First of all let me say that this game should be commended as the efforts of a lone 16-year old bedroom coder in 1983. For that era, the graphics are what you'd expect with use of the DRAW command, UDGs and liberal amounts of colour. There's even a simple implementation of parallax scrolling. Whilst this is essentially a BASIC game, the sound effects are at least written in machine code and sound pretty good too. Clearly the programmer/designer was talented and whilst this may not be the most original game ever written - it does at least show that a potentially impressive BASIC game could be developed by a single coder on an 8-bit system. Presumably the author went on to better things in the future, but I'm purely speculating.
So, why the low score? Well, I just can't actually play it. It could be that I'm doing something wrong, but having the keys displayed on the intro screen would have really helped, as I spent some time fumbling around just guessing what the keys are. Alas, the only way I could infer the needed keys was by looking at the BASIC source, and even then I'm not sure I'm 100% right as the IN command is used, rather than INKEY$. That of course is a good thing, as it allows multiple simultaneous keypresses, however, the program compares the values of the IN function with the literal value of 255.
As we know nowadays with later speccy models etc.. (perhaps not so in 1983), this method of keyboard reading is likely to be problematic since the EAR bit has not been masked off from the read port value, meaning the keys could be unresponsive or behave erratically. Admittedly, I've no real right to complain myself since I've used similar code in one-liner programs where space is really tight (with a disclaimer and instructions of how to fix it). But in the case of BoH, I think it has rendered the game unplayable and I can't be bothered going through the code locating and changing instances of '255' to '191' which could possibly fix it. So on starting a new game, I just see a jumbled mess of UDG explosions, line-drawn laser beams and my craft moving left and right seemingly randomly. Actually I can't quite tell if I'm controlling the craft or not. I think I'm partially controlling it, but usually end up dead after a little while. Same thing happens if I use issue 2 or issue 3 keyboard emulation.
My other slight gripe is that the game asks a couple of INPUT questions at the beginning like difficulty level and "TIME (100^)". Not sure what it means exactly, but I'd rather bypass them and just play with the defaults. As the game doesn't (for me anyway) last that long, it would have been better to have had an optional menu instead if needed, rather than having to keep entering values each time a new game is started.
Since the game only seems to load 168 bytes into the top 32K of RAM and the remaining 99% of it is in lower RAM, I also have to ponder if this really shouldn't be a 16K release, rather than needing 48K? Unless there's a huge DIM statement in there that I've missed or something, it should be runnable on a 16K system with some minor changes I would have thought? The main BASIC listing is only approx 7K and even the sound effects run in contended RAM in this version and it sounds fine. In 1983 I would suggest that squeezing the game into a 16K system would have been beneficial to some people, but perhaps I have overlooked a possible reason why this wasn't done.
Despite all this though, if you do manage to see the UDG-based AT-AT walk onto the screen, then that's mildly impressive for a BASIC game. If nothing else, this type-in may have shifted a few magazines back in '83 thanks to all the Star Wars related mania of the time.
But trufthully, you'll be yearning for sheer speed and smoothness of "The Empire Strikes Back" on the Atari 2600, which is directly equivalent to this game although machine-coded and was presumably an official tie-in. Not that it matters, I don't think the word "Hoth" could ever be copyrighted anyway, being a German surname and all.
