This is great, I like it! Very playable, and quite brutal.

Top score so far - 70,410 (level 8). Lost all three lives to Big Kong's barrels!

That's quite addictive, got to go have another go.

Haha, yes, "just one more game"... best score now 106,910 on level 11.

Edit - now 114,250 on level 12, nearly beaten it!

Electron version is now available!

Those sound effects are actually painful on the Electron ...

But I'm amazed at the turn around! I've added a note about it to the Releases page. Cracking pace as always, Tom!

Sometimes Harry seems to go too far, as if the game is storing up a move in the Electron version. Definitely feels different to the beeb version in that regard.

Sam.

It's quite fun and addictive.
Thanks for making it.

Game's great Tom, nice one

(Hmm.. It does feel like 1993 and I'm still crap at playing games.... )

I've also made it to level 3 - level 2 is easier. It's obviously too smooth and fast to be a 1983 release - if a 1983 release was this fast it would have sprite flicker all over the place, if it was as smooth as this it would be very slow.

It's very addictive!

This game really is incredibly addictive

Made it to level 13, score of 122,500 - I've got fairly consistent strategies for levels 1-10, but level 11 still frustrates me sometimes. Level 13 looks scary...

The electron version is quite amusing - not quite as pretty as the beeb version , still quite playable though. (Might've looked a bit nicer with white in place of yellow?)

[edit] This whole 1983 thing is quite convincing... I just said to myself, in all seriousness, "They don't make games like this any more!" and then "...oh, wait"

I've managed to get to Level 4 - scored about 34000 I think it was, a great little game, can be hard and frustrating at times, but very addictive and has the one more go factor.

Just had a go - haha, it's bang on, like a proper 80s game

Nice work Tom, seems I owe you a beer

I was really pleased with myself for getting a score of 104560 today (yes, still playing it) until I then noticed BeebEm had been set to 75% speed!

Now setting it back to 100%, I'm crap again
Doh!

Marginal improvement... 127,790 (still level 13), with a lot of swearing at the game!

Naughty me... I've been using savestates to practice levels 11-16 - not that it did me much good on a real game, I still can't get much in the way of consistency on levels 11 and 13, they're just evil! The collision detection against the barrels seems slightly ropey (yeah, yeah, 1983, I know )

Still loving this game though. Certainly worth a place in my top 20 beeb games of all time.

So what are the controls? The author doesn't mention them.

Usual BBC Micro/Electron keys:

Z - Left
X - Right
: - Up
/ - Down
Return - Fire button (i.e. Jump)

Sam.

He should definitely put that on the game description. I've found the game won't play using BeebEm, funnily enough. My Compaq Presario CQ56 has the : only accessible via a shift key, therefore you can't go up without pressing shift too, and the game is effectively unplayable. I'd bet my laptop isn't the only one with that layout. I wonder if there is a way round this in the options of BeebEm?

It works fine in both BeebEm and B-Em.

You're confusing what I'm referring to - the colon is the key on the Beeb keyboard, shared with the asterisk [*], and doesn't require a SHIFT modifier on an original BBC Micro.

In BeebEm, select Options and try swapping the keyboard mapping between 'Default' and 'Logical' - that should match the keyboard layout as you're expecting. You can also customise the keyboard mapping individually - it's documented in the README that comes with the emulator.

Alternatively, use B-Em - it's technically a more accurate emulator anyway. B-Em also has great support for 1 and 2 player joysticks, so you don't even have to use the keyboard, if you don't want - just use a PC joystick.

Peter.

Okay it's working now, thanks. I wasn't confusing what you were referring to - I know the BBC doesn't need a SHIFT key for a colon, but I think it's fair to assume most people will be using an emulator to play this, and these keys will not all work on an emulated version. It turns out that it isn't the : key but the apostrophe (') that makes the character go up when using this laptop. Others might be different, but the main thing is that with Default Keyboard Mapping selected, I've got it going - ta for that.
Update: I've got the hang of the user defined keys now so I've got the perfect layout : Q-A-O-P-Space!

Umm ...

You're still interpreting the keys I referred to as matching those on your PC - this is not the case.

The PC apostrophe key works for you because it's mapped to the BBC Micro colon [:] key by BeebEm. You can see this yourself by simply pressing that key at the BASIC prompt before starting the game - when you press your PC apostrophe key you will see a colon appear on the emulated beeb, and not an apostrophe.

The game works with the keys I listed - it's just you weren't familiar with the key mapping configured in your emulator. It hits a lot of new BeebEm users and has been questioned before as to whether it's the best default setting. Opinion has been divided.

To list the keys as the PC ones mapped to by BeebEm would simply be plain wrong when the game was run on a real beeb or any other emulator with a different key mapping.

Glad you got it working,

Sam.