BankZXy - R-Tape

We like to romanticise the ‘Tortured Artist’ trope. Van Gogh, Munch and Caravaggio[1] were all famous arts soles, whose colourful biographies dramatically threaten to eclipse their art.

At the other end of the scale there’s something exciting and mysterious about anonymous artists - the NWFS Cerne Abbas Giant, beautiful Palaeolithic CavePaintings or… the unfamous Banksy[3].

So – to Dave Hughe’s CCSCGC2024 entry BankZXy... Welcome to Bristol, where you guide the famous graffiti artist/vandal around the town, spraying like a stressed cat particularly intent on marking territory.

The loading screen gives a good overview of the gameplay, so …

… which is nice, isn’t it?[4]

The gameplay involves moving your UDG Banksy around, pursued by the asterisk. Hold space to leave your ‘tag’ on the floor. The pursuing asterisk has an aversion to walking on your graffiti, so this can be used to your advantage to complete the game and thus get to reveal Banksy’s secret identity.

As far as it goes, the UDGs are fun and look as much like famous art as can be expected in an 8x8 pixel grid. Some degree of strategy is present, in the placement of your first few pieces of street art, and it plays… just fine, for what it is. As a Type-In circa 1983, I’d have been more than pleased.

Yes, there is crapness. The game is very short, and looks like it might have wanted to be taken to other cities. The randomness of the spray can failure is strange, the Asterisk can sometimes obliterate your art with its movement, and Banksy – for reasons unknown – just will not go to the far east of the map.[7]

It also doesn’t care whether you want to play again or not… you are playing again. Such is the compulsive nature of the artist I suppose. And Dave has handily commented his own programming mistake in the REMark statement. Which is useful for highlighting crapness caught at the last minute.

Nationwide Bank

Only set in Bristol, despite (presumably) being inspired by Banksy’s recent exploits in London.

Tony Banks

BEEPing as the game plays that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike early Genesis.

Bank Holiday

This is a very brief journey to Bristol, and you’ll not be returning there often. You’ll spend the wet bank holiday weekend seeing the sights, but not extending your stay in the AirBnB
.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR SERVICES TO THE UDG

There is no keyword 'stencil'[9] on the Spectrum, unfortunately.

SUMMING UP

BankZXy is a simply game, with just the right lack of quality control for CSS CGC. And it has a difficult to pronounce name, that is even weirder if you do the ‘Z’ as ‘Zee’ like those pesky Americans do.  

It will make you smile and play it to completion though - and, you know - actually works as a game!  So that's a big plus.

Download it, play it, and be inspired to go and make some street art.

[1] Respectively – Vincent: Probably Bipolar Disorder (plus many other diagnoses) and the famous ear-incident seizure, Edvard: Alcoholism and suspected Borderline Personality Disorder, Caravaggio[2]: habitual brawling arrest and a Possible Murderer.

[2] Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio – fortunately known by the mononym Caravaggio. Prince and Madonna don’t have the excuse of sharing the forename of another famous artist/ninja turtle who lived 100 years previously.  Though arguably there are other famous Princes and one especially famous other Madonna. 

[3] Or is it though? Surely the whole ‘Who is Banksy?’ is just the media playing along. A reasonably serious piece of investigative journalism could uncover who, for example, got paid for his exhibitions, film proceeds etc. But does that somewhat spoil the mystique? Since Santa and the Tooth Fairy has been debunked, maybe it’s nice to have some mysteries to hang on to into adult life.

[4] Though there is debatable use of “graffitis” as a word. I’d go with the much more pretentious graffiti as the plural, and “graffito” as the singular noun[5]. And there’s a presumable typo in the loader where 23729 rather than 23739 is POKEd with 111 – thus the loading screen gets corrupted when the main game loads. But never mind.

[5] “Hey you, Street Artist[6], what a lovely graffito you have done!” I shout to them as they climb upon the roof of my local Spar.

[6] Speccy adjacent song! It’s by the creator of The Biz – a ZX Spectrum BASIC game that is fantastic, you know it is, it really is.

[7] Presumably that’d be, Wick Golden Valley Nature Reserve, which is temporarily closed due to the Ash Trees being infected with ‘ash dieback’.[8]

[8] Actually it's to allow Banksy room to spray a graffito on his right hand side.  The one thing we DO know about the identity of this John Doe is that he is right handed.

[9] I did some stenciling recently, having joined a local hackspace-type collective who have a lasercutter.  I used Inkscape to draw myself a vectorised Freddie, which I then laser cut from paper, and spray-painted onto more paper, to see if it'd work.  It's fairly clear I'm not Banksy.

Review: Uglifruit.