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A game in GFABASIC by Cooper of The Coolest Paradise
(http://thecoolestparadise.atari.org)
.-========================================================================-.
reviewed in June 2003 for Alive! disk magazine by Simon Sunnyboy
Now we are up for a little challenge. Cooper wrote a little puzzler and it
is quite addictive. But first of all, we need to know on what sort of
machine it will work properly. First of all, this game is STE enhanced so
bad luck for most people with real machines.
System requirements (STE non-GEM version) :
> Atari STE/TT/Falcon
> TOS 1.62 on STE, plain TOS 4.x on Falcon
> Colour display
> optionally a joystick (no Jagpads!)
I tested the game both in STEEM (due to lack of a real STE machine) and
on my standard Falcon. It worked pretty good, make sure to set ST-Low
though. However in the latest beta of STEEM it run ok with TOS 2.06 as
well while the earlier releases of STEEM all required TOS 1.62 to run
Manga Puzzle properly. Cooper told me about that strange bug and it
probably is just an issue of buggy emulation :)
At the time of this writing there is a version of this game that runs
under GEM and presumably on much more configurations, however I did not
not test that one. I concentrated on the oldschool fullscreen version here.
So just load a disk with the game on it and doubleclick on MANGA.PRG to
run the game. Immediatly some nice chiptune starts playing and a little
nice intro sequence keeps the screen busy. Nothing big but quite nice for
an intro written in GFABASIC.
The intro itself worked in Hatari as well (although the game failed) so at
least the intro could work on plain STs as well.
A keypress will bypass the nice Manga Puzzle logo and will bring you to the
main menu. You can move the big hand with the cursor keys. Select Game to
play, Infos will give you some short explanations and information.
Now the game itself is a puzzler. Your task is to bring a picture back into
shape so you can view and enjoy it. For this, the picture is divided into
16 little squares where one is left blank. Resort the picture by sliding
the tiles next to that blank square into the blank location. The blank tile
will move to the position of the old tile. Now you need to plan a little bit
and you can resort the picture. Over 30 pictures are waiting for you to be
puzzled back so you have a lot to do.
Sliding the tiles is done with keys in the numeric pad or with a joystick
connected to the joystick port. It is straight forward and you learn it
within a minute.
The pics themselves are nice looking anime girls. They make use of the full
STE palette so you really have some motivation to finish a pic. A nice
chiptune is playing while you sort the pictures so you have something both
for your eyes and your ears.
All in all this is a nice looking game. It is quite addictive and keeps you
playing a few afternoons, its graphical quality is superior to most other
PD or Shareware games on the ST. Even the fact that it was done in GFABASIC
does not ruin the fun. This game would look and feel exactly the same if it
was written in C or machine code.
It's only drawback in my opinion is that you need to use a specific TOS and
that it is STE only, leaving my 1040STFM out.
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My conclusion : well done ! If you haven't yet, take a look at it, even if
that will be under STEEM due to the lack of a real STE machine.
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