King Bee is a single player shooting game. It concerns the exploits of King Bee Arthur and consists of two stages.
The King is well-loved among the bees of his hive and does his best to rule wisely and fairly. One day, while the King was away, the evil, sick-with-envy Giancarlo Anton invaded his hive, imprisoned his people, and ate his very crown. When news of this reached the King, he hurried home quickly. Now you must help him deal with the dastardly Anton once and for all.
The game is played using standard joystick controls. You control the King Bee at the top of the screen, whose playfield graphics represent a beehive if you really use your imagination. You can move him left and right with the joystick, and you can shoot his stinger with the fire button. He has unlimited ammo, but he cannot shoot again until his last shot has struck its target or left the screen. If the King gets hit three times, he'll die. Fortunately, he has three lives. But if you exhaust all those, it's Game Over, and you'll have to press the RESET switch to start over. Also, the game will not start until the Fire button is pressed once.
In Stage 1, you will not yet be facing Giancarlo Anton. He is too cowardly for that. Instead, he sics his strongest Goon Bug on you. The Bug starts with three bubble drones that shoot lasers at the King. They also cast a protective aura over the Bug, so it is best to deal with them before the Bug. They take three shots apiece to dispatch. Once they're gone, the Bug will take fifteen shots to defeat. If you wish, you may attempt to defeat her before her drones are gone. If you succeed, you'll be rewarded with more points than you would otherwise.
Bear in mind also that if you destroy the drones, the Bug will call in backup in the form of mites that will race across the screen and dive straight at the King. They are easily dispatched in one shot, though.
Once you have defeated his champion, you'll force Giancarlo Anton to reveal himself. Take care to dodge his homing attack, and also be mindful of his last ally, the spider that zips across the screen and fires at the King. I won't reveal all of Anton's secrets, but suffice it to say he gets angrier the more you damage him, and he can take quite a few hits. If you manage to defeat him, the King will recover his crown, and peace will be restored to the hive. Just for fun, though, the game will also begin again.
If you wish to play this game, please download the latest binary from the Releases section. The easiest way to run it would be to use the Stella Emulator. If you want a more faithful experience, you could also load it onto a Harmony Cartridge or perhaps run it on a MiSTer setup for analog video output. You can also play this game in your browser with Javatari.
On the Stella and Javatari emulators' default settings, the arrow keys will work as your joystick, and space will fire. To RESET, you can use F2 on Stella, while Javatari displays the VCS's switches on-screen.
Bear in mind that the file size is eight (8) kilobytes, so please make sure you have enough room on your storage device.
This game was made with love in DeKalb County, Georgia, by Clayton Anderson. 🍑
It is written in batari Basic.