Sweet! Great job on making another “Surprisingly Entertaining!”︎™︎ game! That was a clever way to decode the eight way input. Plus, you finally gave me a good reason to use the NUM key! I’d never tried it before and didn’t even know if it locked down or not. (It does, thank goodness.)
At first I didn’t like that while a bullet was moving, pressing keys didn’t seem to do anything, but once I figured out that you can bundle up a bunch of shots in the keyboard buffer, I loved it. I don’t think I could see playing the game any other way now. I also noticed that sometimes two aliens will overlap and you can see them flashing between their different types. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature, but it definitely makes the game harder. I think the only thing that would make it better would be if the Tandy 200 had a tactile bump on the center of the number pad so I don’t keep hitting the wrong numbers and getting eaten by aliens! —b9 P.S. Speaking of the NUM key, what do folks here think about NUM+GRPH? Has it ever been useful to you? I wonder if that TSR could be customized to do something else, like a hexadecimal converter. On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 6:45 PM David Plass <[email protected]> wrote: > Announcing yet another 10-line BASIC game: OCTOSIEGE! It's a fast-based > video game for the T200 inspired by Space Invaders, Robotron 2048 and > Tempest. > > https://github.com/dplassgit/games/tree/trunk/t100/octo > > "Defend the center from the invading aliens! You can fire from the center > in all 8 directions using the numeric keypad. An alien can take up to 3 > hits before it dies - but watch out - if any of them reach you in the > middle they'll decrease your shields! > > You only get TWO smartbombs, which kills all aliens instantly. Use them > wisely!" > > For Tandy 200 only. > > As always, bugs/comments/feedback welcome. >
