Urth (Ugly Red Things from Hell)

This is not supposed to be a professional type game. In fact, it really
isn't a game, it was for me a way to figure out how to do certain
routines in Turbo Pascal. Since it was supposed to be a learning
experience for me, I thought I would upload it with the source code, in
case anyone else could use it. In fact the game is sort of fun to play,
if you are feeling particularly mindless.

I also hope that other people upload their source code. There is a
shortage out there. I am sure that many people are working on games and
other projects yet never upload them. Never finish them, probably. Well,
upload them, at worst we'll be innuaded with thousands of cute little
games that are worth 5 minutes entertainment.

Here's some background for the game. Well, after playing a game for a
few hours you think of a story.

When you start off, there is one leader (the non-red things). Shoot the
group of things with your bomb (INS key) and you'll get points (you
don't get to see your score till after the game). If you shoot a red
thing it will reappear around the leader. If you shoot enough things
then more leaders appear, and more red things appear, up to 1,000 or so
red things and 11 or so leaders. The red things choose a leader at
random and cluster around him, except when there are two or more leaders
around then they start getting hyper and move much more quickly than the
red things. If you want some mindless fun that really doesn't do much
you can press ENTER and they all go boom but reappear again, and it
takes a lot of your energy.

Speaking of energy, you lose some everytime you move, fire lasers and
bombs, or get hit by a thing. Fortunately the things aren't very smart
and don't always realize they are sitting on you (either that or it
would have slowed the game down too much checking all 1,000 of them
every time you moved). When they catch you they also make you stop, and
if you get stuck in a bunch of them you'll have to carefully work your
way out of the mess. Usually going diagonally or up or down works better
than left or right.

When moving about, shooting things, and getting hit you may notice that
little white things form occasionally. These are encapsulated manna, and
if you collect enough of them by typing in the secret word you'll be
transported to a secret 3-d energy world where it will be your mission
to save to world using fully english-like commands intelligently parsed
and your mission will be accompanied by over 300 16-million colour
graphics frames and a quadraphonic soundtrack composed by a famous
composer.

You can get more energy by pressing the '-' key until it says
"recharging" on the lower right. You'll slow down though, making it
easier for the bad things to hit you.  Your ship will recharge up to the
original energy amount. If you get really bored, and you desperately
want to corral ALL the things onto a single dot and shoot it and watch
it blow up V E R Y slowly because there are so many, you can cheat by
pressing Shift-E. Fun eh?

It's actually kind of impressive building up a bunch of energy (with
Shift-E), nuking the things a bunch of times with RETURN, and then
watching all 1,000 of them come on the screen at once.

You can also stop on the spot with the space bar and your laser will
fire in the direction you were going. So if you are being chased by 8
or 9 leader things you can get them in a line, point at them, stop, and
blow them all away. Fun wow. If you use the bomb (INS) while you are
stopped (either by pressing the space bar or being tagged by a thing) it
explodes on the spot, which doesn't hurt you but is effective for
getting rid of a couple of things that are biting you, if that's what
they do.

There. I've just taken a game that might have been fun figuring out and
made it rediculously easy and boring. If you are wondering about how I
arrive at the score, it is simply the number of things destroyed with
",000" tacked on the end. I figure people will like it better if their
score is in the thousands.

Compatibility: Since this game uses Borland's BGI interface (which you
will notice I was too lazy to incorporate into the game - delete the
ones you don't need) it works with a bunch of video adaptors - Hercules
(it looks nifty in Herc mode), CGA, EGA, VGA, 8514, ATT, and 3270. Kind
of makes you want to buy an 8514 setup for that extra resolution.

MACHINE COMPATIBILITY - I developed this program on a machine that went
12 or 25 mhz. It was funpacked and easy to play at both speeds, and with full
speed set (pressing + a bunch of times) it could even be called fast. I
tried it on a friend's Tandy 1000SX (an 8MHz XT) and the speed seemed
fine except it didn't recognize the cursor pad (you know, the arrow
keys). It may be a problem with the Tandy, or the XT's keypad.

I'm not trying to imply that my program is any kind of masterpiece. As I
said, it was just a way for me to work out some routines. I do hope that
in some way it proves informative to someone out there, and I'd like to
see more source code. Considering how many millions of home PCs there
are out there, and the number of people who hack in Pascal, C, and
Cobol, there is a real shortage of dumb games. Besides original games (I
could give you some really good original ideas) I'd really like to see a
decent implementation of Missle Command that used the mouse buttons. And
PLEASE, NO MORE Pac-Man clones.

If you feel the need to contact me (not to tell me how bad my code is, I
wasn't trying to write perfect code) you can contact me under my name
David Mason on NorthAmeriNet (or whatever it is called..), I call Canada
Remote Systems and habituate the IBM conference. Or you can call my BBS,
which might be up, at ZOOiD (416)-322-7876, 2400 baud. I even have a
Nifty And Impressive Usenet Address, but my feed is down currently. You
can try dve@zooid.uucp if you feel like wasting your time.

Another thing that is lacking is source code for the Adlib/Sound
Blaster. These games could be twice as irritating and dumb with some
decent inane sounds, and digitized sounds would probably even let us
push file size over a few megabytes!

Imagine the kind of Pac-Man clone you could make with a few megs of
digitized "womp womps". It makes me salivate.