After some discussions with the coder, we have removed Night Escape from the MSXdev’11 contest and transferred it to the Other section.
There was some kind of misunderstanding. The intention of Sherif Hashem aka sherif_hashim was not to participate to the famous MSX challenge, but to share with the MSX community his games created in BASIC between 1984 and 1987. He’s now very busy with his professionnal activities and his hobbies, but thinks that sharing his old MSX works on a nice website (thanks for this appreciation !) is a good idea. So, you can expect that more games will extend the Other section, reserved for games published for other contests or outside any contest. Even in BASIC games, we think that experienced coders can find inspiration for more advanced games !!!
Sherif Hashem wants also to answer to the critics seen on the MSX Resource Center about the presumed non-originality of Night Escape, and, beyond that, the status of all his games. We have indeed received a second game that we’ll release soon. It includes many REM lines without any content, so he has also answered about that. Here’s this answer :
“All these games actually I had on an old notebook written by my own hands in basic between the years of 1984-1987, I already had many games and programs that sure have been modified thru basic books and added/changed/modified the idea/graphics, so I m really not sure which of these games has been modified by me and which has been written from the scratch, but definitely I had learnt and used many many books by this time , but the 1000% sure thing is that nothing of these games was copied as it is from a source, and all of them has at least 50-60% changes either in the idea, graphics, music and more. Even regarding these rem lines according to what I remember, they are usually due to change in the way of reading the sprites data (repeated lines instead of using a for-next loop) or due to change in the input of the control keys ( chr$ vs asc() ) inputs, or sometimes a change in the instruction screens which I used to insert very often by this time ( if something bad was meant I would have sure removed that lines) :))”
So, it means that we can enjoy these games without any problem, as they are not aimed to be part of the MSXdev’11 challenge ! More games, more fun … It’s the slogan that we must keep always in our hearts and in our minds !!! 