Yeehaw! There’s a new TRS-80 game in town with a western theme called RoundUp! If you’ve ever wanted to be a wrangler, but were too afraid to hit the rodeo, then RoundUp! is the game for you. It’s on sale now!
This is the second game I’ve written for the TRS-80. The first was Breakdown a few years ago. This one took a while due to real-life getting in the way for over a year. But, I was able to finally complete it just recently.
The game is simple in concept. You move your horse up and down vertically on the screen and attempt to lasso as many calves and steers as possible before too many calves pass you by. You need to avoid hitting the skulls and steers because that will cause your horse to rear-up and you won’t be able to lasso or bump calves for a few seconds. Control is via the TRS-80 keyboard for the true retro gamer or you can use an Alpha Joystick compatible joystick interface like is found on the MISE or M3SE. Gameplay is fun on the keyboard, but is even better with a joystick.
I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from some initial testers about this game. Here are just a few of the comments:
“Man that’s fun.”
“It’s really well polished and with great sound effects (the animation is a cut above typical games of the time).”
“It’s hard to verbalize how great the experience of playing this game is. Something about how in a world where we’re playing Far Cry, and Cyberpunk 2077, it’s still possible to drop a really amazingly playable title that uses 8 bits, 1-bit display depth and character-sized pixels.”
One thing I really wanted to execute on this time around was packaging the game in a truly retro fashion. So, I am selling the game in packaging as close as possible as I could get to the early cassette titles sold by Tandy Radio Shack back in the day. My goal was to make it look like it could have been hanging on a peg in your local Radio Shack back in 1978. I think I was able to get pretty close and am quite happy with the result. Getting this right was almost as difficult as writing the game.
RoundUp! is available on cassette for the Model I, III and 4 and also on disk for the Model III and 4 only.
But, don’t fret if you don’t have a working TRS-80 Cassette Recorder or disk drive. Every purchase will also come with digital disk copies so that you can play RoundUp! on your FreHD, MISE, M3SE, HxC or Gotek equipped TRS-80. You can even play it in one of the many TRS-80 emulators available today, such as trs80gp.
You can buy RoundUp! now on PayPal for $19.99 + $5.00 shipping in the US only. Please get in touch for overseas shipping options.
NO electronic versions for sale ?
I need to get on this and make it an option. Thanks!