Shoot'em Up! / Shoot'em Up! - Crosshair · 1983

Air Defense

Published by Compute! · Developed by [n/a]

atarimania.com — atari-400-800-xl-xe-games-air-defense-141

Information

Rating: 5.0/10 · Votes: 6 · Downloads: 1,975 · Hits: 6,957

Issue 35 dated April 1983.

Missing original BASIC file!

Akira808 — 6 May 2010
Ahh yes!! The trails and tribulations of typing in programs from magazines!! That bit of trivia sure brings back memories for me!! I had to go through the same thing on the Commodore 64 and the same thing happened!! Most of the time to distinguish between 0 and o is that the zero had a slash going right through it, so people wouldn't get confused. Programs started having checksums built in, which had a pre-determined total. If it didn't match, it would say so, and so it goes, LISTing the data statements to find the error!! Very frustrating and time consuming!!! I felt the same way like you did!!
eppy2000 — 20 Feb 2008
An okay game that borrows a concept from Missile Command, in which you defend the city from attack. The enemy plane continually drops bombs until you lose your entire city (which can take a LONG time!). All you do is aim your crosshair to detonate the bomb out of harm's way. It's written in part machine language, but it's still a bit clunky to play. As another early game I typed in, I learned that if you mistype even one bit of code in the DATA statements (all those numbers to execute the machine language code) it causes the game to crash before it will even run! I remember spending hours and hours proofreading my typing before I finally caught one little obscure "O" that should have been a "0" (zero!).