SERPENT 64

Steer the serpent, eat apples, and clear 12 handcrafted arenas that loop ever faster. Walls block but never kill. Hit one head-on and the snake waits (losing 1 point per beat) until you steer away; travel along a wall while pressing into it and the snake slides, snapping into the first gap that passes. Only two things end a life: biting yourself, and the ghosts.

ON THE FIELD — apple (eat to grow and score, 2-5 on screen, they wander), diamond (50 points, disappears fast), ghost (deadly, slowly hunts your head), hourglass (slows you down for a while), X2 (doubles food points for a while).

End-of-level bonus: 50 x level. Extra life every 1,000 points. High scores save to disk when a drive is present.

CONTROLS — steer with joystick (port 1 or 2), WASD, or cursor keys. Start/pause with fire or SPACE (Q quits to the title). Help is F1, works everywhere, even mid-game.

LOADING — Emulator (VICE etc.): autostart serpent64.prg, or attach serpent64.d64 and it will autostart. Keep the .d64 attached as drive 8 to keep your high-score table between sessions. Real hardware: write serpent64.d64 to disk (or use an SD2IEC / Ultimate cartridge), then LOAD"*",8,1 and RUN. PAL and NTSC machines are both supported.