By Fred D’Ignazio — originally published in December 1986 (Vol. 4, No. 12)
Your mission in this colorful, arcade-style game is to rescue a stranded space colony of scientists. For the Commodore 128. A joystick is required.
You awaken to an alert siren. When you open your eyes, you’re disoriented. Your watch says it’s 3:51 a.m. “What’s going on?” you mutter. Then the announcement blares through the barracks and you remember who you are—a member of the Space Rescue Team. “Attention! Emergency Code Two.” You leap from your bed and dress—”neat and fast”—the same way you were trained to do everything. You know you’ll be expected in the briefing room in one and a half minutes.
You pilot a remote-control spaceship, a Small Robot Lander, but you call your ship what all the other pilots call it—the SRL. As the pilot of a robot ship, you have an awesome responsibility—although you can never die, your passengers can. Today’s emergency mission is to rescue a colony of scientists that’s working on a moon under bombardment by an asteroid belt. “Those men should have been evacuated,” you growl. “They would have been,” says your project leader, “but they said they were onto something really big. You know how hard it is to argue with the scientists.”
You begin with three SRLs, and will be assigned an extra one each time you rescue four scientists.
The Mission
Type in and save a copy of “Moon Rescue.” To play, load it and type RUN. You’re first asked if you wish to “Make New Rocks (Y/N).” Press Y. This sets up the screen and sprite data. This has to be done only at the beginning of a playing session. After your first game, answer N to skip this initialization.
The game begins with your first SRL docked at the top of the screen. There are four belts of asteroids between you and the scientists. Pull the joystick toward you to begin your descent. Your ship is highly maneuverable. You can move in eight directions through joystick control. When you near a scientist, carefully land your ship on the white docking pad. After a few seconds, the grateful—if somewhat distracted—scientist will climb on board. An SRL can hold only one passenger, so you must return to the docking port at the top of the screen before picking up another scientist.
At the top of the screen is a status line which keeps track of the number of scientists saved, the number lost, the number of sets (four per set) of scientists saved, and the number of SRLs left. But as a dedicated rescue team member, you know that there’s no real score when it comes to saving lives—only the satisfaction of a job done right.
See program listing on page 129.