And the road, and the railway line, and the river…
Available to download now from !Store is a newly ported game for RISC OS called Infinite Bunner.
Brought to the platform by Jeroen Vermeulen, the conversion is from Python (using PyGame) to BBC BASIC (using the AMCOG Development Kit.
In the game, you control a ‘bunner’ – presumably some regional variation on bunny used to refer to rabbits (although looking it up reveals one or two alternative definitions) – and your objective is simply to keep said bunner alive and bounding ever on upwards.
That would be too easy, though – you just need an infinitely long field, but that’s not how computer games work! Instead, you must navigate the bunner past obstacles – planes logs, trains, and automobiles – that cross the screen horizontally as the screen continues to scroll vertically.
If you are too slow, and the bunner scrolls off the bottom of the screen, it’s game over – at that point an eagle will swoop down from off the top of the screen to enjoy a nice bunner-based meal. To prevent that from happening, you need to get the bunner across the roads and railway lines – avoiding the cars and trains – and across the rivers, using the logs. Get your timing wrong, then, and the bunner either gets squashed, or it falls in the water and drowns.
The game supports a number of control methods. For keyboard users the arrow keys, the ZX’/ or ADWS combinations all work, and if you’re running on a hardware platform that supports game controller pads, and you have a suitable pad, the ‘D-pad’ buttons work (though this facility is off by default).
The original version of this game – which is itself clearly based on the various ‘Frogger’ type games – was published as a ‘type-in listing’ in a recent publication from Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd as a nod to type-in listings and the benefits they bring to budding programmers, called Code the Classics volume 1. The book is a rather attractive looking 224 page volume that harks back to the type-in listings that regularly appeared in computer magazines of the 8-bit era (although some magazines still keep up the tradition today for more modern platforms).
Indeed, the Raspberry Pi blog post announcing the title a little over a year ago specifically name-checks The Micro User, amongst other titles, so there’s a nice round trip for long-time fans of Acorn and Acorn-derived platforms.
