Clue Up On Co-ordinates

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In my youth I spent many an hour with pencil and squared paper playing battleships - trying to find where my brother had deployed his fleet and to sink them before he destroyed mine.

Chalksoft's Invisible Man is a variation on that theme, in which an in visible man is hidden somewhere in a grid.

You do not need squared paper and you don't need a brother!

As in the game of battleships, the object is to find the man as quickly as possible. If your guess is incorrect you are given a hint such as NW or S.

To increase the challenge you have only a limited amount of time to locate the man. Failure to find him is rewarded by: "Do you want another game?"

Success results in the sort of noise you associate with failure.

The program makes good use of colour and graphics, though a grid of either lines or dots would have been helpful. The program gets all the input and does not wait for Return to be pressed.

The Delete key does not erase the last character input but all of the current input string.

The hints which flash in a text window at the bottom of the screen tend to disappear just as I look down.

When tested in the classroom this program did help pupils to understand coordinates and I would recommend it, though it seems rather expensive.

John Lord