The premise for this game is, to say the least, somewhat bizaare. I suspect it was one of those things that appealed to me at 3 o'clock in the morning when I was 14, but now is somewhat embarassing to describe, so I think I'll allow you to use your imaginations and conceive whatever reason that pleases you why you are a badly drawn, green suited man swearing at VGA invoked monsters to kill them, and prevent them from crossing the screen. I also am conscious that there was no reason to have to invent a narrative for Trooper I - it sprung out of my overactive imagination, and hyperactive drawing almost entirely of its own volition. The fascination at the time was with the code: how to construct a game of my own completely from scratch, using my own graphics system, my own sprites, and an entirely home-made game engine. Trooper I was the result; and the fact that it is an almost insultingly simple game does not detract from the techniques I acquired whilst building it, or the tools I constructed to make it work; and does not seem to have any affect on its manic playability. Considering that I spent such a protracted period of time building, testing and perfecting the game and it's inconvenient and unnecessary menu system, it's amazing that I still find myself occasionally having a blast on it, and admiring it's almost totally bug-free game engine. This is not meant to be some statement of programming abilities at the time: I spent as much time on Trooper I as I did on my early 3D engine, and tested so intensly that any bugs were removed by shear brute force of code refining. The game was produced to run on a 486, and so the graphics engine is almost ridiculously complicated in order to achieve the correct speed on that machine: the background behind a sprite is saved as another sprite when that image is displayed, and pasted back into place when the sprite is removed. As a result, however, there was no need to store the background image (part of a Final Fantasy IX screenshot, I think), and the game runs incredibly quickly, to the extent that I'm glad I included an adjustable game timer. It may not be something you can absorb yourself into, but I was pretty pleased with my little game at the time, and it never fails to amuse for a couple of minutes. The code is riduculously convoluted and unnecessary, and I would never recommend it to someone trying to get to grips with game programming, but it works none the less, and was an important part of my progression as a games programmer. For more informationas to how this fits into my development as a whole, see the introduction. As before, Trooper I is available for download in its original form, with instructions. One aspect in which the game was vital to my future projects, was the use of MCGA graphics: and, indeed, the image of 'Fred', my protagonist, which was originally an example in the sprite package I used, became incorportaed into Trooper II and has even made the transition into windows with DirectX, as have the images of the monsters, which remain unchanged (although, sadly, for forgotten reasons the blue monster was not included in Tr2) in the more recent game. Enjoy!