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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