Good King Zurp

Collect the ingredients you need to create a super spaghetti sauce in this crazey BASIC game. Good King Zurp will work on any 8-bit Atari computer with at least 24K memory, with disk or cassette, and your trusty joystick.

Good King Zurp, son of Better King Xorpfgh, was a powerful, despotic figure in the land of Xjigqh, where they do everything the same as they do here except that they eat gelatin with chopsticks.

During the reign of Xorpfgh, the people of Xjigqh lived happy, prosperous lives, growing breadfruit and hiring themselves out as ballasts for the glowering Foon People across the Thplj River.

Good King Zurp ascended to the throne of Xjigqh when Better King Xorpfgh met an unfortunate end while stooping to pick a flower from a hostile grootlebush. Many suspected foul play, but everybody knew that Zurp couldn't possibly have masterminded any plan that required any type of native intelligence.

Zurp's first official act was to build--no, that's not right, his first official act was to legalize pouring beet syrup over your head and boiling grubs in mayonnaise and rutabaga oil. His second official act was to build a vast empire of financial wealth by hiring out his serfs as fruits and vegetables in traveling nutrional morality plays.

But unsurprisingly, hordes of toothpick craftsmen eventually overthrew Good King Zurp by disabling the palace guards, storming the king's rumpus room and overturning Zurp's pool table--with Zurp underneath, also thereby turning Zurp into a flapjack-like entity.

Zurp left Xjigqh reluctantly (and with constant neuralgia) for the sunnier pastures of Floobgrute, where he became the town's most popular rickshaw operator, but not before building his famous Horror Pits.

NOW TO THE GAME

The leader of the insurgents, one Ftjorjt "The Mad Whacko Strange Person" Lipsko, also met an unfortunate demise when he competed in a polo championship but forgot his pony. His will stipulated that the new ruler of Xjigqh would be that man, woman, child or similar creature that could develop a nationally accepted spaghetti recipe. As luck would have it, buried in Zurp's Horror Pits are hundreds of valuable things, mostly on the order of ingredients necessary for a really good meat sauce for pasta. Your job, would-be despot, is to root through these horrid, gloppy areas for gold nuggets in the form of packages of noodles, containers full of seasonings such as pepper, and cloves of garlic.

If you're lucky--that is, if you survive long enough to tromp through enough pits--you might chance upon some packages of really terrific tortellini, which almost assuredly would put you in the winner's circle.

This sounds easy enough, but this is no mere scavenger hunt, oh, no! No, you've got to avoid poisoned colanders (sometimes called "culenders") and elude horrid, oversized maggots which will cover bits of you with an unpleasant substance--and if you're covered completely, you'll suffocate, which is to say the game will end rather abruptly and tell you that you failed miserably.

Each screen gives you 75 seconds to grab as much as you can before advancing to the next screen. Your score, the time remaining and the number of lives left--you start with nine--are all displayed at the top of the screen.

GETTING STARTED

Type in Listing 1, PASTA.BAS, check it with TYPO II, and be sure to SAVE a copy to disk before you RUN it.

A title screen will appear, followed shortly by a list of objects and their point values. Press [START] to begin. Once the playing field is set up, simply move the joystick to direct your character towards the valuable items--but watch out for those maggots and colanders!

VALUES

Here's how much each ingredient is worth:
Packets of pasta (fettucini, spaghetti, vermicelli, sometimes gnocchi) : 100
Packets of seasoning (including pepper, oregano and, for some reason, dried horseradish): 250
Garlic Cloves: 500
Packets of special pasta (tortellini, tortelloni, ravioli, sometimes agnolotti): 5,000
Pesto sauce: 0 (there isn't any)
Maggots: you die
Colanders (cullenders): you die

BONUS SCREENS

Every fourth screen is a bonus screen filled with rows of groaning colanders. Packets of pork-filled tortellini or spinach ravioli will appear randomly--and very briefly-- onscreen. You must grab one before it disappears and pops up elsewhere.

If you've garnered over 60,000 points, first of all you should have a heck of a sauce recipe, but a nasty maggot will accompany you on the Bonus screens.

In order to get the bonus you must sucessfully grab three pasta packets without touching any colanders or maggots. If you fail, you go bonusless and advance to the next screen. If you succeed, however before heading on to the next screen you'll be given a random amount of points between 1,000 and 10,000.

The game gets tougher,as your score increases. There'll be more colanders, more maggots and more spice packets and garlic cloves to grab. If you have over 50,000 points, the special pasta may appear on the playing field. If your score exceeds 100,000, the playfield will flash different colors, making it harder to concentrate.

STRATEGY TIP

Maggots tend to dissolve colanders in both the regular playfield as well as in the bonus playfield. Nobody knows why. Fool them into passing over the colanders to dissolve them.

Frank Martone is a student at Suffolk Community College on Long Island, New York. This is his first appearance in Antic and the editors apologize for the drastic rewrite of his original scenario.

Listing: PASTA.BAS Download