Searching For The Unknown
MADMIX GAME by Enrique Huerta, 2000

Written by Lachie Dazdarian

Introduction

Since MADMIX GAME is a pacman game allow me to say few things about QBasic pacman games first.

Pacman games were relatively popular in the QBasic game design scene but for most game designers pacman games were a part of their "learning" stage so majority of those games are not very interesting. I must mention the popular Hack-Man 2&3 by WisdomDude as two excellent QBasic pacman games and while I appreciate the effort and quality of those games they simply didn't appeal to me much. I should also mention Pac-Classic by Phillip Jay Cohen. While it featured scrolling and excellent retro design it came only with one level map. There is a whole bunch of other QBasic pacman games but none of them comes close to Hack-Man 2 or 3(the ones I've played, mind you). The only other QBasic pacman game that really caught my interest was MADMIX GAME and while it can't be compared with Hack-Man 2 or 3 in many aspects it has few interesting and original features that Hack-Man games don't.


About MADMIX GAME

MADMIX GAME is a very cool pacman game featuring scrolling and EGA(16 colors) graphics. While you may think that EGA graphics are a very limiting factor for the quality of the game's graphics you will notice from the screenshots that the designer managed himself quite well in 16 colors mode. The animations in the game are quite nice and vibrant and Enrique Huerta displays a very good sense for graphical design. I'm not saying that EGA graphics are the best choice for a pacman game but this game suffers very little because of that.


What you can also notice from the screenshots is that MADMIX GAME features a very small game screen which is about one third of the entire screen(320*200 screen resolution). I find such choice hard to understand since the game was released in 2000. But I don't know. MADMIX GAME is a pure QBasic game and it's possible that the designer had a slow PC when developing it. Anyway, it's a shame but not a huge flaw.

Like in any other pacman game your goal in MADMIX GAME is to eat all the balls within a specific stage and avoid the enemies(phantoms). Most stages feature few special "red face balls" which turn you into the angry pac when you eat them and while being the angry pac you can eat the phantoms.

MADMIX GAME comes with quite few original features that make it different for the hordes of other pacman games. The most important is the "circular scrolling". I don't know how else to name it. Basically, the stages don't have a visible vertical edge so if you travel in right or left direction as much it's possible you will end up on the same place. Just imagine that the stages are wrapped around a cylinder and you move around it. This is a really cool feature and I never saw anything similar in another QBasic game. This is executed perfectly and you never know where the real vertical edge of a stage is. Not any kind of position jump or jerking is visible when you move horizontally and pass over the invisible edge. Not that this thing is very difficult to code but Enrique Huerta took the trouble to implement it in a game and with a purpose in the gameplay. My compliments. Another original feature are "pac lane" balls, a set of balls you need to eat but with arrows which force you to follow them. So if you are approaching from the left to a pac lane ball with an left arrow by it you can't eat it. And if you get caught into a string of pac lane balls you better be sure than an enemy isn't around. Then there are these trap doors which can be passed only from one direction and every time you pass it in flips(toggle system). Trap doors a very nicely animated and only with 3 frames! There is also this bug enemy which replaces the balls you already ate. You can destroy the bug but only as the angry pac. All these features result in a quite different pacman game experience. The circular scrolling, the directional balls(pac lane) and the other features mentioned before are all very original and add depth in the classic pacman gameplay. I don't know how much I should praise Enrique Huerta for originality since I can't be sure if he copied the game concept from somewhere else. Still, nothing is said in the documentation.

MADMIX GAME features 15 very challenging stages(I've reached stage 7 or 8 barely after several tries), 3 tilesets and quite good enemy AI. The package also includes the level editor but it doesn't work on my PC(Window XP; mouse cursor won't appear). The game doesn't feature any sound or music. Actually, I've noticed looking in the source code that several SOUND statements were REMed. Probably for a good reason.

I should mention that the game probably has a serious bug. I can't be sure since I used cheating to discover it. Anyway, if I cheat and use stage skipping to reach stage 14 the game interrupts with an error. Huge minus!

Anyway, MADMIX GAME is a very addictive and challenging pacman game, the most entertaining QBasic pacman game I've played. But due the EGA graphics, small game screen, lack of sound and music and that bug it is far from the best QBasic pacman game ever made. Pity, because the game concept and the original features could have been exploited much better.

I will wrap this up now. A bit short article for me but nothing more needs to be said about this game. I know I've said this before for some other QBasic games too but MADMIX GAME is really a perfect game to remake in FreeBASIC. The entire gameplay is here. All you need is to redo the graphics, add some nice sound effects and music using FMOD and add a lot of polish if you want to release something above average. I'll refer to what Pete Berg wrote in the poll from QB Express issue #4 and Deleter in his "Game Apathy: Another Symptom Analyzed". If you most likely are not in the opportunity or on skill/experience level to work on an "epic" project what can help you to gain experience and fill you up with positive energy is a smaller or some medium project. Some project that will take about a month of hard work and if you get side-tracked at least you will be able to see that the completion is near and very reachable. But I have a strange feeling I'll be remaking MADMIX GAME sometime in the 2007. If George W. Bush doesn't destroy the world till then. :P

Final score
5/10

Get MADMIX GAME

To download MADMIX GAME click here: madmix.zip

I realized few weeks ago that I've concluded all the previous editions of the column with "that was it for this issue" or something similar so I won't do that this time. :P

I'm planning to feature Robot Plague in the next issue. It is probably the most weakest game in the gameplay department featured so far in the column but it's enough original and interesting in other aspects for me to write about it.