The comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Competition 2021: 25th edition extravaganza!

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TMD2003
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Re: The comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Competition 2021: 25th edition extravaganza!

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AND NOW, BACK ON TRACK... for one last time...

First of all, with the competition over, I've made the Awards pages.

A huge round of rapturous applause and a quick rev of the Patio Sprintette to Lee Prince, who won Most Crap Game Of The Year with Advanced Adding a TXT File to an EPROM Card for a Z88 Emulator Simulator!

And the keys of CSSCGC Towers for 2022 are handed to Andy Jenkinson, for the Least Crap Game Of The Year, the superbly playable and tuneful (if you like the Cranberries) Zombie Dice.

There are other pages with commendations for those who deserved it, buckets of beans flung at those who committed misdemeanours, and some statistics, including the full final standings, and the reveal of what the six games were that I've had in the website's title graphics all year.

Meanwhile... there are also BONUS GAMES, and these have been given special double-length accounts into the processes behind their programming, rather than a formal review.

The Minor Bonus is three remakes of Daniel Aguilar's Magiapotagia from early May. I thought that if this program had been made on the primitive micros of 1977, when nobody outside a computer lab knew what a computer was, it would have been treated as if it was actual magic. But could any of the Apple II (with Integer BASIC), the Commodore PET 2001 or TRS-80 Model I (with Level I BASIC) handle the algorithm used to shuffle the cards? The short answer is "yes", and it works on all three, even if some were easier than others. I call the package Magiapotagia 1977.

The MAJOR BONUS, the one that's the result of this competition breaking through 50 entries, is The Ring of the Inka - Sir Clive Edition, a heavily revised, improved and thoroughly debugged version of the original from the 2018 CSSCGC. Volker Bartheld, one of the authors, asked to do this midway through the year, but probably didn't bank on us both spending about a month testing, debugging, optimising for memory, and adding new features...

The original version of the game couldn't be completed as there were vital objects missing, and times where it would stop with errors. All these have been eliminated. The game can be completed - I should know - but you'll now have to deal with a kleptomaniac Shaman, some undead guards that are very good at their job, a decreasing stamina level that will require finding some excellent survival food, a magic effect on the Ring itself... and to make it look nice, there's a custom character set courtesy of Damien Guard's ZX Origins.

This is now a superb text adventure, and the only thing that qualifies it as a Crap Game in any way is that the parser is slow. It also now works on 128K models, which it didn't before, and in addition to the microdrive version, there's a (128K-only) tape, and three different discs (+3, +D, Beta).

Happy adventuring.
Spectribution: Dr. Jim's Sinclair computing pages.
Features my own programs, modified type-ins, RZXs, character sets & UDGs, and QL type-ins... so far!
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