BASIC Gamer

Sea Battle 2.0. RC3 developed by John Riggle, 2011.

Written by Lachie Dazdarian
(July, 2011)

Introduction

John Riggle is active in the FreeBASIC game development scene since around 2010., mostly delivering old text-based BASIC games from his childhood, late 70ties, early 80ties, in new clothes. One of these entries is Sea Battle 2.0., a remake of an HP Basic text-based game by Vincent Erickson, now ported to FreeBASIC and featuring graphics, sound and music and updated interface.

The Review

Sea Battle is a submarine turn-based strategy game. The game is played on a 21x21 map and the objective is to destroy a preset number of enemy ships while avoiding sea monsters and mines in the process. The original was a purely text-based game with a symbolic ASCII-characters drawn map.

John Riggle took the original code and basically rewritten it, adding small enhancements and bugs fixes, leaving the original concept relatively intact, but improved where needed. On the top of that he added new mouse-controlled interface, well picked and animated stock-images, as well as cool speech messages and suitable background humming which perfectly creates the atmosphere of being in a submarine.

The game opens with a nice title screen accompanied with a cool background music. You can setup the game in a rather extensive options menu, or start a new one. Before each new game you can setup the difficulty by choosing one of the 4 preset difficulty levels, or manually adjust the 4 game parameters.

Each round pits you against a preset number of enemy ships that you need to destroy using torpedoes, rockets or sabotage. Each turn you can pick an action, from moving, firing torpedoes, changing depth or using the sonar. The movement can be done in 8 directions (a square-based map) using power (100 units of power for one square), and the power is limited. During your mission you need to avoid mines and sea monsters and to replenish your supplies you must dock with the headquarters, differently positioned depending on the difficulty. If damaged one can change depth with various effects.

Overall, a simple game, yet offering versatile and immersing gameplay. The rounds are perfectly timed, not being terribly short or terribly long and cumbersome, making it a perfect game for relaxing after a hard days work. Perhaps it lacks some sort of campaign mode or scoring so you can compete against yourself or others. In this form it’s a single-round based game, for better or worse. Lacks depth, but is quite fun nevertheless.

Despite this oversight, the game illustrates perfectly how remakes/updates of old (pre-90ties) games should be done. How enhancements should be placed and why they are beneficial.

Anyway, I can warmly recommend this FreeBASIC title. Definitely worth playing at least once.

The Score

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Revisiting The Classics - Lynn's Legacy

Written by Lachie Dazdarian
(July, 2011)

Introduction

In a month or so there will be full 5 years since the release of Lynn's Legacy. Beside being a reminder of the speeding pass of time, it also reminds us how much our FreeBASIC game development scene stagnated in the meantime. In my opinion, Lynn's Legacy still remains the best FreeBASIC game and that says many things.

I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. I'm only expressing here some of the hopes I had back then (2006) about the FreeBASIC game dev scene. Hopes of a strong scene dedicated to retro design forming and flourishing, like the one that existed around 1999 and 2000 on the QBASIC scene, but this did not happen. Too many boundaries were pushed, too many new libraries and possibilities introduced, explored, tested, improved. The FreeBASIC compiler grew. It had to grew. So most of us had to dedicate to that. On the other hand, when it stopped to grow, many felt lost and had an illusion of being trapped in a dying language, instead of perceiving the vast new possibilities it offered compared to QBASIC. I really do believe that FreeBASIC offers everything that a hobbyist game designer wants and needs to develop for Windows and Linux today. But here comes another problem. The rise of commercial retro game development for mobile devices, which I think really damaged the entire freeware game dev scene for personal computers, including our scene. Too many talented people saw the legit opportunity to earn money on doing something they love and nobody can blame them. Even our own Josiah Tobin ended up developing games for iPhone. Others just felt less compelled and motivated to develop retro stuff for free and personal computers while there was a market where they could do it for cash. In the end they didn't develop anything. In an odd way, it hampered their creative desire. But that's just my own speculation. I might be completely off.

The fact is, after the glory first few years of FreeBASIC we just lost our steam. But perhaps we shouldn't linger on the passed time and wonder about the reasons for this much. We should however remember and examine the best of our works in the past and with them in mind try to restart that fire in us that made making games of Lynn's Legacy level of quality a fun and rewarding experience, a mindset we lost with time due the reasons mentioned above.

So let's get back to Lynn's Legacy and see why it is still the best in FB game production.

The Game

Lynn's Legacy remains the pinnacle of FreeBASIC game development, but it also remains an almost flawless freeware game in technical aspects.

For those who never played it (shame on you!), Lynn's Legacy is a The Legend of Zelda-style action-adventure game, featuring screen by screen movement, a quite large world to explore, and a very though-out and developing story, set in a fantasy-like world with space opera elements. The game was developed by Josiah Tobin and cha0s.

When the game was released everyone had to recognize the production values, despite the design being helmed by mere two men. Josiah Tobin delivered excellent graphics and sound/music, both admirable in quality and quantity. The graphics do lose some of the quality toward the end, but mostly in design value, which I ascribe to lack of inspiration due the game size. They are also not great in my opinion, but I'm only mentioning this to recognize the fact that they leave space for improvements. I do, however, rather like the style Josiah adopted with the Lynn's Legacy graphics, a style quite few disliked in the community due several uncommon choices, like characters not featuring visible eyes. To me, on the contrary, this gives the game a unique look, something I quite appreciate.

The game also features great sound effects and quite good original music. No complaints there, except that it perhaps lacked at least one more memorable music track. Everything sounds very good and accompanies the game action well, but doesn’t really stick into mind. Still, original music in freeware games is not found that often, so compliments on compositions are due.

The very game engine by cha0s is flawless and makes playing Lynn’s Legacy a very enjoyable and smooth experience, glitches free. Well, the problem of Lynn not being animated while pushing blocks appeared and remained in the last version, but that’s about it.

Where Lynn’s Legacy shines the most and still remains unmatched in the FreeBASIC game design history is with its size, variety of content and developing story. Lynn’s Legacy offers at least 8-10 hours of play time, much more if playing slower and with emphasis on exploration. This play time is not filled with repetitive battles like in some many console-style QBasic RPGs, but with excellently paced progressive discovery of new content, featuring a huge overworld and 8 dungeons to explore. Very little repetition of content in any sense is present throughout the game.

As well as the other game aspects, the gameplay was extremely well balanced and constructed in the first chapter (the game is separated into chapters), and somehow loss the expected increase of the difficulty as you progressed further. It still remained challenging and fun to play till the end. Just not as fun as in the beginning.

As I said in my original review, I think a game the half size of Lynn's Legacy would be a much more compact and rounded product than Lynn's Legacy ended up being with its final scope, but even with all these flaws it succeeds in being an excellent game, large, deep, challenging, fun, interesting and worthy of high regard. No doubt about that.

An example for all FB game developers, present and future, and a mandatory "reading" for anyone attempting to develop retro games in FreeBASIC.

One problem remains with Lynn’s Legacy and modern computers (it was a problem in 2006 already, but ignored by developers), and that's its 320x200 resolution which can’t be run full screen on most monitors today, something a Scale2X option would fix easily. I do hope cha0s can find motivation to add this option and release an update on the game.

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