All my life I have had a passion for creating games. Right from the very first moment I held a Gameboy I remember questioning, how does it work? How can I change it? How can I make my own, better games?
This was a long long time before Kousou Games, and in fact a long time before I had home internet. Asking around I managed to acquire an old 386 computer with QBasic.
Words cannot describe the power rush I felt the first time I got my very first text-based game to run. It was made using the only commands I knew: INPUT, IF, THEN, ELSE, GOTO and PRINT. A surprisingly expansive game can be made from these simple building blocks.
I hate computers, I hate operating systems and I especially hate bloated software. I have always hated trying to get a machine to do what you want and failing due to poor design. It clashes with my control-freak nature. Yet here, in programming, I had found control. Raw, blistering power that did exactly what you asked for. I was hooked.
Of course if the program won't run, it's your fault, and no one else's.
I can remember crying at my desk, eight years old, begging for an answer to why my code didn't work. Without the internet, I was alone.
But I did not give up. And the persistence eventually started to pay off. Upon adding SCREEN and LINE to my arsenal, having carefully studied a peeling old library book, graphics erupted from my scriptings and after working out how to use INKEY$ correctly, I had the framework in place for truly brilliant creations.
I did not know how to read in bitmaps, so every single sprite was traced out from Paint using line functions (mspaint running in windows 3.1 of course). I had yet to learn far more important and general lessons regarding ambition and pacing oneself though, and all the quarter-finished games I reeled out amounted to nothing but the experience from making them. Then, when the 386 departed this world, so did most of my hard work, and the QBasic story ends there.
There is however one game which carried on, for not only did I finish it but I was so proud of it that I shared it with my school friends on a floppy disk. It is from that disk that I recovered a copy of the game a few years ago, and delightedly ran it in DOSBox on my phone.
So on to the present day, when I chanced upon this javascript qbasic interpreter, and the thought of sharing my early creation with the web world boiled up. Unfortunately it wasn't up to the task, lacking the graphical functions of QB4.5. I set to work on my own QBasic interpreter, but soon became distracted. But the enthusiasm remained! Not wanting to leave readers short-changed I have ported that one QBasic game, Sissy Fighters, into Javascript. Here, today, in-browser, you can experience a glimpse of my childhood.
Do bear in mind that I was twelve years old when I wrote it.
If your browser supports it, you can click for fullscreen.
Yep, two players, nine levels, remote bombs and an annoying mash-the-keyboard movement system (I didn't know how to recognise simultaneous keypresses). Interestingly, I had completely abandoned GOTO for GOSUB when this was originally written. I'm not sure if a book or someone else had told me not to use GOTO, but it does mean that 90% of translating this into JS was just search-and-replace. I have tried to be as honest as possible, resisting the subconscious urges to correct mistakes and to optimize.
I know this whole thing doesn't mean much to anyone other than me. But seeing that pixelated font again brought back a lot of memories. I am tempted to create something new in a retro QBasic style. Any suggestions?
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