Deploy your army of warriors, archers and giant trolls in an attempt to beat the enemy wizard and reach the other side of the battle field! Launch fire balls and special wizard attacks to take out the enemy troops. As more of your units reach the other side, your army will grow bigger. If your wizard makes it across, you win! This game was programmed in Monkey and is the sequel to my game from 2004 (described further down on the page). The texts in Wizard Battle 2 are displayed in the very nice and freely available font Rapscallion by Ryan Splint. The development of this game is described in the Wizard Battle 2 worklog on the Blitz Basic website.

Cars with guns. Prepare for a battle all the way to the finish line. After the first lap, the guns are activated. Earn extra points by destroying your opponents, but make sure you finish high enough to continue to the next race! If you want to compete against others for a high score, I recommend the version of Battletrack on Kongregate. (You need to be logged in to your Kongregate account for the scores to be submitted.) This game was programmed in Monkey. Other tools used: Graphics Gale and Paint.net for graphics, SFXR and Audacity for sound effects, Fruity Loops for music. For more information on how this game was programmed, have a look at my Battletrack worklog on the Blitz Basic website!

A fire has broken out at the local cat and dog shelter! Help two cats save the day by positioning the stretcher just right and bouncing the doggies into the ambulance. Use keys 1, 2 and 3 to move around. Doggy Bounce is a remake of Bouncing Babies by Dave Baskin (1984), written for my girlfriend as it was one of her favourite DOS games, alongside Paratrooper. Flash, HTML 5, and Android versions were created using Monkey. In the Android version, you move the cats by touching the screen.

You are a space pilot hired to rescue pilots imprisoned on an alien planet. After landing you can pickup a few weapons and a medikit from your spaceship, then move through the door to confront the aliens! The prisoner can be found in a prison to the North. Press F to tell him to wait, press F again to make him follow you, back to your spaceship. Use the keyboard (W,A,S,D) to move, and use the mouse to look around and fire your weapons. Select your current weapon using the number keys, or the mouse wheel. When hit you can receive up to three wounds, slowing you down. Using a medikit (M) will heal all wounds you currently have. After every mission, a more dangerous mission begins. If you rescued the prisoner, extra ammo will be available at the start of the next mission.

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Music in Ranger:

Pancake House	-	coda
Placebo	-	xenith800
Savage Bypass	-	xenith800
Kick That	-	DJ Runaway
Ready?!	-	Creast
Incorrect Addressing Mode	-	coda
AM Pop	-	Deus X
Slow Synth	-	Deus X

The aim of this game is to steer your flying saucer around and shoot down evil saucers that appear out of nowhere. The enemy will shoot back, but only when they've turned red first. Keep an eye out for their guns: if they point at you, be prepared to dodge incoming bullets! Two bonus objects may drop from enemy wrecks: a health bonus, and a temporary fast fire bonus. Controls are arrow keys for steering and forward/backward, and space bar or Z for firing. A good tactic is to accelerate a little bit to counter the movement caused by your own gun when firing. Be sure to start moving around when the enemy takes aim. Most of the sound effects in this game were created with DrPetter's very nice SFXR program.

Flyout is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up written for the Shmup-Dev Autofire 2007 competition, ending up at a tied 9th place out of 16. You control a ship flying up into an endless tunnel, trying to collect as many points as possible by shooting down enemies. As you fly on, enemies will attack in greater numbers. To keep up you should try to collect the ship upgrades provided by stranded Dutch pilots! These guys appear around every kilometer unless the maximum upgrade level of 5 has already been reached. The distance travelled can be seen in the bottom-left corner of the screen. The ship is controlled using the arrow keys and space bar (alternative fire buttons are Z and Ctrl), music can be toggled on/off using M. The tunes used in this game are free music loops from www.deusx.com. Good luck, pilot!

Gridfire is a remake of Crossfire. The original is by Jay Sullivan and Chuck Benton and was published for the Commodore 64 by Sierra On-Line in 1983. A nice overview of Crossfire and related games can be found in issue #14 of Retrogaming Times Monthly ("The Many Faces of... Targ/Crossfire"). I found their detailed description of Crossfire very useful. The aim of the game is to destroy creatures that are invading a city, using a ship that moves and fires in four directions. Collect the ammo bonus once your supply of bullets is running low. Gridfire was my entry in the Retro Remakes competition of 2006, ending up at the 20th place out of 76.

Asteroid Buddies is a remake of Asteroids. You control a small space ship and your goal is to destroy the asteroids, which will fall apart in smaller asteroids when you shoot them. The smaller the asteroid, the more points you get for hitting it. Scores can be multiplied (up to 4x) when you score hits without misses inbetween. A special feature in this remake are the asteroid buddies. These blue creatures want to sit on the biggest asteroids, and will be angry when you make that impossible. They cannot hurt you directly, but they might accidentally push you into a rock! Controls: use the 4 arrow keys for steering and thrust, and use the space bar or the right control key for shooting. If you like Asteroid games you should also try Rocks, a great game by ooeyug.

This game is inspired by Space Invaders and Defender, two classic games. It's mainly Space Invaders with additional features. You control a cannon to defend earth against an invasion by aliens. The aliens come in different shapes; some of them will try to capture the little humans at the bottom of the screen. It is possible to pick up humans and transport them to a safer place. There's also a power-up that makes the humans shoot at the invaders. Power-ups are sometimes released by certain types of invaders when you shoot them. When all humans are destroyed the battle is taken into space; this is an idea borrowed from Defender. Big thanks go out to Damien Sturdy for allowing me to use his music on the title page, and to Joe Lesko for testing the game and giving valuable feedback! See the Readme.txt file and the title screen of the game for full credits and more instructions on how to play the game.

In this game, you control a very large steel elephant. This machine was inspired by the walkers in Star Wars, but also by the walkers in shoot 'em up games such as Armalyte on the Commodore 64. I wrote this game for a competition on the Coders Workshop website (which does not exist anymore) where the aim was to write a shoot 'em up, and I had to think about Armalyte and how funny it would be to control one of those walkers. (Although the resemblance with the machines in Armalyte got lost a bit somewhere down the road.) Controls are as follows: use the arrow keys to aim the gun, and use the space bar to fire it. Try to shoot the enemy tanks and aircraft, and also the bullets and bombs they throw at you; after 4 hits by these, the Steel Mammut will, unfortunately, explode.

This game is a simpler version of a 1983 game created by Commodore Electronics and Hal Laboratories that I played on the Commodore 64. You have to steer through the gates using the left and right arrow keys to steer, and the up and down arrow keys to go slower and faster. It pays to go fast since after every 15 seconds, the difficulty level will be increased with more trees appearing, making it harder not to end up against a tree and easier to miss a gate. The game was written for a 100 line competition on the Coders Workshop website. The original game has rabbits running across the screen, this game has skiing bears instead.

Inspired by classic 8 and 16 bit fighting games such as the mighty International Karate, this is an attempt at achieving the same level of fun. There are four different fighters, as this was a rule of the competition in which this was an entry. They share many moves though. The music is by Nebula (Cromdesign). Sound effects in this game were made using a microphone.

This game was my entry in a "one-switch" competition, which means that only one key could be used to control the game. It's a 1 or 2 player strategy game where the goal is to get a wizard to the other side of the screen. Different types of characters can be launched using the space bar. They cost credits, which will be returned to your base when the character is defeated, or when it reaches the other side, in which case you get double the points as a reward. Sound effects are from the Maniacs of Noise CD "Video Game Sound Effects", the wizard's voice actually consists of reversed voice samples from that CD. There is a website about one-switch games, this is OneSwitch.org.uk. The site is about how games can be made accessible to disabled people. Among other things, it has a large collection of freely downloadable one-switch games.

Minimaster is a chess game. It uses the "minimax" algorithm to decide which move to play next. All moves of the game of chess have been programmed. The program sometimes makes rather bad moves, this is probably a bug in my implementation of the algorithm that I have not yet been able to locate. Still, if you are a beginning player this program may well beat you if you're not careful! If you want to play a stronger chess program, check out "Jester" (French and English versions) on Ludochess. It's a Java program, you can play it in the browser. If you want to write your own chess game, the minimax algorithm is perhaps worth a look! Here's an explanation of minimax on the AI Depot site. Last but not least, chess enthusiasts who can also read Dutch may well want to check out this nice blog maintained by my dad: Alberts Schaakblog

If you think this game is rather stupid, that's OK since it was written for a "stupidest game" competition! It contains irritating jokes some of which may only be funny (if at all) to people programming games and using Blitz Basic. Unlike the other games this one does not have a certain fixed speed programmed into it so it may run too fast on super computers and/or on screens that have a really high refresh rate. The goal is to survive for as long as possible in a world of killer pixels.