Tumblers

Tumblers intro screen #1 Tumblers intro screen #2
Tumblers intro screens 1&2
Tumblers game screen #1 Tumblers game screen #2
Tumblers game screens 1&2
Tumblers game screen #3 Tumblers game screen #4
Tumblers game screens 3&4

Tumblers is a type-in game for Color Computer News magazine by Andrew Pakerski, who did many games for the tape based magazines Chromasette and T&D. The game is a BASIC program that POKE's in most of the game as machine language, although skill level, final score and suprisingly, the players explosion when dying are done in pure BASIC. The original listing had a rather serious bug (one byte in a DATA statement was wrong) that caused it to hang, but I fixed that before uploading it to the archive, and it was designed to put the graphics screen up fairly high in 16K memory, meaning that it should work on cassette or disk based systems with at least 16K RAM.

The game itself is fairly simple; using an analog joystick only, you move your blue cross shape across the screen, dodging the tumblers (which are tiny little red lines) that fly in straight paths across the screen at various angles and speeds (and wraparound on all 4 borders). For some reason neither the tumblers nor the player are allowed on the bottom 1/3 of the screen; I am guessing that this was to map the player position at a one to one ration with the Y position on the joystick?

The player selects the speed from 1 (very slow) to 100 (very fast) that the tumblers move at (I found 60-80 to be a fairly decent balance of speed and difficulty). The game starts with 2 tumblers which are easy to dodge, but the longer the player survives, the more tumblers are added, making the playfield busier and busier. When the player is hit (and they only get one life), the game gives the player their points score and how many active tumblers they made it up to on the screen at once. A small, simple but fun game.

Bit of trivia - While the magazine article calls the game Tumble in it's article title, the BASIC source listing calls it Tumblers. Since the latter is what Andrew himself called it, I am going by that title here.

Title: Tumblers

Author: Andrew Pakerski

Publisher: Color Computer News November 1982

Released: November 1982

Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 16K RAM, joystick, tape or disk.

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