 Exile was a huge
game released in 1988, again for the BBC Micro, but I believe it was later
ported to Commodore 64 and Amiga. If you had to fit it into a genre, I
guess it would be a platformer. The story behind the game was that you
had been sent to find out what had happened to the crew of a spaceship
that had crash landed. On arrival, the main bad guy, Triax, teleports in
and out, taking an important component from your craft, thus preventing
you from leaving. A series of tunnels opens out below the stripped remains
of the marooned spacecraft, with no sign of the crew.
The exploration side
of the game appealed to me - just when you thought the playing area couldn't
get any bigger, you found another tunnel or managed to open a door that
led to a whole new section. The attention to detail also made the game.
All moveable objects were subject to gravity, bouncing and falling around
the game, or being blown by wind or blasts from explosions. Gunshots and
explosions provided a firework display of sparks. Items dropped into pools
of water splashed and bobbed up and down. The AI controlling the various
creatures and robots you met through the game was very well done. None
were too predictable or performed noticably wrong actions - problems which
still plague games today.
A curious feature of the game was that you were
never killed. If you were being badly hurt, you'd be automatically transported
back to wherever you'd previously designated as a teleport point, or back
to your ship if you hadn't set a location. The game would reach a point
where you couldn't continue, as your weapons and jetpack would run out
of power, so if you couldn't jump there you couldn't get there.
Another top game from a programming point of view. Storing the game
world map alone within the confines of BBC's 32K memory would be difficult
enough, but then you've got the screen memory, graphics and the actual
game code itself. They've definitely used some kind of magic for this one!
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