A 'space invaders' type game, but horizontal, instead of vertical.
The original game by P.Brown is from Tim Hartnell's 1983 "Giant Book of Spectrum Games"; is a mighty 108 lines of BASIC (and included 12 lines of comments - positively chatty).
According to Google, in the 1980s "Android" = "a robot designed to look and act exactly like a human". I don't know why the game wasn't called "Alien Attack" or similar (except there was an "Alien Attack" in Hartnell's 1984 book) and there were lots of "Alien XXX" games around in the early 1980s.
In the game a stream of aliens enter from the left and try to reach the right of the "map". The human player is "pinned" to the right of the "map" and fires missiles at the aliens. There are two kinds of aliens:
- "motherships" (spherical ships) are worth 300 points;
- "saucers" (flying saucer type ships) are worth 20-50 points.
The player starts with 5 "lives" and looses 1 life if a flying saucer crosses safely, and looses 2 lives if a mothership crosses.
I have made 2 changes to the game's logic, by adding 2 checkboxes:
- Num Aliens (5-20) = limits the number of alien ships;
- Multiple Aliens = allows multiple alien ships to cross at the same time.
In addition, I have set the (alien movement) timer to 500ms, you may want to tweak this, depending on your computer's speed.
This will be the last of these programs I will post for a while. I will move onto a larger project of mine that has been "on hold" for a while. I expect I'll get back to Hartnell's book in a month or two.
Enjoy.
S.
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