Hell! Contest Winners

Escape From Hell!--Antic's June 1988 Game of the Month--drew quite a bit of favorable response. We even received several letters from clergy members, who loved the game and changed it only slightly for their religious school classes.

Plenty of entries also came in for our Challenge From Hell contest to redesign the look and storyline of the original Escape From Hell! Grand Prize Winner is Gwen Lenker of San Francisco, who gets software from The Catalog. Gwen is obviously a major talent at this sort of game reprogramming--she also won our J.D. Casten Rebound screen design contest in August 1987.

In Gwen's prizewinner, "How Nice For You, Dear," you're a hardcopy communications expediter at Busywork International. You've got plenty to do, but your mom has insisted on visiting you at work because she just wants to know exactly what you do for a living. As long as Mom doesn't get in your way, you'll do fine. But if she interferes at all, kiss your job good-bye.

As you work your way up the corporate ladder--answering phones, sharpening pencils, shutting off the computers, playing games and trampling potted plants as you go--Mom will find ways to hamper your progress. She means well, but compared to this, getting out of Hell was a piece of cake.

Unlike Escape From Hell!, each screen in "How Nice For You, Dear" features a different character set and presents different challenges. The Antic staff was impressed with Gwen's use of graphics and sound (phones ringing, time-clocks being punched), and we found her scenario particularly engaging. How Nice For You, Dear appears on this month's disk as HOWNICE.BAS.

Two runner-up winners will receive this month's Antic Disk issue. Their games should be available for downloading from ANTIC ONLINE this month. After you log onto Compuserve type GO ANT-2550 and follow the onscreen instructions.

"Meltdown!" by Ryan Cain of Sacramento, California has you trying to halt a meltdown at the Rancho Seco nuclear facility. You must run around the plant--often on top of the bones of the noble failures who went before you--and set off the bombs. But standing in your way is a radioactive, nuclear, mutated, man-eating rat.

David Sherwin of Thornhill, Ontario, Canada, sent us three variations of Escape From Hell!, all of which merit mention. "Mushroom Patch" puts you in a weird, warped land full of deadly creatures. You've been turned into a purple worm and you must eat every anti-radiation apple you find, propelling yourself by bouncing off the magic mushrooms.

Sherwin's "School Time" has you trying to escape from the worst Hell imaginable--that one horrid teacher in everyone's past, who had it in for you and you alone. And in the "House of 31 Flavors," you're a vacuum cleaner, of all things, who must suck up all kinds of pastries and avoid falling into the melting ice cream sundaes.

Listing:HOWNICE.BAS Download