Mothership - Ed Williams

Epigraph

Free your mind and you ass will follow - George Clinton

Prologue

And so it begins...

"Hi,

I thought id send you this. it took me 1 day to write. I hope its crap enough for the competition. let me know if you have any questions or suggestions,

sincerely,

ed."

Ed need not worry - it is crap enough.

Freudian Slip

Hey, we're back with the mothership connection.  No, I mean mothership. A game which Ed has written in a day. It's in basic, and it is offered as a snapshot rather that a Tap file. 

Shoot the mother ship until it is destroyed. I'm conflicted already. Why are we assuming a ship full of mothers is a bad thing? 

Ed has made a sort of Space Invades clone where you shoot at one huge ship in the sky. The ship doesn't move but it can shoot at you. 

One cool thing here is that the Mothership is generated each time with its size, shape, UDGs and colours all determined with some randomization. This does take a while for the game to start, but also gives you something to look forward to each round. 

Another nice touch is the sound effect. The space laser sound effect, while simple, is nice an effective and adds a touch of quality.

The main problem I have is that the gun fire from you and the mothership is quite hard to see, and the game is very slow. It takes ages to clear a single mothership, and the game is too easy for this to be an interesting exercise. I whacked the emulator up to 300%, but the bullets become invisible so that didn't help.

Ed, here are a list of suggestions:

• Make the bullets more prominent
• Make it miles harder
• loading screen
• rewrite in machine code
• Come up with a banging AY track for some cool in game music.

Wait, am I forgetting what the compo is? Mothership would have been at home on cassette 50 for sure. 

Final thoughts

Mothership by Ed Williams is a good old fashioned crap basic game. There are some nice touches, and making this is a single day is a great achievement.

Well done Ed, and thanks for the submission.

Epilogue

Roses are red

Violets are violet - presumably?

Mothership can be played here

Ed will love it if you do.