Alley Cat
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Alleycat.gif
Alley Cat is a 1984 computer game for MS-DOS, where it was created by Bill Williams for SynSoft and published by IBM. Many know it better for its Atari 800 release, which featured higher-colour graphics and was published by SynSoft (known as Synapse) themselves. In the game, the player controls a stray alley cat whose object is to perform certain tasks within the homes of strangers.
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Description
The PC version runs at 320x200 resolution, features 4-colour CGA graphics (with either black, white, cyan and magenta or black, red, brown/orange and green being onscreen at once) and PC speaker sound and music. It is often nostalgically referred to as one of the classic computer games of the "old CGA times". The game was very compact, stored entirely within a single COM file of 56,448 bytes. It still runs on the DOS subsystem in Windows XP.
The Atari 800 version features 16-colour graphics and is often found on a floppy disk under the filename ALLEY.CAT.
It is difficult to classify into a particular genre because rather few similar games ever existed. Today it might be considered a mixture of a platform game with mini-game elements.
Gameplay
In the main screen, the "alley", the player is presented with the outer façade of a house with several windows, which periodically open to throw out random objects. By climbing trash cans, fences, and clotheslines, the cat can enter various rooms through these windows, and each room contains one of several challenges:
- There may be a table with a birdcage in the middle of the room. Here, the object is to push the birdcage off the table, and then catch the bird (which escapes from the then-broken cage).
- In another room, there is an aquarium which the cat can enter and must eat all the fish from, dodging electric eels on the way while repeatedly coming up for air to avoid drowning.
- Yet another room contains a disproportionately large chunk of cheese with a number of holes, in which mice appear randomly, which the cat must catch.
- The cat may also find itself in a room with a number of sleeping dogs, some of which have feeding dishes in front of them, which the cat must empty without waking up any one of the dogs.
- In another challenge, the cat must collect three ferns from the top of a bookshelf, however avoiding a (disproportionately large) spider that may lower itself upon the cat from above.
In all of these rooms, successful completion of the task is awarded with an amount of points that depends on the time taken to complete it. The cat starts off with three lives in normal mode, and a life is deducted if one of the enemies (like the spider, an electric eel, etc.) is touched, or if the cat is hit by one of the objects that fall out of the windows in the alley. Most of the time, the only way to escape a task without losing a life is to jump back out of the window, but this is not always possible.
After completing the task in one of these rooms, the player returns to the alley where the windows now show a female cat crying for help. Upon entering such a window, the player encounters a room in which there are several rows (a bit like shelves) made out of valentine hearts on which other cats walk left and right. The object is to reach the cat at the top while maneuvering around the other cats, which cause the player to fall a level if touched. Each "row" has areas the player can stand on as well as areas where they fall through (the other cats, however, never fall through). In the PC version, the areas which can be stood on are coloured red, while those which cannot be stood on are coloured blue. In the Atari 800 version, due to the more vibrant colour, the solid hearts are more vibrantly coloured while the nonsolid ones are dim. Furthermore, each row of hearts has its own colour along a spectrum in the Atari 800 version. These areas switch between one status and the other as they are touched by heart-shaped arrows that are constantly shot diagonally across the screen. If the player falls from the bottom row, they fail and must return to the alley and complete another task.
In almost all of the rooms, as well as in the alley, every once in a while a dog may come running along the bottom edge of the screen. If the cat ever touches this dog, they get into a fight, and soon thereafter the cat finds itself back in the alley with one less life.
Most rooms also contain a broomstick that appears to move on its own. The cat can make footprints at the bottom edge of the screen to keep the broom busy (the broom will occupy itself with cleaning them up), but while there are no such footprints, the broom will constantly go after the cat. It is, however, harmless; it never kills the cat, but it pushes the cat around, enough to make it more difficult, or on higher skill levels, rather impossible to complete the task if you don't keep the broom busy. In particular, it might often throw the cat right at the dog mentioned above.
If the cat manages to kiss the female cat in the special room, the level advances by one and the player gains an extra life. This continues indefinitely as the game's difficulty increases. The goal is to see how far one can go before running out of lives. Due to the game's fast-paced nature and increasing difficulty curve, this tends to be less monotonous than in similar "never-ending" games.
See also
External links
- MobyGames's entry on Alley Cat (http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,4/gameId,190/)
- Unofficial FAQ (http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/game/28894.html)