REPTON INFINITY
■ Repton was the most successful game series to appear on Acorn machines, with combined sales of more than 125,000. Or so Superior claimed, but it sounds genuine, as every BBC Micro or Electron user under the sun surely owned at least one Repton game, right? So the question was: with Repton Infinity being the fourth mainline entry, and the seventh overall, did we really need another? Especially as Repton 3 included a screen editor, so fans could create their own levels ad infinitum.
Happily, Repton Infinity wasn’t just another Repton game – it was actually a broad game-creation tool. You could still design your own screens, as in Repton 3, but you could now use the built-in scripting language, REPTOL, to determine the rules and logic, and effectively create your own games. According to the authors David Lawrence and David Acton, it was possible to create versions of Pac-man, Frogger and even
Space Invaders.
To demonstrate its capabilities, four ready-to-play games were included in the package. First up was a version of Repton 3, to prove that you could recreate that game using REPTOL. Then there was
Repton 4, a brand-new adventure in the classic mould but with extra features (see the annotated In Depth screen for a closer look). Finally, there were two titles which showed off the scope of games that could be created. Robbo saw you playing a robot who must complete a series of illogical puzzles, while in Trakker you controlled a mini bulldozer tasked with defeating various nasties (and even our old friend Repton). These games gave you a taste of what could be created, with the onus on the user to let loose their creativity.
You could run Repton Infinity on a Model B and Electron – and we should thank Superior for catering for its core market – but it really wasn’t recommended. The package featured five components (the main program, game editor, screen editor, sprite editor and file linker), plus all the data. If you had it on tape you’d be forever searching for the file you needed, forwarding and rewinding until your fingers bled. Disk was better but still not ideal. On the enhanced BBC Master version, however, all of the editors resided in memory, which meant that the shackles were off. Even the authors doubted
the worth of the 32K versions, writing in a missive hidden on the disk that the Master version was, “Quite honestly the only sensible version of the game; can you imagine what it’s like having to load the editors and data in at 1,200 baud?” We didn’t need to imagine. The Master version was also available on tape and it took 12 minutes to load everything in.
Where the Master hardware couldn’t help was with the performance of the game engine, as the processor speed was still clocked at 2MHZ. As such, the version of Repton 3 included in Repton Infinity ran noticeably slower than the standalone
Repton 3. This was unfortunate, but didn’t take the shine off one of the most impressive and ambitious titles ever released for the Beeb.