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'''JCP:''' I guess that was the main one. Later, toward the end of the process when more people had played it, people discovered that they could sit on the first screen and just shoot tumbleweeds all the time to run up a high score. This was a criticism that was not resolved in the released version, although that [technique of scoring] was not the way the game was intended to be played.
'''GMK:''' When someone criticized part of the game how did you handle it?
'''JCP:''' There were really different levels of criticism. For example, there was a suggestion to maybe change the spaceship to a six-shooter. That type of criticism I threw out because I could clearly picture a six-shooter, and I knew I didn't want it. Other levels of criticism, like the white background indicating where the monster comes out, I had my doubts about; but I went ahead and implemented it, and felt that it was probably a good feature after I played it awhile.
'''GMK:''' Is Tombstone City more a game of strategy or skill, or a combination of both?
'''JCP:''' When the game is played as it was intended to be played, I think it can be very much a game of strategy. It does take some dexterity to manipulate the keyboard, however. Some people really have a problem using the keyboard, so from that sense, it is a game of skill. Due to the speed of reaction of the keyboard, I prefer to play the game this way rather than with joysticks. In my opinion, once you get used to the keyboard, it is very fast-and to me, it's very easy to play.
'''GMK:''' I found the joystick reaction quite fast when compared with a game like The Attack. How do you account for such a difference in speed?
'''JCP:''' The big difference between the two is because The Attack is written in GPL, a pseudo-assembler language. Tombstone was written in 9900 code, and 9900 code is, of course, quite a bit faster than GPL. In the GPL version of The Attack, I'm pretty sure they were utilizing the full speed of GPL, whereas in Tombstone we actually had to put in delay loops to keep the ship from moving too fast.
'''GMK:''' What features or elements of strategy did you put into the game that a typical player might miss seeing?
'''JCP:''' After you've played the game a while, I don't think there are really any hidden features, but there are some basic strategies that a first-time user might not realize. One of those features is what I call "dragging." That is where you have a lot of generating pairs of cacti all lined up in a row, and when the monster has generated from the first pair, you shoot it-destroying the first generating pair, and then you drag the monster over to the next generating pair and kill it next to those; it kills that generating pair, and then you drag the monster on and on until maybe you've got six generating pairs wiped out from a single monster. You do all this by positioning your spaceship so that the monster has to go by a generating pair of cactus in order to come get you. It's a chain reaction type set-up.
==Game Credits for John Plaster==
