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ZOMBIE DICE
by Andy Jenkinson for the 128K Spectrum
(or 48K with a Melodik AY-3-8912 Soundbox)
Exactly one month after the eventual WINNER, Lee Prince's Most Crap Game Of The Year, came the entry that is the LOSER at the opposite end of the competition.
I remind you all, I actually wanted to host this competition and pulled everything I had out of the hat to create last year's LOSER. Andy submitted his first CSSCGC entries in 2020 and it was Sarah's Garden that first formed the idea that I should host the competition as if I was a magazine editor, picking through piles of tapes and ZX Printed listings to see what I should publish in Program Printout, Open Forum or any of the other "readers' listings" section. And after the review of Corona Capers emerged (some time in May, as I remember), Andy became my main rival, the one who might snatch away the keys to CSSCGC Towers for this year. We even both entered games based on Casio calculators from the early 1980s - this was mine, this was his.
So it's safe to say I was prepared for what I'd get, if Andy decided to enter my competition, and as I'd come to expect, his entries were a cut above the usual CSSCGC fayre. As if to confirm we were always on the same wavelength, his first entry this year was Rubik Code. Hadn't I seen this somewhere before? I've already linked to it above.
When Zombie Dice appeared in July, it wasn't a game I'd heard of before, and although Andy had written detailed instructions, I didn't quite see how the game worked until I played it - then it made sense. Really, it's simple enough to have been made for the ZX81 - but bring in the 128K Spectrum, and just about everything that I wanted out of a 2021 Crap Game to pile up the effort points was present. I wanted loading screen, I got one. I wanted a custom character set, I got that as well - Andy even drew it himself. I wanted an AY soundtrack... all right, it's from a band I'm not at all fond of, but it's there, and it's been done on a tracker with extra effects on all the notes, which is (for now) beyond my ability. The rum-and-raisin-flavoured icing on the cake was the sequence of PLOTs and DRAWs that scrawled out the title and each player's initials. It's not that I couldn't have done that, but I'd probably not have thought of it. And there were enough weird and undervalued BASIC commands in the listing that it met the Magenta Challenge.
Never mind the type-in test; this all added up to a game that, had the original dice game been invented 20 years earlier, would have found an excellent home on a magazine covertape, among the likes of Theo Develegas, Tom Frost and Andy Remic (yes, that Andy Remic), who were all regular contributors - or, later on, public domain discs such as Outlet. It was a worthy Least Crap Game Of The Year, and over the last few months I've been checking on Andy to see how his preparation is going to be the 2022 host. Now that it's confirmed, I have every confidence he'll do an excellent job.
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