That's a game written in basic called desert.bas. I played that game and
won it once.
On Wed, 27 Jan 2021, Nathaniel Schmidt wrote:
Hi all,
Not sure whether some of you may remember a game from within the last decade
or two (probably the latter) called Camel. According to Louis Bryant, it
was an old MS-Dos console game although I can't find any online sources on
this at least. The object of the game was to successfully ride your camel
through the desert without dying. You had a select number of drinks in your
canteen, a certain of number of days you could travel without resting and a
certain number of commands / moves before you had to stop to drink or take a
rest. There were also other obstacles to overcome such as sandstorms and in
the original game, you were being chased by a bunch of pigmies who were
basically portrayed as cannibals who would eat you if you got caught.
It was ported to the BrailleNote Classic / mPower in the course of time but
almost went out of existence when BrailleSoft went off the grid. There is
an old copy of it on the audio games archive but I have no idea if it even
works any more and the AGA website is not really liked very much by some
good-quality antivirus software solutions anyway which is rather annoying
and arguably a little suspicious. The game code on the website for the
programming language the game was written in also does not compile properly
when you invoke the language compiler, which is also a bit of a bummer.
So if anyone is interested, I have attempted to re-write the game,
translating it from Rapid Euphoria to Python which means that it is now
cross-platform and will run on Windows, Mac and Linux. I hope that this
will provide an easier (and much safer) means of obtaining the game if
people want it. Sorry if this bursts anyone's bubble but I should probably
point out that I have changed all potentially racist references to Pigmies
and Berbers, replacing them with more ecologically appropriate options such
as ravenous hyenas and general references to crazy kidnappers. Potentially,
the reference to pigmies in particular could be partially justified if it
was supposed to be a reference to Greek-mythological characters but I'm
pretty sure it is meant to be a reference to the actual Ethiopian ethnic
minority. I also removed the reference to the Gobi Desert which, as an
Asiatic reference, carelessly does not even correlate with the two-fold
African ethnic references the game used to have anyway and is simply an
excuse to have fun at others' expense.
The game still needs a bit of work. At the moment I think it is way too
slow-paced and makes it not as interesting. It takes too long to get to the
25-30 mile maximum limit where the hyenas start chasing you and bad stuff
happens too often which means that you die too easily. I am actually not
sure yet as to whether my rendition of the game makes it mathematically
possible to win the game. But if anyone would like to test it out, I would
be happy to hear any suggestions you may have to offer.
The Alpha pre-release of version 1.0 can be found at the following link -
just download the zip archive, extract all the files in the contained
folder, keep the files in the same location when extracting and then run the
file camel.exe. If you get a pop-up blocker from Windows smart screen then
just press enter or space on "more options / actions" and then activate "run
anyway".
https://github.com/njsch/camel/files/5879037/camel.zip
If you don't trust me with unsigned binaries and are worried about
unsolicited content, you can always run the program straight from source -
all code is in one file:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/njsch/camel/main/camel.py
Enjoy.
Regards,
Nathaniel
========================================
Nathaniel Schmidt
Undergraduate student
Bachelor of Computer Science (S306)
School of Information Technology
Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment
Deakin University, Melbourne (Burwood) campus
https://sync.deakin.edu.au/profiles/student/njschmidt/
E: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/njsch/
GitHub: https://github.com/njsch/
Skype: nathaniel_schmidt1994
about.me/njschmidt/ <https://about.me/njschmidt/>
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