Another BASIC game I made back in the 80s was one that I actually designed with one of my younger sisters. She had expressed interest in all this “computer stuff” I was doing and wanted to know what it would take to make a game.
So we sat together for about a week and made a game. It was a riff on Canyon Bomber and we called it BomBer because for some reason we decided the “B” is not silent.
It is of course written in Atari BASIC. I wrote all the code and my sister drew all the graphics for the redefined character set. I then mapped those to DATA statements for use in the game.
This game is simple and does not use any player/missile graphics. It is strictly redefined characters in Graphics Mode 2 (so it’s a bit like a Commodore VIC-20 game, I suppose).
The gameplay is also simple: the helicopter starts at the top left and moves left to right. When it reaches the right side it re-appears on the left, one line lower.
The goal is to drop bombs to destroy the rocks by pressing the fire button in an attempt to find the escape tunnel. You can only drop one bomb at a time. When you’ve found the tunnel you can pull the joystick down to descend to the next screen.
If you crash into a rock, you lose a turn and start again from the top.
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Watch a video of the gameplay:
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I vaguely remember typing in an Atari Basic game out of an old user group newsletter, last year, that played the same game, except I think you bombed towers from the top down. I don't remember quite what the objective was, except not to crash into a tower. I didn't get that far. :)
Wow, this brings back memories... I wrote a very similar-looking game just for fun on a DEC-10 in the late 70s, called Bomber as a matter of fact. I wrote it in FASBOL (a SNOBOL compiler). It used text graphics only and I made the bombs fell in a parabolic path, making it tricky to hit where you want. We used to play it a lot at the computer centre at Scarborough College (of the University of Toronto).