QBASIC Gorillas

A screenshot from the game.

QBASIC Gorillas is an artillery video game developed and published by Microsoft on 1990-04-09 and released with MS-DOS v5.0 as QBASIC source code. In the game, two human opponents play as gorillas standing on a randomly-generated series of skyscrapers. You goal is to hurl explosive bananas at your opponent by entering an angle and velocity, while factoring in the wind, in an attempt to blow up the other player. The game supports EGA hi-res, and CGA lo-res graphics.

Personal

My family's first computer (around 1991) came with MS-DOS v5.0, and, shortly after figuring out how to run QBASIC, I found the game and started playing it. I played around a little with the source code, but never really understood it at the time. Several of the students in my 9th grade math class really loved this game, and we frequently played it after tests and before class started.

Although Gorillas was a great example of what QBASIC was capable of, in hind sight, I find that it is just as much of an example of how limited the language was. There are calls of POKE and PEEK because there isn't a command to get or set num lock, the graphics for the bananas are encoded in complex numbers rather than modifiable bitmaps, determining the available hardware is done through esoteric error trapping because there is no simple way to get it, and the frame rate is governed by counting delays rather than fixed frame rates.

Status

I own a copy of this game on my MS-DOS v5.0 disks. The game doesn't have an AI, so it's not really beatable.

Review


3	4	2	2	5

Best Version: DOS

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

As with most artillery video games, it's a nice distraction for awhile.
The game is one of the very few complete and competent graphical video games released in QBASIC at the time.
The game is one of the few that take advantage of the customizable EGA palette.

Bad

Although passable for the game, the graphics and sound were awful compared to what dedicated hardware was capable of. This game was released after the Genesis.
The game shipped with a couple bugs that were never patched.
The game doesn't take advantage of the hardware that was available at the time. VGA had been out for three years, but the game runs, at best, in EGA mode, and, even then, it doesn't use all 16 colors.