...and now, here's some gameplay, minus commentary! Enjoy!
Checkout is a pretty interesting looking game for the BBC Micro written by Mike Cooke and published by Virgin Games in 1984 for the BBC Micro. This is one of many "tile-walking" games in existence out there, and to get through this game, you'll need to walk on each tile twice and get all the titles on the same pattern that this produces while also avoiding the drone that rotates around the game board as well as its lasers.
Z moves left, X moves right, : moves up and / moves down. At the top of the screen is your current score and the number of lives you have left. On the left side of the screen is an hourglass, and when all the sand goes down, the drone will zap a laser in four directions. If that laser hits you, or if the drone touches you in any way, you'll lose a life. On the right side is a bar that fills up with red bars, and if you complete 17 levels in a row without a game over, you'll enter a second loop that is much more difficult due to the smaller timer, which allows the drone to zap its laser every few seconds as it zips around more quickly compared to its usual speed.
At the bottom is the timer for the magic square and the three-digit number that dictates how many points you'll get from it, which leads to an explanation for There is a chance that you can walk onto the "magic square," which is one of the tiles on the board chosen by the game at random If you land on it within 30 seconds of starting a level, you'll get a jingle, the action will stop, and the numbers on the "reels" of the three-digit number will spin like reels on a slot machine. You'll need to press the space bar to stop the numbers in the bottom right-hand corner, and you'll want to stop the reels on high numbers, as the higher the number you get, the more points you'll get out of it. When you get the magic square and the bonus points, the reels will disappear.
As for the drone, the drone moves around the perimeter between the edge and the center of the board, and it will reverse directions every so often. You'll want to keep an eye on where it is going as well as the hourglass. If you get too close to the drone's path, you will lose a life. If the hourglass empties and the laser that it fires in four directions hits you, you'll also lose a life from that. If you know the drone is about to fire soon, get to one of the corners, as the lasers will never reach them.
It takes quite a bit of skill to get to the later levels, and as you progress through the game, the colors of the tiles, the text and even the background will change colors every so often so as to liven things up, making it so that no two games look the same visually. Also, if you can get to the second loop, you'd better be fast, as not only will the drone fire lasers every few seconds, but the drone will also get a lot faster. The game takes a little while to get used to, but once you get used to how things go, it gets a lot more fun and also a lot more addicting. It also helps that this looks like some sort of game that I could have played on my parents' old Tandy PC back in the early 1990s when I was five or six years old and would still have fun with despite probably not being able to get very far in it. Either way, this is a fun arcade-style game for the BBC Micro and worth checking out.
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