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vidgame | |
vidgame is a simple name for a simple game, writtin in Tcl/Tk.
It was inspired by distant memories of a game I played a few times on
the Apple ][ computer. That game was a bit more advanced than this one,
as it had sound and better graphics. But my game is still pretty addictive.
The basic premise is that planes fly overhead, and drop paratroopers (I never got around to drawing the parachutes). You shoot them. If twenty get passed, game over. You can also shoot the planes, but they take two shots to blow up. But you do get credit for killing everyone on the plane. Which is nice.
Apparently all paratroopers carry large amounts of high explosives, because when you hit them, they blow up. And if their debris hits anything else, it blows up too. Makes for some impressive fireworks.
Action is controlled with the mouse - the canon points where the mouse is. The gun fires continuously, so you don't have to keep clicking the silly button. You also get smart bombs, that kill every paratrooper on the screen. They are used by hitting the space bar. You start with one, and get an additional bomb every 500 kills. "q" quits, "Escape" pauses, and if you get bored with the mouse, you can also use the left and right arrow keys to control the canon.
The game does slow down when you have lots of stuff going on, as well as if you have a slow computer (this is because tcl/tk is interpeted), but it gives it the feel of some very early home-brewed computer games.
It may require some editing to run at your site. If you don't have tcl/tk, then you're out of luck. It may not work with some versions of tcl/tk. You'll probably need to adjust the path to the wish binary, in the first line of the program.
If you don't have tcl 8.0, then the program will try to use perl to generate some random numbers for you. If you don't have perl, then you can build your own file of 1000 random numbers between 1 and 20, and you'll have to specify that file in the RANDFILE variable at the beginning of the program.
Download program (single tcl/tk file)
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