Originally a product for the Amiga range of computers, Blitz Basic was a massive hit among the homebrew games programming crowd with its easy-to-learn language constructs and advanced graphics and sound handling support. Now it's been ported over to the PC, allowing a new generation of wannabe games programmers to exercise their creativity and give the professionals a run for their money.
From the off it's only fair to say that Blitz Basic is rooted in the 2D world--there's no support for 3D here so budding Half-Life programmers are out of luck. That said Blitz Basic tackles 2D games more effectively than anything else on the market today.
File creation is carried out through a simple yet effective development environment which is equipped with a comprehensive online help manual which covers command syntax, introductions to various programming concepts and more.
A debugger is also provided to allow troublesome code to be stepped through and a full variable monitor keeps a watchful eye on the program internals so you can see if anything is going wrong, and where it's occurring.
The completed code can then be compiled into an executable file which can then be distributed. The output code is incredibly compact and Blitz makes extensive use of DirectX 7+ for its display routines keeping file sizes down and compatibility high. The speed of the finished code is pretty astonishing too--thousands of objects moving onscreen at any one time are possible without any noticeable slowdown on more powerful PCs.
It's worth bearing in mind that Blitz Basic is not one of those awful tools which you throw some graphics and an MP3 file at and expect a Shoot-em-up to fall out of it at the click of a button, it's a programming language and as such may not be to everyone's taste--that said I managed to get a passable Space Invaders out of it in less than two hours.
However, if you're brave enough to take the plunge and have the time to learn enough to start creating, Blitz Basic is a fabulous package and worth every penny of the asking price. --Chris Russell
