THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE 3D ANT ATTACK PUBLISHER Quicksilva AUTHOR Sandy White YEAR 1983. CATEGORY Arcade DESCRIPTION 3D Ant Attack is an isometric 3D arcade game with a crap hi-score table. CONTROLS: Keyboard: Left,Right - M and SYMBOL SHIFT Forward - V Jump - C Fire Grenades - S, D, F or G (Each key throws grenade different distance) Change view - 0, P, ENTER and SPACE INSTRUCTIONS Rescue your partner from a city (Called Antescher, some of M.C.Escher's work was obviously an inspiration for a few of the buildings) infested with ants. Once you have chosen the gender of your character, the adventure begins. You have to find and rescue your partner (who is the opposite gender to your character), located somewhere in the (almost) deserted city of Antescher - There are lots of giant ants infesting the city. To rescue your partner you have to move near to him/her, this causes them to wake-up (temporary paralysis, courtesy of the ants), verbally show his/her gratidude, and then proceed to follow you as you move. The ants have other ideas, and will bite you if they come into contact. You can withstand 20 bites before succumbing their poison, and having to start again.... To aid you, there are a number of grenades on your presence, which you can use to defend yourself. Depending on your distance from the ants, you can throw the grenades varying distances. If you are not careful, you can run into grenades if thrown whilst running, thus rendering you incompatible with life and requiring a restart. Throwing them near a wall will make them roll up it, and down on you, with the same result. If you use up all your grenades, you can still paralyse the ants by jumping on their backs (Top tip - you will need to do this to mount the rescue in later levels, to act as a step..) There are not any lives, as such, just a time limit for each level, of which there are 10 levels with your partner being located in gradually more devious places. INLAY CARD TEXT [back cover] Battle the ants in the walled city of Antescher. Author: Sandy White. [inlay card - loading instructions omitted] QUICKSILVA - SOFTWARE FOR THE SINCLAIR SPECTRUM ANT ATTACK Softsolid 3D The Walled City of Antescher has rested for a thousand, thousand years in the midst of the Great Desert inhabited by only the deadly Ants who have made it their home. The sands have piled up at the walls but for some reason have never encroached upon the city proper. The City rests dreaming of past glories, solid and unmoving; the signature of a long dead race. The City washed clean by the sun's rays. The city lost from the world of men for days without number. Then one day, one year, one hour, He arrived and She arrived, some say that they are descended from a race of wizards, some say that they are descended from a race hidden in a green valley at the North Pole. Who can really tell these days, how much do we really know about the world as it was, or as it is, after so long in the cold Dark Ages. Only Antescher seems to stand inviolate after all this time, teeming with secrets, yet silent. He and She arrived to play their games through the wind-swept streets, ousting the ants from their exclusive occupation. He and She are now wreaking havoc through the ants who for their part kill and kill again without thought or consideration, just carrying out a biological imperative. He and She run to and fro, climbing in and out the buildings, the sound of their feet stretching from block to block. They laugh and cry out in fear walking with each other just ahead of the Ants and Death. And above all the drama within it's walls the City of Antescher watches and watches waiting for the next renaissance and the next Golden Age. The City seems to have a presence, a huge brooding entity which hangs over the buildings and which in some mysterious way controls the destiny of those below... Controls: Q, P, ENTER, SPACE - 4 view angles SYMBOL - Rotate SHIFT clockwise M - Rotate anti- clockwise V - Forewards C - Jump S D F G - Throw grenade Short-long distances 1 - Last resort, returns you to the city gate To climb onto something, press "move" and "jump" together. Scan indicates which direction to take to reach the girl or boy. URL ftp://ftp.dcc.uchile.cl/pub/OS/sinclair/snapshots/a/antattac.zip SEQUELS/PREQUELS A sequel, Zombie Zombie, was released in Christmas 1984; also set in Antescher, it used the same 'Softsolid 3D' look. SCORES RECEIVED This game was not reviewed in Crash, and not rated in YS. CHEAT Insert the following line after breaking into the program with Multiface, or similar: 62 POKE 45164,3:POKE 45165,238 Then RUN the program again, you should have unlimited time. GENERAL FACTS The following 'Anterview' was published in issue 2 of Your Spectrum (April 1984, p.50): THE ANTMAN COMETH Overseeing the ins and outs of our competition this issue, Sandy White found time to rap about the fame and fortune of being caught up on the front page of the software scene. Every now and then, the software market blossoms and an incredibly different hybrid evolves. Always, just when you think it's safe to banter about the banality of the current software selection on the high street shelves, something new comes along heralded by the fanfare of enthusiastic reviews from all and undry. Such a program was Quicksilva's Ant Attack. Or perhaps more in keeping with the recent trend towards the 'software uperstar', one should say Sandy White's Ant Attack. When asked about himself, Sandy modestly replied, "I'm hard to categorise really, but I do have a degree in sculpture." Indeed, Sandy is the first to admit surprise over the attention thrust upon him, for this time last year he was an unknown sculptor. After five years attendance at the Edinburgh College of Art, Sandy was happiest constructing electronic 'story-telling' gizmos which his lecturers were quick to tell him were not art! A little disheartened at his progress in the art world, Sandy borrowed a friend's Acorn Atom to "fiddle about with a few graphics routines". After experimenting in Basic and machine code, he was about to give up... when inspiration struck. Excited by the computer graphics simulations in Walt Disney's movie Tron, Sandy set about using the routines he had created to emulate some of the features included in the big screen on to his monitor. The knowledge to construct his soft-solid graphics certainly owed a lot to his college days. "I'd written big programs before, but Ant Attack was my first game - up until then all the software I'd written was linked to my work at college." Not being a follower of arcade fashions, Sandy started to approach the game proper at a slow pace - having bashed out the code for the soft-solid graphics routines in an incredible two-week period, he needed ideas on how to implement the results of his labours as a popular game. So, after looking at a selection of 3D games already on the market, "I went to a lot of people I knew were keen on games software, and asked them about the ones they enjoyed the most." It was at this stage that Sandy returned his friend's Atom and looked to the Spectrum's Z-80 to produce the miracles he had in mind. "The biggest problem with Ant Attack was making sure it was fast enough - some of the mathematical algorithms were really cumbersome. The game had to be fast enough to keep it reasonably exciting to play, while still maintaining the 3D aspects as well as could be allowed. Of course it's possible to do the most incredible 3D simulations on the Spectrum - as long as you're prepared to wait half an hour between moves!" Indeed, it was 15 weeks of solid programming before Sandy was happy with the game. His close friend, Angela Sutherland, did a lot of the formatting of the structure for the final product; she was responsible for most of Antescher's design and also the characters who act out the adventure. Completing the game was not, as one might suspect, the final hurdle in the game's development - for if Sandy knew little of the available games he had to compete with on the software market, he knew absolutely zilch about the methods by which an unknown could get software out on to the market. Where should he start? Difficult question... easy answer (or so he thought!). "Yes, it's true, I first sent a copy of Ant Attack in action on video tape to Sinclair Research," laughs Sandy. "And after a couple of weeks, I gave them a bell as I was really keen to see the game published by Christmas '83. A secretary there said she was sorry but they hadn't got a video tape machine - so they sent it back... unseen!" Following the brush-off from his self-confessed 'hero', Sandy was at a loss at what to do with his programming masterpiece. Psyching himself up, he placed a call to Quicksilva. "I phoned up Quicksilva," explained Sandy, "but I gathered fairly quickly that they've obviously got a lot of people phoning up and proclaiming that they've written the best game ever. The only thing to do was to go really over the top about the game and hope that they would listen. I ended up jumping up and down on the spot while explaining what I had done - and eventually they said they would have a look at my video tape. I was amazed at how difficult it was to get through to people - the only thing I can suggest to new programmers who think they've got something worth raving over is simply to rave about it yourself... and persist!" Following Quicksilva's inspection of the video tape, Sandy was on a plane to Southampton the next day to sign a contract. And at 23, Sandy is in the enviable position of having his first foray into commercial games-writing heralded by most reviewers as the 'program of the year'. Looking to the future, rest assured you've not heard the last of Sandy White. When YS spoke to him after the launch of Ant Attack, he happily chatted about his plans to write "a kind of adventure, not necessarily involving text - instead of entering a room and reading about the contents and typing out what you want to do, how about actually interacting with the room's contents in real time..." How about that indeed! However, on a recent trip to the YS offices, Sandy was coy about his plans for the future. Yes, they did include writing a new game, but no, he would rather not comment on the structure or design of the program. Could it be we're in for another classic... watch these pages for future developments. The magazine came with an A2 map of Antescher, with the designers' names for all of the buildings within its walls. The competition referred to in the introduction was to win over 1,000 pieces of software and just about every peripheral then available; a phone number to ring with the required answers was supposed to have been published in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, but it didn't appear in all editions, and there were complaints about not being able to get through on the phone. NOTES The game has a very disappointing front end, when first loaded looks very naff indeed - Beeps and coloured graphic blocks to greet you. First non-sexist game (?) (choose the sex of your character). Excellent, and fast 3D effect, called Soft Solid, which incidentally was developed on an Acorn Atom.