Exile (BBC computer game)

Exile is a computer game for the Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, and related 8 bit Acorn computers. It was released in 1988 by Superior Software. It was considered at the time to be cutting edge and pushed the boundaries of what was possible on 8 bit platforms. more...

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Exile (BBC computer game)
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It remains probably the most complex game available for the BBC Micro.

Designed and programmed by Peter Irvin (who wrote Starship Command) and Jeremy Smith (author of Thrust), it was published by Superior Software and later ported to the Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga and CD32, all by Audiogenic. There were both OCS (1991) and AGA (1995) versions of Exile for the Amiga. Amiga Power magazine voted the OCS version to be the best game of 1991. The multi-format magazine Edge posthumously awarded it 10 out of 10, together with only 2 other games.

Story

The player takes the role of Mike Finn, a leading member of a space-exploration organisation called Columbus Force, who has been ordered to the planet Phoebus as part of a rescue mission. Finn is tasked with abetting Commander David Sprake and the surviving crew of the disabled Pericles ship from a psychotic scientist, Triax, who appears briefly at the very start of the game removing a vital piece of equipment called a Destinator from Mike's ship, the Perseus. As with Elite, a novella (written by Mark Cullen, with input from the game's authors) was included to set up the story, and to provide some clues as to the nature of the planet Phoebus' environment.

Game Mechanics

The game contains other characters to interact with as well as a physics model with gravity, inertia, mass, explosions, shockwaves, water, earth, wind, and fire. Energy is required to power the weapons and jetpack system, and needs to be collected throughout the game. Finn cannot die: when he reaches a point near death he is automatically teleported to safe locations previously reached and designated by the player, and ultimately back to his orbiting spaceship: consequently in many cases it is still possible to complete the game.

A major feature to this game is the enormous and detailed world it offered for exploration. This is achieved by generating the majority of the caverns and tunnels from a compact but highly tuned pseudorandom process - recreating the same world from the same seed each time - augmented with a few custom-defined areas. Exile's programming featured innovative routines like creature strategy code that knew about noises nearby, line-of-sight vision through the divaricate caves and tunnels, and enemy's memory of where the target was last seen, etc.

Hardware limitations

The standard 32 KB BBC Model B version used a specially defined screen resolution (8 physical colours; 128 pixels across × 128 lines down = 8 KB screen memory), smaller than full screen MODE 2. The purpose of this was to free up more RAM for the game data. This was a common technique in complex BBC games.

Read more at Wikipedia.org