Saturday, April 20, 2019

PC Games - San Francisco Earthquake

This year is 1985. Computer games are almost non-existent. The PC itself is in the infant stage. Your memory on your PC is about 64K. Computer Games? Of course, there weren't any PC games that were worth playing at the time, not the kind of memory. Well, actually there. If you have your own Radio Shack TRS 80, then one game is so popular that people with these computers can't stop playing. This game was called "San Francisco Earthquake - 1906."

This game will take place during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But the game itself is not about earthquakes. Oh, yes, it happens in the game, it only makes things more difficult, but the main goal is to find the kidnapped wife.

Play completely in text mode, no graphics, wake up to find your wife's kidnapped notes at your bedside. Then you receive a call for a ransom demand. Suddenly a terrible sway occurred and it hit. You are now in the worst earthquake in San Francisco history and your wife has been kidnapped. What way to start a new day.

Play games by issuing commands to the computer, such as look, get, north, south, west, move, open, close, inventory, and many other commands. There is a very limited help function that basically gives you a list of commands you can use. The only graphics in the game, if you can call it a graph, will happen when the aftershock occurs. The screen shook a bit.

Although the game is very sharp, it is very hard. The number of puzzles you need to solve and the items you have to get are at least countless. Many times you have to go back to where you have been to pick up an item that will only appear if you get another item or other aftershock.

E.g. Part of the game is that you arrive at a pile of ruins. You searched for it but didn't find anything. So you move on. In the later part of the game, another aftershock hit. If you think you are going back to the ruins of the pile, you will find that it has been disturbed. If you look closely, you will now find an item that you have not seen before.

You have to think outside the box to play this game. There are no instructions and clues. For those programmers, you can find out where everything is. The game is written in a combination of BASIC and assembly language. By printing out the source and target files, if you can read them, you can pinpoint exactly the order of each item you need to find and where to find them.

This game is a real challenge. Although it doesn't have all the fancy of modern PC games, it's not boring.




Orignal From: PC Games - San Francisco Earthquake

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