Forest Fire demonstration

The instructions and two complete games of Forest Fire by Alan Poole, one of Medium Difficulty (2) and one on Hard (3), for the Commodore 64. It's a game published early in Loadstar's 22-year run, on issue 17. While not graphically detailed, its simple and effective graphics show what you need to play.

An arsonist has set four fires in your forest, and you must put them out! Your efforts are represented by a blinking white square. Move it over some fire and hold the fire button down to dump water on it. Every dot of fire beneath the square has a 50% chance each turn of being put out. You can also press the space bar to set backfires to limit the fire's spread.

Work to save as much of the forest as you can, and especially try to save the houses, which are worth the most points. The game ends when every bit of fire is out. Try to put it all out as quickly as you can: extra fires are prone to popping up randomly as time passes. The difficulty levels affect how likely each dot of fire is to spread each turn, and how likely new fires will appear.

The complete (or "compleat") 22-year run of the classic Commodore 64/128 disk magazine Loadstar is available for sale, with the permission of J&F Publishing, on itch.io here: https://rodneylives.itch.io/loadstar. It contains Forest Fire, and around 500 other games, plus lots of puzzles, music, art and other software.

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