Lift

Lift is one of 11 games by Japanese developer Inufuto using their C like cross-platform engine (called "CATE"), targeted at many 8 bit systems (Lift, as of this writing, is available on more than 50), most of them Japanese. On systems that don't have hardware sprite chip or a dedicated background music chip (like the Coco's), the engine uses tile based sprites, and single voice music in the intro, game end, and between screens. On the Coco 1/2 version, it runs in the equivalent of PMODE 3 (128x192x4), and on the Coco 3 version it runs at 256x192x16 (a narrower version of HSCREEN 2). The games are designed to run from cassette; this means that if you run the Coco 1/2 version from a disk drive or DSK image, you should use a Disk BASIC disabler routine (like ROML) so that the game doesn't occasionally crash or glitch some of the graphics.

The game itself is loosely based on the arcade game Mappy but with no horizontal scrolling. In the game you have a timer in which to collect all the flags - if you get two of the same flag in a row (all flags come in pairs), you get bonus points. There are elevators that are always going up that both you and your opponents can catch rides on. There is no jumping in the game; your sole controls are to move left or right, and keyboard only (using the J and K keys. All vertical movement is done by falling or the elevators - but you can change direction in mid air while falling. Later levels (there are 10 total, 6 of which are pictured above) have more than one opponent to deal with, and all of them will try to hone in on your position, but with the same movement restrictions that you have. If you complete a level, you get bonus points based on how many seconds are left on the timer. After all 10 levels are complete, the game wraps back to the first level.

It should be mentioned the Inufuto has also released theses games for the Coco's cousin, the MC-10. They require a 16K RAM expander, and run at a lower resolution (128x96x4), but play pretty well identically to the Coco versions.

Title: Lift

Author: ??? (Inufuto?)

Publisher: Inufuto

Released: December 27, 2021 (Coco 1/2 version), August 7, 2022 (Coco 3 version)

Requires: Color Computer 1 or 2, 32K RAM (Coco 1/2 version) OR Color Computer 3, 128K RAM (Coco 3 version)