Capture the Flag

Capture the Flag is one of the best (according to various reputable publications) shareware games in history, created by the famous Richard Carr in certain circles and reviewed, including in "big" computer game magazines - things distributed in this way were awarded such things infrequently.

As it is easy to guess from the name, it is a computer incarnation - and quite reliable - of the popular outdoor team game for children and youth in the West called "Capture the Flag". Before the start, you can set some settings: in particular, choose the side of the "red" or "blue" (both artificial intelligence and a living person at the same computer can act as an opponent) - and one of a number of proposed areas where the competition will unfold. The field is divided into two halves; each of the teams sees only its own team, while the opposite team is hidden by default and becomes visible as the opponents move along it. The ultimate goal is obvious - to detect and capture someone else's flag. The interface fits on the right side of the screen: at the very top of it, a global map is displayed (more precisely, its part known to us at the moment) with dots denoting players, below is a list of all our wards and several auxiliary options in the form of keys.

The gameplay is step by step. Both teams have 13 participants, who look exactly the same (they all look like boys in blue or red sports sweaters). However, in fact, each of them has certain values of four indicators: "A" ("agility") - the ability to fight; "M" ("movement points") - stock of movement points; "S" ("stealth") - the ability to hide; "V" ("vision") - vigilance; among the characters there are both "generalists" and "wretched" (the latter have all four parameters are very small). If you select on the interface panel any icon with a portrait of one of the team members, then between the block with them and the global map, his above characteristics (in the form of conditional scales) will appear, under them - four icons with different positions of the human body, indicating orders that you can give it away (walk, crawl, stop, run), and to the right - a square and eight numbers around it: these are the movement points that you have to spend if you take one step from a given point in any of the eight directions; at the same time, after such a click, the transition to the area of the map in which this participant is located will also automatically occur. It should be noted that the number of movement points, as already indirectly noted earlier, is different for specific participants (for one it is 10, while for the other it is as much as 30), but it is constant: it cannot be replenished in any way during the current turn, but automatically rises to the maximum inherent in this player at the beginning of the next one, and if not all points were previously spent by the character, then the "remainder" is simply lost.