Please indulge me and sing along, you know the tune....
The chances of any crap game being set on Mars, is a million to one they say. And still this game came....
Weirdly I watched War of the Worlds last night for the first time. It was a strange live show type of thing where they had Liam Neison who appeared as a hologram - presumably they couldn't afford anymore of him than that.
Apt then, that I finally get around to reviewing this game which is a sort of ALS / War of the Worlds mash up for the Next. (PS: sorry for the brief hiatus, I had to take care of some real life stuff for a few weeks - Building a chicken coop! Now I have 4 happy chickens in the back yard, and I can get back to my official duties and the worst host this competition has ever had*)
In Jim's own words:
Chronology:
This should be the FOURTH lawnmowing game for the 2023 edition of the CSSCGC. Jamie Bradbury - this year's host - decided to enter his own competition (and disqualify himself from it...) with a Z88 conversion of Duncan MacDonald's notorious original Advanced Lawnmower Simulator (it sort-of-works on the letterbox-shaped screen...), soon followed by Ed Toovey's Licence To Mow, a text adventure involving mowing.
And then I was contacted out of the blue by former Your Sinclair and current Guardian journalist, Rich Pelley, who was writing an article about Sinclair-based Crap Games, and wanted my help with both the article, and submitting a "new for 2023" Advanced Lawnomwer Simulator into the competition. So I went to town on that, being careful to retain as much of Duncan MacDonald's original code while adding more and more Quirks And Features (cheers to Doug DeMuro for that) of my own.
No sooner had I finished that than I had the further idea to enhance ALS even more, for the more recent Son Of Spectrum.
Back to my review...
It took Jim 8 days to finish it off using the Next emulator CSpect. Jim reports that this game was a perfect learning process, and his first chance to use tiles. He also used as many NextBASIC features as he could, because... "why wouldn't I, when I have them at my disposal?"
A nice touch with this game is that it generates a new set of tiles every time the game is run. With eight red weed tiles, and eight mown weed tiles. This ensures that every game is visually very slightly different.
Jim's game is not actually the first ALS for the Next, that appears to have been made by Retroasylum in 2020:
It's a direct conversion, but with music and better graphics. Jim has managed to distance his game as much as possible from the "original" shown above by setting it on Mars, and providing a full back story to boot:
Jim's story:
For all my bashing of the Cult Of St. Greta along the course of ALS 2023 and elsewhere, in this reality they turn out to be right - there really *is* OMFG CLIMATE CHANGE everywhere. London really *is* knee-deep in the ocean, with the Thames Barrier, or at least an update of the original, finally overwhelmed on 17th July...
...2257.
Fortunately, technology has progressed by this time to the point where colonisation of other planets is possible, and Elon Musk's descendants have been working on it. His great-to-the-power-6-grandson Zapp Musk-Kroker - not the most competent of leaders - redeemed himself by building the dome that will eventually house the first Martian colony. He has left it to his son, Brandon Musk-Kroker (born exactly 300 years to the date of the Moon landing) to command the next phase: terraforming the area inside the dome.
Someone else who was also right, even back in the 19th Century, was H.G. Wells. Mars is covered with Red Weed, and it needs to be hacked away with the most powerful anti-plant weaponry available to humanity: LAWNMOWERS. What H.G. was also right about was Martian lifeforms... who are none too happy about the human colonists, especially if they're from London, the source of the plague that killed all their fighting machine pilots, and whose residents have been looking for somewhere less wet to live for the best part of half a century.
It's time for some truly outlandish mechanised horticultural mayhem.
LET'S MOW, BRANDON!
Decisions, decisions...
You have a choice of six mowers that have been packed onto the shuttle to Mars and dumped in a shed inside the dome. The shed is equipped with a large bank of batteries, charged by solar panels - so efficient are these by now that even the weak sunlight on Mars is comparable of generating enough to run your mower over the area of Red Weed inside the dome. These mowers are:
Like ALS 2023, not all of the mowers can be coaxed into life. But unlike ALS 1988, more than one of them is working.
Unlike ALS 2023, both success and failure can be achieved with all the available mowers, and it's up to you to find out which mowers are more likely to complete the job. Some of them, it will be sheer blind luck that the mower doesn't break (or worse), others are completely within your control.
Conclusion
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