In this game you play the part of a cyan rectangle as I'm sure you may have already guessed by the game's title! Actually, that's a slight over simplification - you play a small rectangle with a couple of pixels sticking out the back of it. I'm not 100% sure what it is, but it looks like it may be a top down view of some sort of pick-up truck. You have to use QAOP keys to drive the truck around some twisty mountain roads and eventually enter a city in this flip-screen affair.
The game does have one good feature - the background terrain is quite superbly detailed with trees, rivers (even featuring a dam) and also some city roads and buildings, although the entire game is in monochromatic cyan and black with the sole exception of the red status line at the bottom of the screen.
The game is badly let down by the really awkward control system. Q=accelerate, A=decelerate, O=half turn left, P=half turn right. The discrete nature of the steering really hinders efforts to try to keep the truck on the narrow roads. One slip-up and "blam", back to the start of the screen again. But what really kills the game is the unresponsiveness of the keyboard. Only about half of the time will your keypresses be registered, unless you hold the keys down - and if you do that, the truck will steer a full 90 degrees instead of the intended 45 degrees, usually resulting in a crash.
There are thankfully cheat POKEs available for this one (currently at the tipshop) - but here's my cheat. Since the game is written mostly in BASIC, simply BREAK out of the game, delete line 4060 and RUN it again. You can then drive straight up the middle of each screen instead of around the tortuous roads and at least admire the considerable effort and skill that was put into the background graphics. I never normally cheat in any computer game as it undermines the whole point, but if you load this one up I think you'll completely agree why it is worth resorting to in this case. There's also a rather nice end of game sequence (Which can be viewed any time by loading the program called FINISHED off the tape. That does feature a huge sphere (albeit not a red one).
Other than that, I wouldn't recommend this game, without cheating it's a frustrating and overlong experience. Does exactly what it doesn't say on the tin.
Review by YOR on 17 Mar 2020 (Rating: 2)
This is not a good game but it's not as bad as I anticipated it would be. I didn't have as much control issues as Digital Prawn did but they were still a nuisance and it's just too slow and boring to get on board with, especially when you can't really go too fast or you'll crash. I like the idea but it's far from enjoyable.
1988 Martin Tosas Bautista (Spain)
I'm not sure if this game was written in Basic, but if it was the author did a good job.
This is not intended to revolutionize
the industry, obviously, no one is expecting that, and yes, it gets boring, specially if you are not a patient person, but for such a simple game, I must say again that the author did a good job of it.
