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Puzzle Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Kasparov Beaten At Repton, Game Recreated? 28

migstradamus writes "Anyone out there remember the BBC microcomputer? If so you probably remember the puzzle game Repton, too. ChessBase.com has a charming story about how a 3-year-old was clearly better at any computer game than the newly crowned World Chess Champion, including Repton, back in 1985. This defeat led Garry Kasparov to import Atari computers to Russia! The kid who beat him is now a 21-year-old programmer and has recreated the legendary game for free download. There's been plenty of feedback for the officially-sanctioned mini-remake, and on Jan. 21 they will release a super-hard level as part of a contest." It's worth noting that Repton has also been commercially re-released for Pocket PC and Java-enabled phones, as well as a full PC version from the original makers, Superior Software.
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Kasparov Beaten At Repton, Game Recreated?

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  • by Scarblac ( 122480 ) <slashdot@gerlich.nl> on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @11:51AM (#8032999) Homepage

    Quoth the article: The program only runs smoothly on modern graphics cards. If you have a very old version you may need to keep the window very small to play the game properly.

    And I tell you, some people believe in a thing called "Moore's Law"... Nicely nostalgic article.

  • My favourite game! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by alyosha1 ( 581809 )
    Woohoo! That was the first computer game I ever played. I Had the whole series, Repton, Repton2 (a pain to finish, but I managed it....) Repton3 and Repton Infinity (ahead of it's time - it had a complete game editor/designer built in, including an entire language for modifying the behavior of game elements, but ran way to slow...)

    Anyone else play the other greats of that era - things like Ravenskull, Striker's Run, Exile etc...? Did anyone ever finish Exile? Even with the cheats I couldn't figure it ou
    • You finished Repton 2?! Impressive stuff... I can't imagine more than a handful of people can make that claim.

      Mind you, we only made it through Repton 3 with liberal use of a Replay chip... ^^;
    • Anyone else play the other greats of that era - things like Ravenskull, Striker's Run, Exile etc...? Did anyone ever finish Exile?

      Don't forget Elite, Arcadians and Starship Command.

      Exile still is my favorite game - it works under BeebEm [pipex.com]!

      I never finished the Acorn Electron version (couldn't afford a Model B or Master) but got it for the Amiga years later and finished it.

      I recently found it again as an emulated game (using BeebEm) and started playing again - even now it's very playable.
    • You finished Repton2 - impressive. I got quite a way through Repton Thru Time, but it got insanely hard at one point.

      One of my all-time favourite Beeb games was Citadel - did anyone else play that? I managed to complete it after many weeks of searching for those damn crystals. My friend and I actually drew a map of the entire world - I still have that somewhere. I still remember the ending sequence when you blow up the teleporter - wow, all those colours! That was one thing that really struck me about Cita
      • I used to know the full solution to Citadel, many years ago... We (my dad and I) had a map drawn on fanfold paper too :-)

        There was also a Citadel 2. I only discovered this recently (well, a couple of years ago) when I was looking at emulators.

        Did you find the easter egg? You could jump into the title screen... you needed to drop a trampoline on the beach at the far east of the game (where this ball of fire floats towards you over the ocean to kill you). Then you use the trampoline to jump up off the

        • Yes, I did find that, but at the time I was too young to realise it was an easter-egg and thought it was just a cool bug! :)

          I tried Citadel 2 out recently with an emulator - it seemed to lack a lot of the polish that made Citadel great.

          One thing I spent hours trying to do - the water at the bottom of the 'Well' (after you've initially drained it) - I was damn sure I could get past those arm-wavy plants and swim around under there, but I never could. I used to dream about what might have been to the right
          • It was possible! You had to take the ice-crystal down with you, which froze the ice. Then you could jump over the plants, get through the tunnel to the right and retrieve one of the hidden crowns. Ok, I don't know what that says about me...
            • Yeah, I realise that - I meant the 'pipes' you see after you've reached the bottom - you can't jump up some of them, they are too high.
        • I can't remember what the two blue 'boxes' were for (one is near where you start). Also, the iron bar...
          • I think that if you took them to StoneHenge they got converted into gold bars, but I've forgotten what you would use them for after that.
    • I've resurrected my Beeb recently and got into Repton 2 [demon.co.uk] again, which rocks, as they say :-) I liked it much better than 1 and 3 (with the annoying fungus). Also ELITE [clara.net] of course.

      Another favourite was Labyrinth [nl.net], which featured a bizarre screen mode using remarkably only four colours to simulate many more with pixel patterns. Very cool game.

      There are many great Beeb sites out there, particularly 8BS.com [8bs.com] - see also my list of (mostly) Beeb games [demon.co.uk]

      Have fun!

      >_

  • I remember modifying boulderdash so that a diamond explosion would generate even more diamond explosions - I ended up with a sea of diamonds.

    Not sure why they say repton is superior. Maybe the puzzles?

    With boulderdash hand eye coordination does help because you can actually run downwards under a boulder - you just have to make sure you step out of its way in the end.

    Actually I remember an AppleII game called repton that was a side shooter. Much like defender.
  • by chendo ( 678767 ) on Tuesday January 20, 2004 @01:23PM (#8034016)
    ... then you already have a clone of Repton. GNOME Stones is very similar to Repton, if I RFTA correctly. Maze, diamonds, stones... same concept.
  • by ReyTFox ( 676839 )
    I played Boulder Dash as a kid. And on the Atari, its ORIGINAL platform(more people remember it on the C64 of course). I wasn't so great at it because all the levels past the first two or so really were quite hard. But when we got the BDCK I had lots of fun making levels ^.^

    Interesting how both games(BD was made by Peter Liepa, whose page comes up first on any google search) were made by mathematicians.

    I wonder why mathematicians stopped making video games? ;)
    • ...because mathematicians solve problems by reducing them to other problems they know the solution to. Repton is the Ultimate game in the sense that all other games can be reduced to it. When thinking of a new game concept a mathematician will simply prove that it is, effectivily, Repton, and be satisfied.
  • There are various reimplementations of Repton for Unix and Windows. This includes a version for the Linux console via SVGALib, for generic Unix / X11 through KDE (both 1.x and 3.x) and for both Windows, X11 and possibly OSX throught FX Repton using the FOX toolkit.

    This is the site, at http://www.keelhaul.demon.co.uk/krepton/ [demon.co.uk] and also of interest may be the Repton appreciation society [repton-world.org.uk].

  • The compressed download for this game is 4.5 megs.

    Considering the original ran in 32 kb of memory this is worse than Microsoft bloating...

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