Atari 400 / 800 / XL / XE

My dad (Nigel) wrote this! 😅 Stephens Software being a nod to me (Stephen). So glad to know this little piece of software lives on! 👍

I have only now discovered this one and to my surprise, it's FUN!!! Not too easy, not too difficult (at least speaking from the first impressions), the controls are responsive and quite tight - and it seems more than OK as a game to try again and again.. Truly, a very pleasant find for me.

..also, the looping soundtrack is just an auditorial purgatory.

I was never a Spin Dizzy fan, but I could at least appreciate its controls and overall polish of that game. But this clone is just not good. The enemies are moving chaotically and way to swiftly, leaving the player with no chance to react meaningfully. The controls have this "anticipatory feeling", meaning, the player needs to perform the actions upfront a bit. And I have noticed, that on one particular screen, game's physics defies itself, rendering any movement from the starting position impossible. I have never managed to get more than 2 jewels, and frankly, the time spent to get those was a watsed one. This one's NOT a good game.

Very difficult to complete as a human, only a bot can beat it I think. Did a TAS run of the game using some modern tools, think it came out ok ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDr8BRdCi-Q

I have this on cassette. No system to test it on though.

Author here. I believe this to be the first 8-bit game with all (or nearly all) of the football players names inside for the league. All other games reused about 20 players names. It took 2 summer holidays to write this at the age of 17, released at the age of 18 to the Dean Garraghty PD collection at an All Micros Show in Stafford, England. I started coding a new version, all in 6502 in around 2020, but had to stop it due to time issues and other projects. Enjoy the game!

Does anybody have information about this mysterious publisher?

Does anybody have information about this mysterious publisher?

Latest version is actually 2.00 now and available at https://forums.atariage.com/topic/389640-experiments-with-claude-invaders/