact that there were eight black ants to my two or three.
Despite the major flaws in the game's AI, it's compelling to play, simply because it has AI at all -- this was an era when many games were released as two-player endeavors only. The computer's ants seem to all be at full strength when the game begins, as opposed to the red ants, some of whom are at death's door (with high-pitched bellows) from round one. It's engrossing to try to defend the home spot, move weaker ants out of harm's way, and send a force across the lawn to invade the black ants' hole, when your ranks are being decimated early on by a stronger enemy and that malicious spider.
The usual caveats apply -- the execution of this game is slow as molasses, and the pacing is glacial. Those unfamiliar with keypresses in TI BASIC may be frustrated trying to hold down arrow keys to get their ants to move. The biggest letdown is that the flaws in the game's AI only really become apparent once you're a few games in, and really sold on the game. It's just too primitive to have a lot of staying power, but it's a great concept, well-executed for its time. This is the kind of game where a rewrite, perhaps taking advantage of 32K memory expansion and Extended BASIC, would address some of the AI issues and make this a real strategy powerhouse.
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Here is the first draft of my "Ant Wars" review. I will be adding more to it to include information on 2-player games, plus a lot of screenshots. I plan to host my blog offsite. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

ANT WARS
Not Polyoptics, 1981
Reviewed 8/15/2014 by Keith Bergman
Long before SimAnt, Not Polyoptics devised "Ant Wars," their own simulation of life in warring ant colonies. Red and black ants scurry (well, stagger at a painful BASIC crawl, anyway) toward each others' holes, forage for limited food, and engage in battles in this interesting, if somewhat frustrating, early strategy game.
The usual caveats apply -- the execution of this game is slow as molasses, and the pacing is glacial. Those unfamiliar with keypresses in TI BASIC may be frustrated trying to hold down arrow keys to get their ants to move. The biggest letdown is that the flaws in the game's AI only really become apparent once you're a few games in, and really sold on the game. It's just too primitive to have a lot of staying power, but it's a great concept, well-executed for its time. This is the kind of game where a rewrite, perhaps taking advantage of 32K memory expansion and Extended BASIC, would address some of the AI issues and make this a real strategy powerhouse.

 

 

You know that RXB can run TI Basic games and they should run faster and with the new addition to RXB like the new RND it should look pretty good in RXB.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...