"Mosquito" by Mr. Slump (1985)

 

I ported a game to the TRS-80 MC-10 from for the NEC PC-6001. It was originally published in MICOM BASIC magazine 1985-01 (see above). This new version uses the SG6 graphic mode of the MC-10 rather than the higher res graphics of the original that can be seen in this pic:

My version looks like this:

Programs like this are fairly easy to port because although the images on screen look like graphical sprites they are in fact rendered using a "graphic character" module on the NEC PC.  I think that module is mostly for producing text on screen using Japanese characters, but it can also simply render Roman characters.  So underneath the apparent graphic game, the program is just printing and moving text characters on screen.  All I had to do was switch those characters to semi-graphic 6 characters to get a quasi low res graphic game for the MC-10 curtesy of the creative BASIC programmers for the popular NEC PC-6001 series (an intro 8-bit computer for many Japanese kids back in the early 80s).

You can see how the graphic character module actually allows characters to be printed overtop of each other in the original. For example, the player "sprayer" is actually just an uppercase V and an uppercase D overlaying each other.  I think the author felt it looked like some standard garden spray can, perhaps with a kind of handle.  But I had to render the player sprayer as a simple block with a nozzle sticking out to the left.  You can only shoot left.

The instructions published with the game were the following:

Press "s" to start the game. Move the spray can around with the arrow keys (on the MC-10 these are AWSZ and I used Greg Dionne's suggested key-polling peeks for better responsiveness and true 8 way motion through key combinations). Press spacebar to spray it. If the spray hits a mosquito it will die. If it hits the = that appear on the screen it will stop the spray. Kill enough mosquitos and the level will advance. If a mosquito touches your spray can it is game over, it’s also game over when you run out of spray. You start with 20 shots of it.

I found myself wishing that the game had more than 20 shots, or that there was some way to earn more shots than ones you start with.  But it would seem you are limited only to those 20 shots.  At my level of play I would normally get around 250.  It would be neat to know if other better video game players could score higher.

It's publication details are Micom Basic (マイコンBASIC) December 1985.

As usual it can be played online using an MC-10 emulator here (at least for a little while as I test the game and others do as well).  It's listed on the "Other 8-Bit BASIC Game Ports" menu item once you launch "the game" on GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/jgmc-10games/339292

Here's a vid playthrough: