ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER MARCH 1990 ^^^^^^ NEVER RELEASED OFFICIAL TI MODULES: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^PART 4. -- GAMES ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^by Charles Good ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Lima Ohio User Group WING WAR: The title screen says "Texas Instruments presents Wing War, copyright IMAGIC 1983." You see an elaborately detailed underground cavern with stalagtites, stalagmites, etc. A pair of birds descend from the ceiling, and the speech synthesizer says in a very realistic voice, "Adventures await dragon master." A dragon appears in the lower part of the screen that you control with the joystick. You make the dragon fly by flapping its wings, accompanied by very realistic flapping wing sounds. The dragon can spit out fireballs which will melt the rock walls of the cavern and allow access to goodies that you can see imbedded in the rock. There are holes in the top of the cavern, and the dragon can fly out these holes to the open sky. Various treasures and things can be found floating around in the sky. On screen instructions give you the following information: Collect crystals for power. Obtain treasures from a cave. Blast rocks in sky for gifts. Wash crystals and treasures in the magic fountains (you find lots of these in your travals around the caverns) and then take them to your lair. JS or keyboard. To move press left or right. To fly down press up. To fire fireballs press down. To fly up press firebutton. Talk about confusing instructions! "To fly down press up." I never did really get the hang of controlling the dragon, mainly because the consfusing use of joystick movements. Why not, for example, press the firebutton to fire fireballs. Movement of the dragon responds realistically to the earth's gravity. If you press the fire button a couple of times (for up), the dragon will shoot up even after you let go of the fire button. Its rate of upward movement will gradually slow and then it will start to sink unless you give it a few more jolts of "up" with the firebutton. When set in motion left/right, the dragon will continue to move after the joystick is released, but will gradually sink to the bottom of the cave unless some "up" force is also applied. These sorts of movements are just what one would expect from analysis of vector physics on a free moving body influenced by gravity. According to the on screen instructions, scoring is as follows: Purified crystals..........10 Super crystals............100 Super super crystals......500 Eggs (game over)..........512 Lives (game over)........1024 Mate.....................1000 Treasures....multiples of 256 Fireballs (game over).......1 Presumably the word "Mate" above is a noun rather than a verb. I have never found a mate in my bumbling around with this game. When one of the creepy things in the cave kills you and you lose a life, the computer says "Alas." When you are down to your last dragon (life), the computer says "No eggs left in lair, master." When your last dragon bites the dust, the game ends with the computer saying "Our glory is now only a passing memory." MOUSE ATTACK: The title screen reads "by Don Fitchhorn, copyright 1983 Sierra On-Line". This game is another PacMan look alike for one or two players. The players are "plumbers" who have to traverse every spot in the maze before moving on to the next screen. There are three mice that float around the maze. At specific times the plumber can catch mice for extra points. At most times the mice chase and try to kill the plumber. At the beginning of the game, you are given the opportunity to change defaults, as follows: 1 or 2 players Keyboard or Joystick. If you chose the keyboard, you are given the option of using the ESDX or the ESDF keys for movement. Music YN Sound effects YN Character speed 1= slow 9= fast The ability to set the speed of each of the two possible plumbers and each of the three mice individually is a nice feature. You can set up this game so that any klutz can get lots and lots of points. Just set your plumber speed for maximum and the mice speed for minimum. It is really hard to get killed this way, and the game can go on almost forever. I have seen my 9 year old spend several hours just piling up the points with Mouse Attack set up this way. SUB OCEANIC: The title screen says "by Dominic J.^Melfi, copyright 1982 by Texas Instruments Incorporated. Press enter or joystick fire to use keyboard or joystick." You command a submarine and can move rapidly left/right and up/down under water, or surface. You fire vertical torpedos at an endless host of ships, planes of various types, and helicopters that are out to get you. Your torpedos pop right out of the water and up into the sky to hit the planes. The opposition drops depth charge clusters and rapidly falling vertical torpedos which you must dodge. After you have been hit a few times you can't dive down as far into the ocean, and eventually you must stay on the surface. This brings the game to a rapid end, because on or near the surface your reaction time to dodge the incoming torpedos is greatly reduced. There is alot of fast action and eye/hand coordination in Sub Oceanic. It is your typical "shoot up the never ending hords of bad guys" kind of game. The 1982 copyright suprises me. Apparently this is not a module that was abandoned by TI when they left the home computer market. The 1982 date suggests that TI had previously decided not to market this module. PADDLE BALL: "Copyright 1983 TI." Do you remember when TV games first became popular? Just before the original Atari game system was marketed the most popular TV game was PONG, which resembled ping pong. This is TI's version of PONG, with lots of possible variations. What I have is an EA5 file that will load and run out of a GramKracker in the usual way and which can also be loaded and run using an ordinary E/A module without a gram device or supercart. After booting, if you just leave this module on the screen without pressing keys the module will eventually shift into a self demonstration mode and illustrate automatically all of the following options. 1. Single ball 2. With central fog area 3. Center field blockades 4. 2 balls 5. Double blockades 6. 3 balls 7. Bomb with blockades 8. 2 bombs 9. Hole paddle on screen 3 10.^Hole paddle on screen 4 A center field blockade is a moving bar with a hole in it near the center of the screen. The bouncing ball may go through the blockade if it passes through the hole. Otherwise the ball hits the blockade and rapidly bounces back toward the paddle. A bomb is a ball that randomly turns from green to red. When it is green, you are supposed to hit it with the paddle as is normal. When the ball is red you must AVOID touching the ball with the paddle or you loose the turn. Bombs change color rapidly and randomly, making game play very interesting. This is my personal favorite of this bunch of never released modules. The action is fast and there is lots of variety. I think this would have been a commercial success for TI. SIMON SAYS! That's what the title screen says, complete with explamation mark. There is no copyright notice. This is your typical SIMON game in which you are asked to exactly repeat an ever increasing sequence of ESDX keypresses. Each keypress generates a different tone. With each successful try the computer adds one keypress to the end of the sequence. There are four levels of difficulty, but I can't tell what the difference in difficulty is. Each level seems to play the tones at the same speed. If you make a mistake you are given the opportunity to review the keypress/tone sequence before continuing the game or starting another game. There is nothing fancy about SIMON SAYS!, but I like it anyway. It is as fast, as colorful, and as pleasing to the ear as any of the stand alone SIMON electronic games that were sold a few years ago. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: In ending this series of "never released modules" articles, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Mike Wright (TI Sig, Boston Computer Society), and Gary Cox (Mid South 99ers). These individuals provided me with much of the software described in these articles. .PL 1