Monday, October 14, 2019

Atari Emulator -> (The) Crypts of Plumbous

You're flying around the Italian countryside in your spaceship... it'll be normal by the next century, don't worry.  Brought to you by either Tesla or Elon Musk, one of those two.  It's either a routine patrol or a mere joyride.  WHEN SUDDENLY... a rogue spaceship comes at you!  Fortunately, it's coming at you just low enough to enable you to blast it out of the sky.  Firing, the worst-sounding missile exeunts your ship, so to speak, and boom!  Out of the sky it goes.  This goes on for a while, WHEN SUDDENLY... a SECOND ship appears!  Can you feel the Atari's resources getting strained or what?  This one's slower, though... at least, for now.  Because these aliens didn't fly across the light years for nothing.  They're after your secret wine cellar, buried in seven distinct locations, in groups of two.  Oh, they've done their research.  If you die fighting off these baddies, you'll have several paragraphs with footnotes about you forever in the anals of history... annals of history.  However, if the pastel purple baddie makes off with ALL SEVEN of your proverbial casks of Amontillado, you shall be forever known in the Book of Cosmi as a ROTTEN PILOT.  I $#!t you not, my friends.
...have I blogged about this before?  Maybe, but that was eight years ago.  This is 2019 now, and I was just able to pull off my little trick again.  I erased the spaceship, so constantly dying is not a problem now.  I actually tried the really, really tough level.  You get 30 spaceships on that one!  The only problem is you move too fast, and your bullets move too fast.  And why is that a problem?  Well, on the Atari, in the laws of Player/Missiles, a missile usually actually has to touch the bad guy to destroy it.  And if it touches too quick, well... it can't keep track of that either.  Anyway, watch this space for everything you ever wanted to know about James Jengo's "Crypts of Plumbous," but were too sophisticated to ask.
Oh, and there's a fuel gauge, but so far there seems to be no way to re-fuel your craft.  Something tells me that the programmer cynically figured that the game would become too difficult too quickly to have to worry about refueling at all!  Very cynical.  But for those of you able to pull it off, the level known as REALLY TOUGH actually gives you a bit of a reprieve if you get past 50 points!  It then becomes not so tough, for the pastel purple ship slows down again to a more human speed.

Level: VERY EASY
Rank: Pseudorookie
Points: 0-5, 7, 9

Rank: Novice
Points: 6, 8, 10-13...

Level: REALLY TOUGH
Rank: Ace Pilot
Points: 84

Rank: Fighter Pilot
Points: 107

Crypts of Plumbous' official home at Atarimania

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