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My high score list says that someone died of "incompetance". That A should be an E.

Game hangs

I'm playing 0.9.14b "Brains" on a Mac laptop running OSX 10.10.5. I entered an exit portal from... whichever is the second level with a treasure room. Level 5? The game froze and I got the spinny Mac beach ball; had to Force Quit the app.

This could be an OS issue or it could be the game. I had exactly 1 second left on the timer when it froze, though; if I have the patience to try to reproduce it I may attempt to again leave a level at the last second and see if that does anything fishy. (I have successfully exited this level on this build in the past. Maybe even during the last few seconds of the security timer, though perhaps not with exactly 1 second left.)

Okay, more data. I'm playing on a Mac.

Playing version 0.9.12 "Spleen", the very first enemy I kill in the game is worth like 200 points, and the multiplier goes up by 0.2, then 0.2, then 0.4, then 0.4, then 0.6... I finish level 1 with about 3000 points.

Playing version 0.9.14 "Brains", the first enemy is about 100 points and the multiplier only goes up by 0.1 each time no matter what. I finish Level 1 with about 1000 points.

I seem to have missed 0.9.13, so the change could have been there too.

Since the 2/29 update, I'm getting farther in the game but scoring lower. Has my playstyle changed, or did enemies become worth fewer points or something?

In any case, thanks for your dedication to restoring this piece of history. Looking forward to playing through the rest of it.

Actually, it's hard not to wonder if the entire calendar is off by a year. Making Spellrazor in the spring of 1981 would mean Bower had never seen Tempest or Robotron or (I think) Omega Race. Defender would have been out there, barely, but I don't know how fast distribution channels got it to various cities in the US. Spellrazor screams with the joy of taking something to the next level, but it feels like it's building on the aforementioned classics, not on Pac Man and Space Invaders.

So even taking into account his modified hardware, this would make more sense to me as a project from 1982 than 1981.

This concludes maybe the pickiest post I have probably ever made on the internet. Please enjoy. :)

Enjoying my first explorations of the game. One thought: I'm not always sure which spell I've maxed out when I start getting gold. Maybe a notification when you get to 10, similar to the one when you hit 0?

Also, there seems to have been corruption in some of the accompanying data; Jolt Cola wasn't introduced until 1985. DMB must have been drinking something else.