| Posted By
Csabo
on 2025-07-22
10:32:28
|  Carrot Stew
| Title: | Carrot Stew | | Category: | Game/Action | | Release Date: | 2025-07-20 | | Language: | English | | Size: | 16K | | Machine: | PAL Only | | Code Type: | Basic | | Distribution: | Freeware |
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2025-07-22
10:32:28
| Re: Carrot Stew
Do I have to specify that I love old BASIC stuff, and I love a good comeback story? Well, it's true. There are very few people left who will actually look at something like Carrot Stew.
When I heard the news that Frank Bingley is writing a new game (and yes, I knew the name and remembered his old games immediately), I was happy.
I really wanted to like this game. That said... It's not very good. Here's a closer look:
First of all, the title screen bugged me a little, especially the "W". The way the letter "R"s are written could be chalked up to an artistic choice I guess. Anyway, here's my take on it:
But that doesn't really matter, we skip it quickly anyway. The biggest problem is that the gameplay isn't fun, and if I have to pinpoint why, it's the random elements. The guns fire completely randomly, so the player can't really "outsmart" it. Running into the randomly placed snare isn't fun either. I mean, what was the player supposed to do? There are several visual bugs: half of the man disappearing, the guns disappearing if you run over them. Occasionally two carrots appear, but one of them is "fake", just left over somehow. What I count as a "logical bug" is placing the snare under the carrot - that's just mean. Nevertheless, I played through it once... and I was greeted by a typo ("obsticles") on the final screen. With a game that has like a total of 50 words in it, this is unacceptable. Finally, the lack of scoring basically means that there's zero replay value. A simple idea would be to show the time taken to fill the pot, then a potential player might want to play again to beat that time.
Finally, I looked at the code a bit. There's so much room for optimization, I can't say that this is well coded. Just a few random issues:
* The game is PAL only for no real reason: it POKEs into $FF07 several times, and some of those POKEs are correctly written, but others are not. (For the record, replacing each instance of POKE 65287,8 with POKE 65287, PEEK(65287) AND 64 + 8 would fix this.)
* The initial loop that copies the characters takes to RAM is too long, 15 seconds (I checked). It can be rewritten as B = 37888 : FOR A = 15360 TO 16376 : POKEA, PEEK(B+A) : NEXT which only takes 6 seconds. I would also place this after the red title screen with a message ("PLEASE WAIT A FEW SECONDS") to that the player has something to look at.
* There's remnants that show that the game probably had scoring: HI=0, CS=CS+100. These variables are only set once and never used. "Dead code" like this should be removed.
* Some sections of the code are written multiple times (e.g. rabbit caught by various methods), this could be simplified.
To sum it up: I'm ecstatic that Mr. Bingley sat down and created something out of nowhere. Must have been a fun trip down memory lane! I'm glad this game exists. I'm glad there's activity on the platform. At the same time, if I (or anyone else from the scene) had a chance to give feedback on it before release, this could have been a lot better.
I should come up with a slogan, since I feel like a broken record saying this: "Send your games to play-testing before release!"
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Posted By
gerliczer
on 2025-07-22
12:52:21
| Re: Carrot Stew
Not intending to do a shameless plug, but the charset could be copied with the screen copying routine I found a short age ago when investigating your request for any method to copy it quickly to RAM. Then it shouldn't need any waiting message.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2025-07-22
13:43:01
| Re: Carrot Stew
Yeah, or it could have been included "behind" the game (taken care of with some POKEs), which completely negates both the initial copying and then redefining the characters from DATA lines. I wanted to demonstrate that even if we stick with the author's intended pure BASIC solution, the loop could have been better written; my version reduces the time from 15 seconds to 6 seconds which is pretty significant.
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