Furious Felines is Coco 3 game written in BASIC that borrows from classic 1970's games like Artillery and was released as a free download by it's author Diego Barizo, with a cat theme. The graphics are quite well done and the game play is a little different from the older Artillery games; the player has 3 cats of different weight and sleekness (which affects what angle and how far they travel). The "firing" mechanism is also different: there is a trampoline near the far left of the screen. The player uses the 1, 2 or 3 keys to stack cats of the 3 different weights on the left side of the screen (this is the amount of "power". Once they have the power set up, the player hits the spacebar to switch to the cat to "launch" (which is done by the topmost cat on the left stack jumping down onto the trampoline which springs the "launch" cat into the air); the arc height and distance is partially controlled by the type of cat the player picks here. There is also wind to contend with (direction and relative power is display in the upper left of the screen), and then the cat flies through the air. If the cat encounters brick walls, it bounces off of them until it lands on the ground.
The object is land the cat on the single mouse that appears on each level. The game is played in semi-real time; the mouse can move back and forth (until it hits an obstacle) while the player's cat is flying through the air, which adds a timing element not present on most Artillery style games. The player also has so many tries before the game ends, or until they complete all 6 levels. The less tries the player takes to capture each of the six mice the higher their score will be. Angles and planning ricochets on levels with tall walls make the game quite challenging - especially with wind added. The game includes pseudo overlay windows (all done in BASIC) and features sound effects when the cat jumps to the trampoline. The game is polished with some little extras - including a semigraphics load screen and nighttime cityscapes as a backdrop during game play and is different for each level. A well done and fun game in BASIC for a stock 128K Coco 3 - it doesn't even require joysticks.
Title: Furious Felines
Author: Diego Barizo
Publisher: Diego Barizo (Free download)
Released: April 2013
Requires: Color Computer 3, 128K RAM, disk.
Download Furious Felines by clicking on any of the screenshots on Diego Barizo's website.