I had a dream:
The Grid Sequencer!

Atari in the USA:
Mr Atari's IDE

Atari 7800: The
system that could
(but didn't)

Tablet PCs in
Today's World

Atari Goes Metal

Do you have 19
inches of rack
mounted Atari?

Multi Worms

Pixel Power

The great scramble
Once upon a time at the Unconventional 2k I saw for the first time a game for the Multilink. It was Multi Dash. Jiri Bernasek wrote it for an existing network system nobody remembered.

Well to see eight XL/XE computers connected via a SIO network was very impressive.

So soon some people wanted to know how it works to code some games. So Jiri was bombarded with questions. He gave me a piece of code at the ATARIADA 2k1, but he warned me that it is hard to understand, because it is documented in Czech. But he promised to make it more modular and to make a simple and documented example.

At the ATARIADA 2k2 Jiri released his next Multilink game, called Multi Race. Together with this game he released the example, Multi Worms.

At a RAF meeting at my apartment, we finally built up a network and tested the game. As with all the other Multilink games there is a master and some slaves. You load the game on the master, connect the slaves via the SIO bus and power on the slave(s). The game automatically boots over the network, so you need only one floppy drive!

On every master or slave there can be two players.

You can choose which joystick each players will use (or keyboard). Type in the name of the player(s).

On the master you can choose whether you want a failed player to disappear from the screen, or his corpse be an obstacle for the other players.

You can also send messages to each other player. A popular sentence for example is, "It wasn't my fault, the joystick you gave me doesn't work".

The game starts when the master and the slaves declare themselves ready.

You control a little worm. This worm has to eat some apples and avoid some skulls.

With every apple he eats he becomes longer. Besides the optional skulls, the worm has to avoid hitting the other worms (players).

New apples appear somewhere else after you eat one of them.

At the beginning the worms aren't long, so you have to concentrate to get the apples, not the skulls. Later when the worms become longer, you have to be careful not to bump into another worms.

The more apples you eat the more points you score.

Multi Worms is at first sight similar to Cervi from Raster/CPU. But instead of having five seconds time to find your worm (Cervi), in Multi Worms your worm starts when you first hit the joystick. This is less stressful for the players.

We can look forward to some fine new XL/XE network competitions in the future.

thorsten@myatari.co.uk

Mad Butscher
The principle of the game is explained in five sentences, that's mostly an indication of a fun game. So it is. The rules are easy to understand, the menus are few in number and self-explanatory, the graphics are simple but the fight against the other worms is exciting. The network works effectively without problems, so you forget that you are playing on a network after a while.

Bunsen
When I first played it, I knew, for me Multi Worms is the best multi-player game so far. Playing in a network with up to ten people on five systems (if you have five TVs and enough space) is cool. Also the game-play is great to play.

Uncle Harry
With Multi Worms, Jiri Bernasek proved once again, that simple game-play, technically well adapted and innovatively improved (network), is a great mixture to have fun with your 8-bit Atari.

Carsten Strotmann
Yet another great game from BeWeSoft. Titled as, "just a demo for a magazine" is a great understatement. It's similar to Cervi (Worms), but totally different game-play. It's very funny to play. Really a highlight this year.