Nuclear Tomatoes

Nuclear Tomatoes





David Green,


Ashford,


Kent.





This is a fast machine code game for the Spectrum with


weird sound effects but, most importantly, it is not very


long. You should be able to type in the 1K of machine code


within an hour without suffering any ill effects on your


eyesight. [Well, should be... had not the magazine page


scans been of such execrable quality. I had to debug the


disassembly to get it to work. I _think_ I've got all the


bugs out, and it certainly seems to run fine on both 48K


and 16K emulated Spectrum, but...]


The game itself is based around the utterly ludicrous


premise that by the end of the 20th century, the main


source of atomic power will be the heavy element Spectrum


428, found in very small quantities in tomatoes. Unfortu-


nately, by this time a few small genetic engineering errors


have made all vegetables considerably more intelligent than


they were before, and the following speech, made by the


leading vegetable rights campaigner Heinz Tomato, shows


some of the problems caused by this:


"Friends, tomatoes and other vegetables, lend me your


ears, for I have come to bury these humans, not to braise


them. After all, some men are born tomatoes, some achieve


tomatoes, and some have tomatoes thrust upon them. Whether


'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of


outrageous fortune, or 'tis better to stay at home and


watch the television? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If


you poison us, do we not die? And if you put us in the fuel


cores of nuclear reactors, shall we not jump up and down a


lot and make them explode?


"We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in


the frozen food department of Marks and Spencers, we will


fight them in large square buildings belonging to the CEGB,


we will fight them in the cracks in the pavement, and


future generations will remember us, and say: 'Never in the


field of vegetable conflict was so much owed by so many to


a bunch of tomatoes'. Or something like that, anyway."


Your job is therefore to move the boron blocks in the


nuclear reactor up and down to absorb the fanatical toma-


toes, since if too many of them hit the unshielded walls on


the left and right, the reactor's temperature will get so


high that it will melt down, and you should obviously try


to prevent this sort of thing.