Nuclear Tomatoes



David Green,

Ashford,

Kent.



This is a fast machine code game for the Spectrum with

weird sound effects but, most importantly, it is not very

long. You should be able to type in the 1K of machine code

within an hour without suffering any ill effects on your

eyesight. [Well, should be... had not the magazine page

scans been of such execrable quality. I had to debug the

disassembly to get it to work. I _think_ I've got all the

bugs out, and it certainly seems to run fine on both 48K

and 16K emulated Spectrum, but...]

  The game itself is based around the utterly ludicrous

premise that by the end of the 20th century, the main

source of atomic power will be the heavy element Spectrum

428, found in very small quantities in tomatoes. Unfortu-

nately, by this time a few small genetic engineering errors

have made all vegetables considerably more intelligent than

they were before, and the following speech, made by the

leading vegetable rights campaigner Heinz Tomato, shows

some of the problems caused by this:

  "Friends, tomatoes and other vegetables, lend me your

ears, for I have come to bury these humans, not to braise

them. After all, some men are born tomatoes, some achieve

tomatoes, and some have tomatoes thrust upon them. Whether

'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of

outrageous fortune, or 'tis better to stay at home and

watch the television? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If

you poison us, do we not die? And if you put us in the fuel

cores of nuclear reactors, shall we not jump up and down a

lot and make them explode?

  "We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in

the frozen food department of Marks and Spencers, we will

fight them in large square buildings belonging to the CEGB,

we will fight them in the cracks in the pavement, and

future generations will remember us, and say: 'Never in the

field of vegetable conflict was so much owed by so many to

a bunch of tomatoes'. Or something like that, anyway."

  Your job is therefore to move the boron blocks in the

nuclear reactor up and down to absorb the fanatical toma-

toes, since if too many of them hit the unshielded walls on

the left and right, the reactor's temperature will get so

high that it will melt down, and you should obviously try

to prevent this sort of thing.