HSC16 Round 5: Berks 4 Liners 10

[+therealbountybob]

Apologies for having 2 expanded rounds in a row but now is the time to support the guys who are creating programs for our great 8-bit systems

 

This will be another three weeker ending 10am Sunday 20th April 2019

 

Berks 4

This is the main game, I know nothing about it but am really looking forward to seeing what Jon Williams, the creator of Jet Boot Jack and other cherished English Software Co. games has been up to!

Atariage Link: Berks Four (64K)

Scoring: Full HSC points

 

Bonus games

Baby Berks, Major Blink, Train, Joyas

Atariage Links: Baby Berks v2 and Major Blink plus Baha Software's Train (1+2) and dmsc's Joyas (extended Ver)

Scoring: tba

 

Ten Liners 2019

Possibly many will be simple concepts and might not take any HSC competition play, but we'll see.

Scoring: 1pt for each one played with additional scoring for any that are competetive.

atariage Link: BASIC Ten-Liners contest

The contest covers all 8-bit systems so if anyone has other systems or emulators to run other entries they can boost their points total. I see carlsson has created something too perhaps he can tell us about emulation so we can cross over to the dark side and play it? or better still he can now port it to the Atari

 

Bonus points for commenting on any of the games featured in this round, either here or on their threads.

 

If anyone needs any help getting anything working please post. Everyone welcome to join in. We will return to regular HSC action after this round

[McKong]

I hope we can play Jet Boot Jack later in the season, and who knows, next season we may even have the sequel to play!

[RedThunder]

Berks4

12,755

 

Major Blink

219,590 on Normal

 

Bouncy

This is fun. @TRRB mayby something we could use in GBH ?

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/287756-2019-basic-ten-liners-contest/?do=findComment&comment=4213105

 

FloodyBot

1990 Level N

Excellent game... SS Achilles V Sinking Titanic (Now that would be a game)

 

PokePig=Played

MiniLife=Played and ???

Chared=Used

MiniBros=Played (Crashed on me)

Edited April 2, 2019 by RedThunder

[+slx]

Latest version of Baby Berks is in this post.

[carlsson]

Wow, this will be a busy round! 3 weeks to play up to ~25 games, only counting the Atari 8-bit ones. If one wants to try all the 10 Liners games, you'll be looking at 80+ games!

[Deteacher]

How are we scoring Berks4? I finished 3 of the 4 worlds, but it looks like the scores reset after finishing a world.

 

By the way, this game is awesome! I've finished the first part of the 4th world...man, the difficulty ramps up in world 4. Kudos to the author for a fantastic game!

[carlsson]

Early scores:

 

Berks Four - 5390 pts (so nowhere near clearing a world)

 

Baby Berks - 33250 pts (initial difficulty level Novice, it ramps up after a while)

Joyas - 86 pts (default settings Moves, Normal)

Major Blink - 242950 pts (initial difficulty level Normal)

Train - 6480 pts

 

 

[Sikor]

@trbb, can you preare multidisk with 10-liner contest (Atari, of coz)

[McKong]

7270

[McKong]

World 1 - 12360 35% complete - Password = JetBoot

World 2 - 22160 30% complete - Password = Timeslip

World 3 - 31695 40% Complete- Password = Georgina

Edited April 3, 2019 by McKong

[+therealbountybob]

@all above!

 

You guys better help me out with scoring suggestions and what is what on this round, there may be a couple more new games that we'll add in. The 10 liners are usually very quick plays, we can extend the round if needed so take it easy guys Hopefully they will release a menu disk soon, they usually do.

 

Might have to set a limit on the maximum number of points if anyone goes crazy

 

Yes RT that one caught my eye, might contact Kevin

 

 

Season 16 Current Standings Updated

RT picked up 5 bonus points for completing Lode Runner

[carlsson]

Berks Four - 10810 pts (is this the last room of the first world?)

Train - 6980 pts

 

[McKong]

Yes

[devwebcl]

Berks Four - 10810 pts (is this the last room of the first world?)

Train - 6980 pts

 

berks4-10810.jpg

 

Yes, remember that you can check the map pressing "M".

[carlsson]

Ok, I spent an evening going through the 10 Liners entries.

 

Games played with scores:

 

Floody Bot - 2136 pts (Decent high score material)

 

Hubbub - 99 pts (Good high score material)

 

License Plates - 19 robbers (Trivial if you keep your eyes on the screen and have a short term memory that lasts at least 3 seconds)

 

Mini Bros - 250 pts (Good high score material, but I'm sure would like to play the full Mario Bros instead)

 

Missile 10 - 47 pts (Good high score material)

 

Neverending Story - 47 pts (Very slow high resolution Snake game, eventually I committed suicide)

 

Poke Pig - 562 pts (Entirely random if you score or not, fun but not really HSC stuff)

 

reactorX - 200 pts (Good high score material, but we just played Alpha Shield and this one reminds me some of it)

 

Games played without scores:

 

Bouncy - Trying various angles and speeds, could be even better if it somehow had scoring.

 

Lander - Managed to land on various platforms, but unfortunately no real scoring.

 

Minilife - Game of Life. Perhaps it could be played as a high score contest by putting X amount of dots and see who manages to make it last through most number of generations. Then again we have so many quality games to play in the HSC that we don't need to make up games from non-games.

Pixelated Puzzle - Not finished, not sure if you get a score or would count number of moves made.

Games requiring paddles, thus I didn't play them:

 

Bomber

Bounce & Catch

UFO Attack

 

Non-game entries, not much to include in the HSC:

 

Amen [bREAK] - Some sort of drum pattern

Garden - Draws pretty flowers without user input

Mini Character Editor - It is what it sounds like...

 

Not yet available games:

 

Dragon Trainer by 8Bit 1337

Missile by Etom000001

 

I'll see if I can locate one or two paddles, but out of those I tried, I would play Hubbub, possibly Missile 10 and reactorX.

[carlsson]

MiniBros=Played (Crashed on me)

 

Some of those games were programmed in Fast BASIC which means you need to hold down the Option key to disable the built-in BASIC when you load them. Mini Bros is one of those games.

[McKong]

Cool, thanks for the summary on the games Carlsson

[jblenkle]

Berks 4 - 2,940

[roadrunner]

Berks4

14,645


i needed 1 more key to clear world one, great game.

[carlsson]

Berks Four

 

World 1: 12345 pts, 30% complete

World 2: 17455 pts, three keys remaining

 

Since the game returns to the menu after clearing each world, I suppose we play each world separately as we have managed to clear the previous one?

 

 

[McKong]

The worlds take a long time to clear so i had also presumed this. I forgot to look to see if any spare lives you have left, are carried over if you play two worlds in a row.

 

I played the 4th world yesterday and it does get more difficult. I cleared two zones and it took me a long time. I think it may take about an hour to finish

[Bunsen]

Floody Bot 1831

[carlsson]

I keep trying to give all the games a go...

 

Train - 9620 pts, scene 12

Train 2 - 1900 pts, scene 3

 

The sequel has MUCH more difficult levels and requires detailed planning from the very beginning, compared to the first version where you usually can get away with one bad decision.

 

 

 

Edit: I gave the previously unplayed paddle based 10Liner games a go as well. It turned out that all three of them require PADDLE(0) while I only got a Coleco Gemini controller which is a combined joystick and PADDLE(1) controller, meaning I had to modify all the games before playing them. The two games by Vitoco, namely Bounce & Catch and UFO Attack were easy to modify since his entries were within the PUR-80 category and the Atari BASIC editor would not have an issue storing the line after modifying it. However Bomber by Savetz which uses Turbo BASIC XL and is in the PUR-120 category had a line that was too long even after figuring out which keywords were possible to abbreviate (turns out that neither PADDLE, PEEK or POKE are possible to shorten?) so I had to make it an 11Liner entry by adding an extra line and GOSUB to read the other paddle. Truth to be told, I spent more time modifying the BASIC listing than I spent playing the game...

 

Bomber - 121 pts, 96% accuracy

Bounce & Catch - 92 pts

UFO Attack - 6 rounds won (W:6)

 

 

 

Edited April 7, 2019 by carlsson

[+therealbountybob]

Sorry not posted for a week, but here are my efforts so far:

 

Joyas, nice game

Joyas Hack 5 (with the new graphics) 140 sort of want a longer game in rounds but I guess the skill is to pick the best moves, will play these more

Train 1.0 way too easy for me, even on the faster speed.

Train 2 some lovely grapphics and harder level designs but somehow the movement timing is a *fraction* too slow for me making it not playable, perhaps it can be adjusted - after lots of BASIC games I'm used to these turn based movers but it seems not quite right. 1,380 (3) NIce level start feature but it needs to show the screen before starting again too easily and default to no level - I wanted to restart on level1 each time but the screen transition effects meant I'd pressed on the last level played. Esc aborts go.

 

Baby Berks - nice, but too easy for too long on "normal", though I like the progressive difficulty I retired 209,200 (51) with lots of lives left, I think I could have gone on for much longer.

 

Major Blink - now we are talking - nice game, Kid Grid ish 166,885 312,670 will play this more :thumbsup:

 

Berks 4 - another quality game, nice work Jon, the mapping feaure is fantastic. This addresses many of the thoughts I had after playing Baby Berks. Only played world 1 so far, not the intensity of Berzerk or Krazy Shootout but enjoyable and nice to see lots of pieces of Jet Boot Jack code being used - gives the games a nice feel Will play the other worlds this week and tackle the 10 liners

 

Also checked out Combat the recent 2600 port it's 2 player only but looks like fun with various game modes:

----------------------------------------------

 

We'll use this round to try out any other new smaller games, from my first plays Berks 4 and Major Blink and Joyas are my favourites. The 10 liners are various formats so hopefully the guys will do a menu disk again soon

[carlsson]

The 10 liners are various formats so hopefully the guys will do a menu disk again soon

 

I understand the prize ceremony is next Saturday, April 13 and all the games will be posted for download after then. It means the few games not previously posted on AtariAge as well as combining all games into one or a few disk images won't happen until then, which means this HSC round has about 1 week to play them. I didn't think loading the games separately was much of an issue.