Instructions

Guide your ship through six enemy zones and destroy the final base.

Hit red tanks to increase fuel.

Hit purple tanks to gain random points.

Once the task has been accomplished, a flag denoting a completed mission is posted at the bottom right of the screen, then the game will reboot and speed will increase.

Game Controls

5 - Left, 8 - Right, 0 - Fire

Default controls are compatible with a cursor-joystick:

Keyboard controls can be redefined through the "Setup Keys" menu.

Scoring

A Note From The Author

Long ago in 1981, Explorer was a clone of my favourite game, Scramble. Once upon a time, I'd seen an alternate vertical-scrolling version of Scramble on a TV show. I discovered, years later, that it was Atari's Caverns Of Mars.

Anyway, in 1989 I wrote a Basic version of the game, using the ZX Spectrum POKE 23692,0 to scroll vertically the whole screen. I actually never liked it, there was too much flickering and a lack of any gameplay info. It was in fact a crap release!

However, this version is a restoration of my classic game, and includes an Assembly routine to scroll the screen window. A new font has also been added (That of the original arcade!) along with a few nips and tucks here and there and ... here it is. It's still CHR$ movement-based so it's not particularly smooth, but I like how it plays.

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Game Credits

(c) 1989/2015 Luca Bordoni

A first release of this game was written in Basic in far 1989, known as Space Chase. It was a weak attempt to play a vertical clone of my favourite arcade game at the time.

In 2015 the code was totally rewritten and compiled with Boriel's ZX Basic (www.zxbasic.net), revisiting the graphics and bringing a bit of shine.

Special thanks to Chris Cowley for the start tune!

Dedicated to early-software enthusiasts.