Space Attack:

Micro Adventure #1

by Ruth Glick, Ruth Glick

Includes a story of a space station under attack and one can use the eight computer programs included to decode the alien messages, break into the enemy's security systen and play the deadly game of laser attack.

Genres: Childrens, Choose Your Own Adventure

123 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Ruth Glick is an American writer of cookbooks, romance and young adult novels. She has written novels under the pseudonym Rebecca York; until 1997 these were written in collaboration with Eileen Buckholtz.

Reviews

[J. Boo · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are codenamed Orion, and you are in a book series written in the second person. Even though you are in middle school, you are secretly an agent for ACT - the Adventure Connection Team, which sends you and your teammates on dangerous and exciting missions. Your specialty is computers, and periodically you are prompted by the book to boot up your IBM PC, Commodore 64, or any other 1980s home microcomputer, and type in a program written in BASIC in order to solve a problem, play a minigame, etc. (These programs are detailed in the appendix, which explains how they work, walks you through a troubleshooting process if one of the tasks involved fixing an error, etc.) Alternatively, you can skip the programs entirely and just read about your adventures.

This is a really fun series, and you wish you could find a current equivalent that features Java, bash, Javascript, Python, etc., but you have never yet found one. (If you do find it, you will please mention it in the comments of this review, and receive thanks).

DS#1 (age 6/7) thinks the series is great, despite not having a place to try out the programs. However, you've just now found a website that has the text of many of the books as well as an online window to type in and execute the BASIC programs. This saves you the trouble of figuring out exactly why the C64 emulator you downloaded is giving you a 0xc0000022 error message. (*)

Website is here: http://microadventure.net/

"Space Attack" is also available as a PDF from archive.org : https://archive.org/details/tibook_mi...

(*) You looked into it anyway and found out it was due to weird file permission error. Moving the directory which contained the emulator to the desktop fixed the problem.

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another one of my husband's childhood books I stumbled across. I found about 8-10 books of his when he was younger. Reading them when I need a break of the 900+ page book I am currently reading. This one had a storyline but also included a computer program to run on older computers and gaming consoles of the 70s-early 80s. I teased my computer tech husband if he did the program as he read the book when he was a kid and he grinned and said yes. I gave it a 2 star because as an adult and not being into computers I just wasn't too into it. But it gave me a break from the book I'm reading so I'm good.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stumbled onto this series randomly and fortuitously during a stint of learning to code.