"Kagelien" from Micom BASIC Magazine Aug 1985

 Beware the "ShadowAlien!"

The following is what came out of Google translate when I downloaded and translated the Readme file that came with a program called "multi-game" for the NEC PC6001:

5. KAGERIEN (instructions)
Move yourself in 4 directions with the cursor keys so that you do not hit an enemy or a bomb (*).
Please take all the unpleasant. Enemies and bombs are displayed only on the left screen, and diamonds are displayed only on the right screen. It will not be. If you press the space key when the score is 100 points or more, you will lose 100 points and the enemy's movement
You can pause it. When the score reaches 500 points, one person increases, and after that, 1,000 points. One person will be added each time. In addition, there is a time limit for each surface, and even if this becomes 0, the number of people will decrease by one.
I will. When all of you die, the game is over. 

Restart
In any game, if you press the space key, you can play the same game and return.
Press the key to return to the menu screen.

At the end
At first, I intended to make everything original, but in the end, more than half were transplanted.

It has become. Next, I challenged the limits of N60BASIC !? Send the game I would like.

Reference
Micon BASIC Magazine August 1985 issue JR-100 "Four-handed Kannon" God Warriors, MSX
"KAGERIEN" Hiroshi Uwasawa, July 1987 issue Family computer "Rurumoppe"
Scramble Uko, February 1988 issue PC-8001 "Yanmo STONE" Minoru Yamamoto

<< Table 1 >> Main variables
S ..... Score
T ...... Time, number of times
R ...... Number of faces
X, Y .... Coordinates of the main character
V, W .... Move destination, move direction
I, J .... Loop
A$, D$, A, B. General purpose

My attempt to clean up these instructions resulted in this:

Use WASD keys to avoid enemy "@" or bombs "*", which are displayed only on the left side of the screen. Collect "$"s on the right side. When score is 100, pressing space clears bombs. 500 points = bonus man and after that, 1000 points is needed. There is a time limit for each round. You lose a life if you exceed it.

From what I can gather from the information provided in the Readme file, the game was originally made for MSX computers and published in Micom BASIC Magazine August 1985 (p. 83) under the name "Kagelien.  I think this was a combination of some Japanese word with "alien" since you can see the English word "alien" in the text and the MSX version uses a sprite that is clearly meant to represent an alien figure. The game seems to have been translated in 1988 to the NEC PC6001 and combined with 3 other programs to create the "Multi-game" program.  In the course of that translation the program seems to have been renamed "Kagerien" for reasons that escape me (or this might just be a tanslation error from the Japanese text file encoding). I separated the source for "Kagerien" from the other programs and renamed my version back to "Kagelien." I added a title page reference to the original 1985 Micom BASIC article, since I wanted to credit the original author of the game. However, that author's name is not apparent in the article.  Perhaps I will have my son Charlie try to decipher it from the Japanese characters.  He might also be able to provide something of the back story.

The game is very clever in its use of a split screen to provide greater tension and difficulty in what otherwise would be a relatively "slow BASIC game," although I did manage to speed it up to a point that I could add 3 levels of play using a slowdown loop. The necessity of having to split one's attention between two different screens means that despite the relatively slow movement of the enemy, you can easily become distracted and allow yourself to be killed.  The sound is minimal, but there must be something about the Japanese education system that produces a good level of basic musical awareness.  Most Japanese games I have translated don't just use indiscriminately selected sounds to indicate major in-game events, but always melodic tones.

Here is a video of the game before I renamed the program:

Charlie's Note:

I'm gonna guess the author's name is those 3 characters floating as a pair and a single up in the top left grey patterned area, 上沢   裕. According to https://culturetour.net/japanese-last-names/uesawa4557 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka that's probably pronounced Uesawa Yutaka.

Uesawa(上沢) Japanese Last Name Meaning and Origins

Then that top left paragraph has the backstory: "in XXXX year, a certain astronomer discovered a star covered in diamonds, XX star (Japanese sci-fi is really big on these blanked out names/dates for its settings). A <something> was sent to the planet (probe, mission, colony?). Doctor D, the man who 'developed' the <something> (this word is used in the sense of software, but also of a nation. It might just mean he just develops i.e. works at a facility on the planet?), even though he had a map that could see anything, somehow there was... a shadowy ('KAGE', this is where the name must come from) gorilla-like alien...!"

I wish I could figure out that <something> character. It's a complex character that comes out blurry in the scan.

Addendum to addendum:

Or yea, that something is you. I see that now in the next paragraph. So whatever you are; a robot?

PLAY

The game can be played here under the "Classic 8-bit BASIC games" menu item:

https://gamejolt.com/games/jgmc-10games/339292