Stock Market Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum
22A walkthrough of the ZX Spectrum game, Stock Market. From the recording originally sent to http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/ . Some notes from the submitter:
Stock Market (a.k.a. Stocks, or La Bolsa in the Spanish edition)
RZX by Jim Waterman, 2 April 2017
Recorded using Spectaculator 8.0 - playing time 25:41
Twang your red braces, wave your Filofax in the air, and shout "GREED IS GOOD!", because it's time to make a pile of cash on the stock market. Now, before you get too excited, Stock Market dates from 1983 and is written in BASIC, so don't expect sophistication, or indeed anything like a realistic experience of trying to make a million pound profit buying and selling shares in metal mining companies. But that is the object of the game, and I remember managing to win at it "first time round" - i.e. when I was still under ten (though admittedly I always played on the easy level then). It's yet another of those games I had on Argus Press Software's 90-odd game compilation that bubbled to the surface in 1987 - it wasn't even mentioned in the accompanying booklet, as it had replaced DK'Tronics' Road Toad at the last minute. I think I may well have had more fun out of this wheeling-and-dealing simulator that I would from the Frogger clone!
Anyway, these days I actually own a few shares and am familiar with the dreaded words "Capital Gains Tax" as well as the rather more friendly "Tax Return". I think I've managed to show off all the main features of the game - those two run-ins with the Inland Revenue that can decrease or increase your cash assets feature heavily, but there are also bonuses to be handed out along the way for shareholders in each of the four mines, the potential for each to be taken over by a consortium or go bankrupt if their share price gets out of hand, and (this being the 1980s after all) the potential for the miners to go on strike and withhold the payment of dividends.
As the game is in BASIC I could examine the code, and found that the difficulty level mainly affects the chances that Tax Returns and Capital Gains Tax Investigations will occur whenever there is a !! NEWSFLASH !!, harder difficulty skewing the game towards the latter. To keep the taxman away from your assets it's better to hold them in shares rather than cash in the bank (90% of which may suddenly disappear at his behest). Share prices start at £10, £50, £250 and £1250 for Lead, Zinc, Tin and Gold respectively, and the minimum and maximum values of each share can be approximated as half and double those values respectively, although sometimes they will exceed these boundaries. The bank interest rate is, frankly, absurd; 41% is the highest I've seen, and interest will be calculated after each turn, which is excellent news for those with cash in the bank (which I've just told you not to do on the hardest level) and a nightmare for anyone with a loan.
Incidentally, it is possible to win at this game without doing anything - without buying or selling a single share and relying purely on that interest rate, I made a million in 29 turns on the easiest level, and in 81 turns on the hardest level, despite the constant Capital Gains Tax setbacks.
This RZX has been brought to you inspired by Daren's recent job with Millionaire, another business program I had at the beginning of my days with the Spectrum, but at which I always ended up bankrupt. Daren used Rollback to make his million on that game; so have I here. And if I could do that in real life, or even if I could see my bank balance inflated by 41% overnight, I wouldn't be here making RZXs of 34-year-old Spectrum games, I'd be out on the trading floor making real millions.
I don't think any game sums up the 1980s more than this one. Everybody do the Safety Dance!
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