Crater Crawler - A rather nice version of Moon Patrol released for the ZX Spectrum NEXT

As we said before : In 1982-1987, Irem with licensing by Williams released the fantastically enjoyable game of' ' Moon Patrol ' for the Arcade gaming community. A side-scrolling shooter that is widely credited for the introduction of parallax scrolling in side-scrolling video games, as you drove a buggy across a landscape, jumping over ditches and rocks while also shooting at enemies both above and in front made this such a great game to play.

It was so popular in fact that many remember it on a multitude of home systems such as the Atari 800, 2600, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Dreamcast, Intellivision and an enhanced edition for the Atari XL/XE released in 2019 called Moon Patrol Redux. So why are we mentioning this game you might ask? Well take a look at this excellent unofficial version of Moon Patrol on the ZX Spectrum NEXT; a newly titled Crater Crawler by Kevman3D, which in itself is a far better version of Moon Patrol sporting a soundtrack, smoother framerates and generally more pleasing on the eye using Parallax scrolling effects!

Links :1) Source

6 comments:

  1. The Atari 800 homebrew was one of the best ports I have ever seen. This is a much more complex system to port to but it looks decent.

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  2. Also, a nice demo version of Lunar Patrol was released for the Atari 7800 console by OldStyle last month over @ AtariAge: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/345867-lunar-patrol/

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  3. This game shows what is capable on the Next when using BASIC only. The game is written in NextBASIC only.

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  4. https://youtu.be/UkqIK6XfHqs?t=561

    Fun facts. The game runs much faster on real HW, even to the point of being very unplayable. The author debugged it under an emulator that runs slower. So a correction will be necessary. Otherwise admirable performance for a BASIC intepreter and even bigger things are in the pipeline.

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    Replies
    1. Author:

      Kevin Phillips

      "If anybody needs to, there's a 1.1 update there - not a lot of stuff, just a pile of 'options' to do a little reconfiguration of settings for number bullets, jumps, etc to fine-tune the gameplay.
      And if you want to re-layout the levels yourselves (add more alien attacks, build super-impossible crater sequences to frustrate your friends, etc), the data is on lines 9000 onwards. Page 46 in the PDF explains the way it all works. Pretty much like a construction kit of 'parts'."

      Delete

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