Atari Emulator -> Morky

Mushca Disk 49... I gotta say, Morky's a little dorky!  But I guess I am, too; really can't delude myself about that any longer.  And now that I'm on vacation... actual vacation, not one that involves a couple days at the hospital... I finally decided to see it all the way through.  That's the big question: what does it take to reel them in?  About three levels or so?  This game's got it all, I'm telling you.  And according to atarimania, it's based on a German type-in game ... see, a long time ago, there were these things called magazines.  Ask your great-grandparents.  They're like thin books, but with slicker paper to compensate for the lack of a hard cover.  Also, if you're not careful, you'll slice your fingers open with them!  Yeah, I miss those days NOT.  Go ahead!  Try it!  Drag one of these Cosmopolitan magazines along your finger, and not just because it's one of the sex tips they recommend.  Anyway, there used to be all these computer magazines before "Game Informer" came to dominate the scene.  And furthermore, video games used to be simple enough that you could actually list some computer code in a magazine!  A few pages worth of code, give or take.  You could actually type in the instructions for one of these stupid games, then actually play the game!  There were actually  programming environments that Microsoft didn't control!  And charge an arm and a leg for!  I'm guessing Morky is a combination of Basic and a few machine language routines.  USR 1536 and all that... ah, that takes me back.  And some of these type-in games are nothing to sneeze at!  The best is probably J.D. Casten's Rebound from Antic magazine.  It's got everything: a rainbow of vertical colors, six fonts it has to switch between, an avatar that needs two player-missiles, decent sound effects.  But Morky's got something!  Arguably, it's a little unfair... okay, a little to a lot unfair.  I confess I had to use the Atari emulator's state-saving feature about a few hundred times.  Take the ladder, for instance.  There's a couple rooms where you restart and have to climb down a ladder onto a platform... where you immediately get hit by one of the bad guys.  Five times in a row, thereby ending the game.  There's that, plus the globs of cotton candy that fall from the ceiling.  Some of them seem to know better than others where exactly I am, and usually on a ladder.  Also, there's the usual keys/doors motif, but here's a neat twist: if you push against a door without a key, you get killed!  As I sarcastically mentioned at the beginning, talk about door-key!  But here's the map in the attached picture.  The rooms all fit together nicely, unlike Willi... Cathryn Mataga's Shamus 1.  There's a little bit of overlap in the Red level, but those were the days, when you could do that with a maze in a computer game.  And even though this is a type-in game, I will say that the final room is devilishly fiendish.  I can't remember a finale that required such timing, even in games of complete machine language.  Takes me back to my old jump rope days in grade school, where they make you jump into two at once.  You know, timing.  Also, I'm a completely terrible juggler.  Use that information against me well someday.

Morky's home at Atarimania.com