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Lander is an arcade game that is lots of fun.  You have to land your space ship on the surface of the moon softly.  If you land too hard, you will crash.  Each time you land, you go back up to the top and a new meteor appears on the screen.  Make sure you don't hit a meteor on your way down or you will crash.  The game gets harder and harder to play as you get to higher levels because it gets tougher to avoid the meteors.

A note on the graphics:

The surface of the moon, the earth in the background and the meteor are all photographs from NASA that were put into the game.  You have to download the entire game folder, graphics and all, by RIGHT CLICKING it and saving it to your user folder in order to play.  Once you do that, open your user folder by double clicking on my computer and then your folder.  Right click on the Lander folder and choose EXTRACT from the menu that pops up.  Keep clicking next, then finish and then open the lander folder.  Now you can play the game.

The program is too long to explain in a lot of detail here, so each function has a comment (green line) that tells you a little about what the function does.  You will also recognize some, but not all of what you see from the programs we have written in the past.  Here is an example of one function and its comments.:

Method MainLoop()

    While IsKeyDown( "escape") = False

    End While

Here are some things you can try:

1. Try making more stars in the sky, then try making fewer.

2. Try changing the sounds,\.

3. Try changing the earth and the moon's surface.

4. Try changing the space ship.

5. Try changing the rocks.  You can even make your own.

6. Can you make the fire that comes out of the rocket yellow rather than red?   Can you make it green?

7. Can you make the rocks move faster (hint:  look in the SetUpProgram() routine and see if you can find the number to change.  This one is hard!

Good Luck and have fun programming.