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Fantasy Island
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| First Impression |
Boy, I've seen this a lot. A small walking demo of an RPG that will probably never be completed. Basically speaking, this is DarkDread's RPG engine that is found in his five part RPG tutorial that he wrote a couple years ago. There is one town that you walk into with nothing in it but a fence to keep you from walking out anywhere but through the entrance. There is also a small menuing system that loads when you press escape. It's not bad, but there's nothing really to do in it except for use the healing spell. That's it.
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| What It's Like |
There's no story. There's a bunch of beeping and buzzing from the PC speaker. There's nothing to do but run around...and heal yourself once. That's all you have to do in this game. Oh, you can run in to the village with no towns or people...just a fence and leave. Take a look at the screenshots. It's pretty much self explanatory.
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| Other things you should know |
Although you shouldn't make the effort to run this program unless you plan on learning how to do this type of engine or the menuing system, the author didn't make use of the nice directory features of unzipping programs. You have to do it yourself, but don't worry, it's not that hard. Just make a new directory called 'tiles' in the directory that the main BAS file is located and move all files except for the bas files in to the directory. It's most easily done in DOS. Just mkdir images, and copy *.til (where til is, put the extension of the tiles. I forgot what it is.) to the tiles directory, and then copy fontdata.dat there too...and run the program!
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| The rating |
| Graphics |
Junk. If they were drawn with a sprite editor, they have no excuse for existing. If they were drawn with text in QB (PSET, LINE), they have an excuse, but they could have been done a bit better. They are junk, though. The only thing that keeps these from being a 0/5 stars is their sheer number of pictures. When I saw all of the image files, I thought it had to be good if there were that many pics, which is a plus. The edges of the lake are nicely rounded, and there are 'animations' for the character. Not really animations, but two alternating frames every time you move. So, in the words of Forrest Gump, 'That's all that I have to say about that.'
** |
| Sound |
"Oh boy! Holy crap! Wow, that really gives me a rush!" is what I said as I smashed my computer with a wooden mallet after hearing the sound in this game. Hundreds of annoying bleeps, and blips coming out of the tower that looms beside the tube I sit in front of many a time. It's enough to make you cringe. Actually, to tell the truth, The sound ain't that bad, but it keeps on going and going and going...like the Energizer bunny.
** |
| Plot/Story |
Simple enough. There ain't one.
N/A |
| Gameplay/Control |
Arrow keys move both you and your selection on the menu. Enter selects. Simple, and over used.
**** |
| Overall Impression |
Okay, this program is of no use to a QBASIC programmer that is not a newbie. A newbie will be able to learn from the source very easily, because it's simple. Check out the menuing subs, because the movement engine is not that good. Well, that's my review. Thanks for watching. I will now disappear like the bodiless entity that you all think I am. :)
*** |
| Total |
11/20 * 5 =
55% |
