^A^DGOBASIC REVIEW^E
By HARDNOSED HARRY**
[Hardnosed Harry as you may well know is the most particular Adamite alive.
He finds fault with everything.  When I gave him the GOBASIC demo disk to
review, he complained because I hadn't gift wrapped it]

[This review is ONLY of the demo GOBASIC disk distributed by TSF and it is
expected that the final product will be more polished.]

First there are NEW COMMANDS that you will have to learn.  I would have
liked it better if they made less commands, maybe cut it down to one or
two.  Who wants all those commands.

GOBASIC has 28 BUILT IN ICONS (or little figures or symbols) that you can
call just be typing PUTICON X at h,v (X is # of icon, h is horizontal and v
is vertical).  BUT WHAT if I wanted to have my icons play foot ball. Well
with ll icons on a side, 2 more for each side for punting & field
goals,that makes 26 and ONLY leaves 2 icons for officials and you need more
than 2 officals for a football game. Only 28 icons is very impractical.

Then there is the PULL DOWN MENUS, well what about liability insurance.
What if some user pulls a menu down on top of a letter or worse an incon.
They could sue.  No I don't want pull down menus.

Dialog boxes. All you do is type startdialog and you get a dialog box and
exitdialog and it disappears.  Seems simple enough but then you must put
some dialog in it.  Well thats the catch, you have to think of some dialog
to put in the dialog box.  If I could think of dialog, I would write novels
or screen plays or something, so  there, again a totally useless feature.

Changing the foreground color by using FCLOR = X or the Background color to
be painted by using PCLOR = X, or the border color by using OUTERCOLOR X or
even the window color by WDWCOLOR f,b is simple. BUT I have a green monitor
and I will assure you that all these color changes didn't do much for me on
my green monitor.   MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE INCLUDED, FREE, A COLOR MONITOR
WITH EACH GOBASIC SOLD.  YAA, THATS A GOOD IDEA.

Also while I think of it you only get one kind of window.  What if I wanted
a bay window, or picture window, or full lenght floor to ceiling window. No
very much of a choice is given you.

NOW THIS ONE WILL REALLY MAKE YOU ANGRY, THEY  ONLY  GIVE YOU A CHOICE OF
SIX DIFFERENT FONTS.  What if you want a different font for each day of the
week, well what about that guys.  You either have to design a 7th font
(they do give you that option) or use one of the 6 build in fonts twice in
one week.   I mean, they make underwear for each day of the week.  Come on
guys, get with it.

As far as being able to underline fonts, make horizontal mirror images of
fonts, vertical mirror images, rotate fonts, reverse fonts, and even more.
Well its just going to make the fonts dizzy or upset or something and next
thing you know we will have a strike on our hands.

Another flaw in GOBASIC is while you can put the windows up, down, left or
right, what if you have them up and it rains.  What about that.  Maybe it
would be safer without any windows at all.  Also what about screens for the
windows and what about storm windows.   There is no option for storm
windows.  (Unless you paint the storm in grapics mode yourself, I guess).

GOBASIC can handle Disk drives ONE THRU SIX, a HARD DRIVE, TWO TAPE DRIVES
& A RAMDRIVE.  Well where are you going to get the money to buy 6 disk
drives and even if you do, where will you put them.  You can only stack
about 4 on top of each before they all fall over.  Another flaw.

Then they give you the ability to calculate Cosines, arctangents, logs,
square roots, tangents,etc.  Well I thought I was finished with all that
when I flunked trigonometry or was it solid geometry.  Anyway, who needs to
be reminded of all those bad memories, anyway.

I am just hitting those points that upset me the most.  Take output
settings.  Now here is where they  really stick it to you.  The go from
PR#0 all the way to PR#15.  Thats just too many choices.  I like it simple,
yes or no, black or white.  Giving you l5 output choices, I mean to screen,
Adam printer, other printer, 80 col. terminal (either EVE or OBS), etc.
That means I have to buy an 80 col. terminal to be able to use all l5
outputs.    Maybe the reason GOBASIC is so cheap is that they are going to
make money selling 80 col. terminals so you can use PR#8 & PR#9.  Who
knows.

NOW ANOTHER BUMMER.  You can draw a circle by typing RADIUS = x, CIRCLE
h,v, thats it, it draws you a circle. If you use FCIRCLE you get a filled
in circle.    For a SQUARE all you need is LENGHT = X, SQUARE h,v.  Also
FSQUARE is a filled square.  You can do rectangles just as easy.
BUT WHAT IF YOU WANT A PENTAGON OR HEXAGON OR 99 SIDED FIGURE. Well they
don't automatically give you those.  You can still get them but not with an
automatic command.   They should have gone from l sided to 99 sided figures
at least.

I won't even tell you what they do to sprites as it is too horrible to
imagine, (rotation, coloration, hiding, finding, mirroring,reversing,etc.)
. Its enough to give a sprite a nervous breakdown.   They even STAMP those
poor fragile sprites.  Just inhuman.

Then you get choices like 30 column, 40 column, 60 column screens. Who
wants to have to count all those characters to see if you are really
getting them. For all I know, I might have 29, 39, and 59 columns.

These are only some of the things I don't like about GOBASIC.  There is
also its price.  Hell, if you don't pay at least $99.99 for a program, it
can't be worth much can it???

[I must ask that you consider the source of this review, HARDNOSED HARRY,
before making a decision on GOBASIC. I have heard NO other commplaints
about GOBASIC and in fact only very good things about it.  But we felt for
balance that HARDNOSED HARRY had a right to present his point of view.]


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