Fire Play Test VII


Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 1 Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 2 (Coco 3 palette example)
Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 1 & intro screen 2 (Coco 3 palette example)

Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 3 Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 4
Fire Play Test VII Intro screens 3 &4 (Coco 1/2 colors)

Fire Play Test VII game screen 1 (Coco 3 palette example) Fire Play Test VII game screen 2 (Coco 3 palette example)
Fire Play Test VII game screens 1 &2 (Coco 3 palette example)

Fire Play Test VII game screen 3 (Coco 1/2 colors) Fire Play Test VII Intro screen 4 (Coco 1/2 colors)
Fire Play Test VII game screens 3 &4 (Coco 1/2 colors)

Fire Play Test VII is a Coco port of a game that itself was a port of an earlier game. The original game was a "Game & Watch" handheld put out by Nintendo way back in the summer of 1980. It was an LCD based game with fixed shapes, where one had to bounce people jumping out of a fiery building onto the ambulance to rescue them (similar visually to games like the arcade game Circus or the Coco's Clowns and Balloons).

Erico Monteiro ported the game to modern platforms with retro-graphics style (similar to a Game Boy), adding smooth scrolling multi-planar graphics, 6 different waves & full music tracks. You can still get his port (released in October and November 2018) from Erico's itch.io webpage.

Paul Shoemaker's port is based directly on Erico's, although he did makes some changes. Musical interludes are between waves rather than running continuously throughout the game, and if one runs it on a Coco 3, one can choose from 5 different palette color sets (2 of which are shown above). Almost 29K of pixel art was directly ported from Erico's original, but the theme changes somewhat in that the player is rescuing people to make it to CocoFest 2024 (for which the game was released). There are some minor game play changes as well that Erico himself has said are improvements to his original port. The player uses the joystick to move the trampoline back and forth and try to bounce the people jumping from the build onto the ambulance (as per the original Game & Watch version) but with multiple people jumping on the screen at the same time at different heights to make it more challenging. The same multi-planar scrolling between every 2 levels is still present in the Coco version, and the game does have an ending if the player can complete all 6 waves. It also features an attract mode and keeps track of the highest score in your current session.

Title: Fire Play Test VII

Author: Paul Shoemaker (with art and original game by Erico Monteiro)

Publisher: Shoemaker's Last Software

Released: April 23, 2024

Requires: Color Computer 1,2 or 3, 64K RAM, joystick

Download Fire Playtest VII (and name your own price if you wish) here.

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