Alley Cat: first thoughts

[toasty]

#2099

This game is rather strange and I haven’t quite figured out what I’m supposed to be doing yet, but I’ll happily continue playing. So far it seems to consist of climbing up things, knocking into mice and jumping into windows. The rooms seem to contain a number of bizarre things, such as giant blocks of cheese and autonomous sweeping brushes. I’m guessing I need to do something in the rooms, but I keep accidentally jumping out again >___>.

The noise it makes when the dog catches you is very horrible; it’s quite simple but effective at making you avoid the thing.

It’s a nice, simple, relaxing game, so I hope others will check it out 🙂

My favourite room so far:

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[sorceress]

#2120

Autonomous sweeping brushes were the roombas of the early 1980s.

And cheeses really were that big, before shops started cutting down the packet sizes.

[toasty]

#2123

😀 😀

[Pix]

#2126

Alleycat is one of my favourite early DOS games and the only one of these 6 that I know really well already. I played this loads on my first PC. Good arcade games were kind of thin on the ground when you had an 8088 CGA machine. This just plays and controls perfectly, there is loads of variety with all the different levels and the difficulty ramps up at just the right rate. It was famous for years for being so well programmed that it would run at the right speed no matter what machine you ran it on right up to the end of the DOS era with PII’s. Don’t know which version people are playing but if you want a few more colours and sound channels, there is a PC Jr release. This is one of the handful of PC Jr games that won’t run on a Tandy 1000 but there is a patch to fix that too if needed.

[Fimbulvetr]

#2129

This was the first PC game I ever played. I still find it to be a lot of fun, although my reflexes are not quite the same as they were in the 1980’s when I used to play this all the time. I can still beat my kids at it though! The original Atari 800 version has nicer graphics and sound then the dos version. My favourite is still the dos version though, because of the nostalgia of playing it.

http://frgcb.blogspot.com/2015/04/alley-cat-synapse-software-1983.html

[LunarLoony]

#2145

You’ll notice my avatar is of Alley Cat…