PrinceWatercress plays Zombies (PCW/Century Communications) (BBC Micro) - The Longplay

It's now time for a few games of this, minus commentary. Enjoy!

Let's Play

Much like Robo Swamp for the BBC Micro, this game is another maze chase game. Originally by P. Barker for Commodore PET, it was ported over to BBC Micro by Daniel Lucas. Published in Personal Computer World in June 1983. Century Communications Ltd. would then publish it for the Best Of PCW Software For The BBC Micro compilation from Personal Computer World magazine along with some other games.

Guess what? It actually plays well.

In this game, you are in a graveyard and the walking dead are roaming the land. You have to survive as long as possible with the one life that you have, and if you die, the game ends. In order to get rid of the zombies, you'll have to lure them into the open graves by standing near them so that the zombies run into them as they take the shortest path to you.

Z moves you left, X moves you right, * moves you up (' on an American keyboard) and ? moves you down.

When you start a game, you can pick how many zombies will be on the first screen. You can start with as little as 10 and with as high as 50.

You are the green man, and you start at the center of the screen. The white characters are the zombies, and if any of them touch you, it's game over. You'll need to move around in order to lure the zombies to the open graves. Thankfully, you cannot fall into them; the only way to die is to have a zombie touch you.

The zombies all move one at a time, one after the other, one space at a time. This gets hectic when there are just a few zombies on the screen, and if you have one left, the lone zombie will move super-fast as a result. When there are a lot of zombies on the screen, you'll have a little more time to decide where you want to go. Nevertheless, it is a wise idea never to line yourself up with any of the zombies and to find a wide open area where it will take a while for zombies to reach you, then lure them into the open graves from there.

Unlike Robo Swamp, where the controls were garbage simply because the game only seemingly let you move whenever it felt like it, the controls are far more responsive. You can hold a direction down and run quickly in that direction if need be. This is good, as responsive controls are a must for a game like this.

When you die, you'll find out how long your game lasted, then you can choose whether to play again. If you choose to play again, you can set the starting number of zombies anywhere from 10 to 50.

This game may be short and sweet and there may not be much to it at all, but this is far more palatable compared to Robo Swamp. The controls respond when you want them to, there's plenty of challenge if you're trying to last more than a minute (good luck with that), and the graphics and sound, while simple, get the job of providing a nice, brief arcade-style experience done. While you can do better, you can definitely do worse, and compared to Robo Swamp, this is a noted improvement due to the responsive controls alone.