This has been written for people with little programming knowledge to help them create their own arcade games. There is also a listing for an adventure game and character generator.

The main control loop for an arcade game is listed. After typing this in you enter the procedures used.

Here you have a choice of several different versions of each procedure, all with the same line numbers and all of which work with the main control loop.

There are seven different backgrounds, 13 different aliens, 15 different players and various checking and scoring routines. You just choose which one you want and type it in.

As you can imagine, quite a large variety of games can be produced. The games look quite reasonable, but are incredibly slow. I fell asleep three times playing the example! This is a simple space invader type of game with just one invader. It takes well over a minute for your laser base to crawl from one side of the screen to the other.

The book is valuable in that it teaches how to structure games programs, explaining every procedure in detail, but the arcade games themselves are not really playable as they are so slow.

A reasonably good programming book, but not suitable if you want to play some fast arcade games.

Roland Waddilove