Part 11: ManxomeBromide - Bagger
Let's Play Bagger!Compute! Gazette, July 1988, Issue #61, Vol. 6, No. 7
Game Summary
We've mostly played game summaries straight except for the very first post, so when I say that the premise of this game is that bagging groceries has become a new sport in the Summer Olympics, I am actually reporting what the article says and not just making stuff up. Honest.
It's also basically a Tapper clone.
CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO
The Good
- Tapper is, in fact, a pretty okay game!
- Some very nice graphics supercharging here. In addition to you, at any given time each lane can have up to three customers, three bags of groceries in flight, and one pile of money in flight. That adds up to 29 sprites at once, which is pretty solid for a system that theoretically can only handle 8.
There's a whole article later in the issue about defying the 8-sprite limit, and I suspect that Bagger either uses that program itself or replicates the technique itself. Basically, the graphics chip can send an interrupt to the CPU when the screen display has reached a certain scanline. I suspect that Bagger has set it up so that there's an interrupt in between each of the four lanes and it goes and repositions all 8 sprites into the lane it's about to draw right then. Do that four times a frame and hey presto, 32 sprites!
The Bad
- You are magicking your bags instantly out of the Grocery Dimension. A major part of what made Tapper so frantic to begin with was that it takes time to fill glasses.
- The controls are hot garbage. It's easy to jump zero or two lanes instead of one when you're trying to move back and forth.
- You hit the RUN/STOP key to start. Seriously?
The Weird
Hey, this is actually the issue that had that SYS Stamper program Chokes McGee had mentioned upthread. How about that. I think I'd still rather have a proper loader generator.
Also:
Hm. Some kind of get-rich-quick scheme? Or maybe a legit investment opportunity?
... or maybe it is a random number generator. This one is special though, it will win the lottery for you, unlike those competing programs that can only force wins in some states.
If I'm feeling real, real generous, I might note that using one of these programs might improve your chances in 1988, since before the rise of Quick Pick people would do things like pick their birthdays as lottery numbers, and not only is that not an even distribution, it leaves whole chunks of the space guaranteed-unchosen. So it actually might help, a little.
I am no longer feeling generous. Picking lottery numbers is one of those things that they do in five lines of BASIC in the user's manuals of these machines, and we're charging what would be nearly seventy 2016 dollars for that?
Downloads
This game has been added to the SA Gazette disk.