Release Date: July 1973
Platform: Mainframe (Basic Type-In)
Genre: Educational, Non-Game
Developer(s): John Graham
Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation
Alrighty, folks - this is a weird one. Immediately I'm going to make a call on it being not a game. What we have is essentially another Boomerang Puzzle, but this time with some casual racism inserted into it. Fun! This one will, as a result, be much shorter than the last couple of articles.
Chief once again comes to us from 101 BASIC Computer Games. It's going to be a strange day when that book is behind me - only for it to come back when the 1978 coverage rolls around. This game is another one not done by David Ahl, but was submitted for publication by John Graham of Upper Brookville, NY. Another one-game-wonder with no searchable information. All I've got to work with is the description he provided for the game, which suggests that he wasn't a student. Likely a teacher or university guy. He also suggests that Chief is "mostly a game", which I strongly disagree with. By my definition, there isn't really a goal or any mechanics that would qualify it as a game.
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| Even Ahl doesn't spend much time on this one. |
What Chief really is is an educational program designed to drill kids on basic arithmetic operations. It's actually quite similar to Boomerang Puzzle, in that the computer is the one doing the guessing instead of you (I'm reminded that it's actually a concept that goes all the way back to Digits). The arithmetic it has the player do is different, but the premise is exactly the same.
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| Feels like even less in the 1978 edition. |
Where Chief makes itself stand out though is the... odd way it presents itself. That's putting it nicely. In Chief, you are being "tested" by "CHIEF NUMBERS FREEK", the "INDIAN MATH GOD." Hoo boy. What do I even say about this? Graham intended for this to give a bit of "fun" to the program, but all it succeeds in doing is giving me secondhand embarrassment. Especially when it calls me "PALE FACE WITH WISE TONGUE." A strange combination of insult and flattery - neither of which are true.
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| You think you're funny, calling me a smart white guy, eh? |
The "test" is as follows: take a number, then add 3 to it. Divide by 5, then multiply by 8. Finally, add 3, then subtract 1. In mathematical terms, it would look like this:
(((((n + 3) / 5) x 8) / 5) + 5) - 1
I think... That's a lot of brackets. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - I feel like I am anyway.
This formula has some strange results to it - almost every number you'd think of choosing will result in a decimal-point answer. Part of me thinks that it's an intentional choice, purely due to how the program is designed - I think it wants you to fail.
So you'll come up with a number, put it through the formula, and then realise that there's a problem at around the second "divide by 5" step. If you're like me, you'll ignore it and round down or up and continue on, typing the final result into the program. The game ("Chief Freek") will then try to tell you what the number you started with was (it essentially runs through the formula in reverse). Inevitably, unless you picked a number like 22, which doesn't have any rounding issues, the game will suggest something absurd like 6.375.
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| I admit, I'm impressed. |
Of course, nobody would think to pick a number so precise, so you'd tell the game "no, that was not my number." Then Freek gets grumpy with you and lays out the math to tell you why you're wrong. Even with such strange numbers (it can even deal with negative numbers), the program manages to get it all right. Initially I thought it was full of it, and that there was no way that it would get to a number like 2 from -9.25. Yet, it does.
So, Freek always proves himself correct. Still, if you're feeling in a Patrick Star kind of mood and say "that's not my wallet," when Freek says "Now do you believe me?" Then, this happens...
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| I can't believe you when I'm dead. |
I can certainly say that this is a first - being smote by a computer program. Yet, I have lived to tell the tale. I must say that I'm rather impressed by the lightning bolt. Our developers are beginning to get more creative when it comes to text graphics. It's all fairy simple stuff, still - I think Star Trek still has them all beat, though.
On a different note, there was another coding error in this one, similar to the one in Bullseye. However, this one was entirely a copyist error; whoever copied the game over for Vintage BASIC was at fault for the mistake. If the game guesses your number correctly, and you say yes to it, the game will freak out and respond with this:
!BAD GOTO TARGET 500 IN LINE 130
What this is saying is basically that the "GOTO" target listed in line 130 of the code isn't working. Within the whole code, there actually is no line 500. A quick check of the book tells us that the 500 is meant to be 510. This also appears in line 290, so two places where 500 is incorrectly written. It's an easy fix, just change the 500 in lines 130 and 290 to 510 - problem solved. Now you get the actual response: "BYE!!!" A bit anti-climatic, don't you think?
...and that's all there is to discuss with Chief. Like I said, not a game, and as such, no scores for it. If I did, I think it would easily end up in the F tier, anyway, because there's so little to it. It's a joke program, more than anything, as far as I can tell.
I have slightly more hope for next week's game.
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