syntax#1

Bridge-It
Right, I’ll cut to the chase,
the upside of the game is
that the graphics look nice
and colourful… The
downside is, Bridge-It is
actually a game where the
whole point of it is to put
it’s cassette in the tape
deck, load it up, realise in
about 40 seconds its a pile
of crap, reset your
Amstrad, take the tape
out and sellotape over the
recording holes on top of
the cassette and save
something decent on it,
like maybe the following
BASIC program
10 PRINT “Hello There”
20 GOTO 10
Was shite… Still shite!!! :P
Easi-Amsword
The only serious
application in the pack,
and as you can guess, its a
word processor. I’ll be
honest, I never used it, I
loaded it up, created a new
document, typed some
text, reset the CPC and
loaded up a game. I can’t
comment on how good this
was, it was just there. In
later years though, like
years and years, I did use a
one called Protext in
conjunction with Maxam (A
Z80 assembler), and that
was really good. And as
another little fact,
LibreWriter, which is the
well known open source
word processor I’m writing
this on, has roots to the
Amstrad CPC as another
Amstrad word processor
called Star-Writer is an
ancestor of it… You learn
something new every day!
;)
71
Fruit Machine
You may think the image is a screenie from NBA
2K20, but, alas, you’ll be wrong. This is Fruit
Machine, and it was actually a bit of a favourite in
my house, especially for me mam, lol, I’d get in
from school and noticed she’s had the tape in the
Amstrad, bless her, she likes a little gamble and all
that, bingo and what not. And yeah, you won no
actual money obviously, but, as a fruit machine
game, it was good, really good. You had the lot in there,
holds, nudges, gambles and winspins.
The visuals were decent enough for a bandit game, but
what drove it was the sound
effects… From the clunk clunk clunk
of the reels, the exciting loop of the
gamble feature, with rising pitch
when you got further and further up
the gambling ladder, to the all out
mental mode your CPC went into
when you dropped the jackpot…
The sound setup was really clever if
you ask me. I’ve never known the
jackpot drop in straight off a spin,
usually that could only be won by
either nudges or gambles. When it
came to nudges,
you could cheat
a little as the
fruit order on
each reel was
inside the tape cover, sneaky! It was
all packaged together nice and a good
bit of fun for literally everyone, oh,
and no micro transactions needed to
play it either! :P
Do I still play this… Of course I do.
There’s something quite therapeutic
getting the jackpot and watching your
CPC go into an all out seizure! ;)
And there we go… The whole round-up, what a ride it was, and it was nice revisiting these
games/apps, especially the ones I haven't touched for, well, 32 years! Even them brought a nice
feeling of nostalgia now looking back at them, which is nice. All in all this was a great collection of
free software for users to start off with on the CPC, there can be no complaints at all really, apart
from Bridge-It, lol, can you tell I truly hate that game or what! :D
So with that, I thank you for reading my little piece here, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did
writing it… Tara for now! :) Dabz