Loadstar 245/245.d81/t.phobia

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             P H O B I A
             For the C-64
          By Cleve Blakemore


    No one forced you to enter the
Reality Institute. You volunteered of
your own free will. You were curious
to run what you had heard called the
"Ultimate Obstacle Course," a
nigh-lethal challenge of both mind and
body, an elemental test of the
lifeforce itself.

    Even after getting over the pits
of deadly chemicals and past the laser
fire from the security system, you
will have to answer questions
requiring such tremendous self-
introspection and judgment that they
dwarf any test you have ever taken in
your life. Worst of all, you must
answer these questions before the
moving wall behind you crushes you
into pulp.

    Anybody can go in. But can anybody
come out?

    I wrote Phobia for five specific
reasons:

  1. To do another offbeat game that
     would surpass Teleporter (Nov.
     '86) in originality. I wanted to
     do a game that would test
     left/right brain coordination the
     way Teleporter tested intuition.

  2. To satisfy our friends over at
     INFO Magazine who have been
     clamoring for more good all-BASIC
     games from the computer
     magazines, rather than just
     machine language listings which
     don't teach.

  3. To finally demonstrate the nature
     of left-right brain interaction,
     and create a game that would test
     not just a person's knowledge but
     his actual ability to THINK (and
     under pressure at that).

  4. I had just finished Masters of
     Darkness, a new short Story
     collection from Tor Books, and
     was so enthralled with Fritz
     Leiber's Black Corridor that I
     just had to write a computer game
     with this wonderful short as
     inspiration.

  5. I was curious to see if I could
     do a really worthwhile arcade
     game in BASIC 2.0. I have never
     done an action game completely
     without machine language before
     for Ahoy!, and I had a handful of
     really keen tricks for speed
     running around inside my head.
     After seeing Hanger 14 in the
     Jan. '87 issue, I suspected you
     could do quite a bit of animation
     without a whit of object code, if
     you really used your noggin.
     Congratulations to author Justin
     Luton for his terrific demo of a
     BASIC arcade game without ML.

    The game uses Port 2 for joystick
control. The left and right directions
move your man back and forth, the fire
button allows him to jump, and the up
and down motion of the joystick
permits you to choose between the two
categories of ideas displayed on the
giant computer screens overhead.

    Your simple objective is to
survive the Reality Corridor, a narrow
tunnel filled with trenches of noxious
chemicals and rapid laser fire from
ahead. The wall to your rear is
constantly sliding forward,
threatening to crush you to death
against the wall ahead. If you stand
in place, the trailing wall will push
you into the barrier, or over into one
of the pits. You must keep moving!

    The laser fire will incinerate you
if it hits you. Press the fire button
and leap over these photon lances when
they approach.

    Before you reach the door at the
end of the corridor, you must choose
between the two concepts displayed
above. Moving the joystick up or down
will illuminate the lights on the
panels beside the screens, with the
positive choice in green and the
negative choice in red. until you make
a choice, the wall in front of you
will not budge, and you can't go
through it.

    If you make an incorrect choice,
contact with the barrier in front of
you will activate a current in the
floor beneath and electrocute you. But
if you choose wisely, the wall will
hum briefly and grind forward away
from you into the next room,
permitting you to exit the corridor
safely and enter the next one.

    There are nine corridor sections
to traverse. As of this writing, I
have made it past the ninth level and
graduated from the Reality Institute
only once. (And I know all the answers
to the questions, too!) The ninth
level requires split second timing and
instantaneous reaction to survive.

    I would like to go into detail on
the questions, but it would spoil
everything. Instead, I'll only
describe them as similar to Zen koans,
questions put to eastern students of
Taoism in order to test their true
capacity to think and comprehend, and
to draw their minds into the here and
now, rather than drifting off in
waking dreams.

    You must choose the option from
which you have less to fear. In other
words, if you are asked to choose
between Fire and Water, you would
choose Water, since you might survive
being submerged, but you would not
survive burning. All the questions in
the game concern your choice of
survival option, and you must make
your decision accordingly. The game
gives a good indication of how close
you are in touch with reality. If you
were asked to choose between Terror
and Drowning, you would choose Terror,
correct? Fear is a mere emotion, but
drowning is a serious proposition
indeed.

    This sort of understanding
requires you to use both the intuitive
and analytical portions of the human
mind simultaneously, and is a far cry
from standard tests of Western
intelligence, like "What is the
capital of Nevada?" Such questions
challenge only one half of the brain
and leave the other untouched.

    Anybody who wins this game on the
first shot, without having seen the
questions, would have to be either a
kung fu master or the Buddha himself.
Don't feel bad about making a lot of
mistakes. It's part of the learning
curve.

    If you manage to learn the correct
answers to all the questions in
Phobia, you might try a real Zen koan,
one of the traditional meditation
pieces for eastern students:

        "Is an idea a concept
        about the real world,
         or is the real world
         a concept concerning
              an ideal?"

    This one has kept people occupied
for entire lifetimes.

 CB