LADDER - Ascii Donkey Kong clone. Tough as balls.

TurnpikeLad

You are a lad trapped in a maze. Your mission is to explore the dark corridors never before seen by human eyes and find hidden treasures and riches.

You control the lad by typing the direction buttons and by jumping by typing SPACE. But beware of the falling rocks called Der rocks. You must also find and grasp the treasure (shown as $) BEFORE the bonus time runs out.

A new lad will be awarded for every 10,000 points. Extra points are awarded for touching the gold statues (shown as &). You will receive the bonus time points that are left when you have finished the level.

Remember, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Good luck lad.

LADDER is a text-based platformer developed for the Kaypro line of computers in the early 80s. The gameplay is loosely based on Donkey Kong. Rocks (o) fall from the sky and roll in random directions. You are a p when going right, a q when going left, and a g when standing still. You have to jump over them and proceed to the end of the level. Basic stuff.

Except that the rocks proceed randomly from the generators, and you have to pass dangerously close to them. And when you complete a level, you have to beat all the levels over again before reaching the next stage. And to beat the later levels, you have to rely on bouncers that push you in random directions.

This is a game that pretty much kills you randomly and forces you to repeat levels in endless tedium. But it's the first game I ever played, sitting in front of that 5 inch screen hitting the space bar with the palm of my clumsy two-year-old hands, and dammit if I'm not going to get you guys to play it.

Me and my dad, we got to Gang Land once, and it was like seeing the face of God. We never made it past that level. I'm sure you people will be able to beat it, but remember we had a response lag of about a quarter of a second.

Controls:

• Use your numpad.
• Tap left or right to start moving left or right. Tap 5 to stop.
• Tap up to go up the next ladder you come across, down to go down.
• Tap space bar to jump. If you're in the air, space bar will queue up a jump for when you land.

Set mode to HARD, or else you'll be either bored or overwhelmed. The difficulty level changes the speed, see.

For full KAYPRO experience, imagine the monitor ghosting behind your guy for like an inch, and the game taking about a quarter of a second to respond. And the screen being about exactly the size of the JAVA window.

Here's where to get it. It's a JAVA executable. http://ostermiller.org/ladder/download.html

And a screen shot, I guess:

V                  $                     
.                                                         H                     
                H                                        H                     
        ========H==================================================            
                H                                                              
                H                                                              
                H          H                             H                     
================H==========H==================   ========H=====================
                &          H                             H          |       |  
                                                         H         Easy Street 
                H                  .                     H                     
        ========H==========H=========  =======================                 
                H                                                              
                H                                                              
                H                        .               H                     
======================== ===================== =========H==============       
                                                         H                     
                                                         H                     
*    p                                                   H                    *
===============================================================================

Good luck lads!

PatboyX

I suck at this game.
Thanks for spoilering that picture - you should put a 56k warning in the title.

Trevor

Seems interesting, but it appears that either the site is down or I am clicking the link wrong.

Edit: Looks like it's up now.

TurnpikeLad

Maybe his server couldn't handle the huge flow of PA traffic.

Burtletoy

So getting a high score almost broke my computer.

TurnpikeLad

Wow. I'm really sorry. I've never had an issue like that.

Did it crash?

Burtletoy

It froze up for like 15 seconds, but the second time it worked fine. Level 2 Score 4977 (I was playing on Medium, whoops)

5669 on Hard!