587 Squadron Advance

587 SQUADRON ADVANCE

Presented by asie and PogeSoft

Fly your high-speed bomber deep into enemy territory on a dangerous solo mission! Be the spearhead of an assualt on the enemy's secret weapons facility! In the course of your flights, you'll disable enemy communication networks, destroy transport infrastructure, incapacitate warships and finally destroy the enemy's secret weapon!

587 Squadron Advance is a demake of Epic 's Zone 66- a 1993 shareware title of theirs that I am fond of-using Epic's own ZZT*. The ZZT world was in turn ported to a GBA-playable format by asie using a build of his fork of ZZT, OpenZoo/C++. All the screenshots are from the GBA version.

The game is available for download as a .GBA file. If you play it on an emulator, we recommend mGBA as this is what the game has been tested on the most. It has also been tested to work on real hardware. 

HOW TO PLAY

You control a little white smiley and interact with things by touching them. To navigate in the ZZT world, use the D-pad and Start to bring up a menu. For this particular game, A is the sole action button. Further instructions on the game proper are available in the game. 

As 587 Squadron Advance is a fast-paced game and you control a tiny little dingus 3x5 pixels in size, I suggest you first play the game in easy mode to get the hang of controlling things before moving up to normal. Hard mode may be added in in future releases.

Some issues:

• Sometimes the plane you fly will stop dead in its tracks. This is due to its path being blocked by a moving object rather than a solid wall. You will need to start moving again.
• The arrows you use to control your plane can push you out of place. It's possible to just move the player (the smiley) back into place and continue playing.
• The ZZT palette makes things hard to see due to contrast. asie and I will provide a more GBA-friendly palette in a future release.
• Based on feedback from testers, when playing the game on a real GBA, ghosting issues can affect how easy it is to respond to things on the screen. The screen being modded or not, as well as whether your GBA was a launch or later release, can contribute to this. Another reason to first try it out in easy mode!

SOURCE CODE

The source code for the OpenZoo engine is available at: https://github.com/OpenZoo/openzoo-cpp/tree/special/507squadron. The source code for the game is the .ZZT file provided as a download here.

587 Squadron Advance (the game) is (c)2021 PogeSoft and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Licensing information about  OpenZoo and other libraries used to make this GBA-playable can be accessed from within the game.

*-or, if you want to go further back, a demake of Raid on Bungeling Bay