BEEEEEEEEEEES

September 10, 2011 6:46 PM

I am looking for an old BASIC(?)-programmed DOS game. It is about defending North America from an invasion of killer bees. I believe the file was SWARM.EXE, and I'm pretty sure it was freeware.

I've googled for it off and on over the years, tried various niche gaming forums (which have been successful for other searches of mine, but not this), and so on.

Gameplay consisted of turns or rounds. Every turn the swarm would stay somewhere, or advance, or.. retreat? I always lost so I'm not sure if it ever retreated. And you could fortify cities with different tactics (napalm, sonic.. can't recall the others).

Does this sound vaguely familiar to anyone? Better yet, can you find it?

posted by curious nu to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: If it's the one I'm thinking of, it was in an old book of BASIC programming games from the 1980's. IIRC, one of the tatics was using robotic bees. I may actually still have that book in a box somewhere.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 7:24 PM on September 10, 2011

Best answer: I had this! I think this is the file (in BASIC code!).

I had trouble loading the page, so here's the Google cache.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 12:03 AM on September 11, 2011

Response by poster: That's it! Thanks so much; been trying to track this down forever. Now I should probably read through those old BASIC programs and see if anything else seems familiar...
posted by curious nu at 6:48 AM on September 11, 2011

Response by poster: Hmm, it doesn't run in either of the interpreters I've tried this morning. Time to debug! And relearn BASIC, I guess.
posted by curious nu at 9:08 AM on September 11, 2011

I got it working in QuickBasic by changing the variable name "COM" to "COMMAND" in lines 4860–4890.
posted by reynaert at 10:40 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]