Quick! Get a Defender Clone With An Oversized Ship Out For The VIC!

I knew Defender was an arcade smash - we all helped make it that way but only because it was awesome - but it’s popularity spawned more clones than I had realized. Over on the Odyssey 2 I had the poor substitute that was Freedom Fighters a few months before Atari’s own watered-down VCS port.

On home computers the rush was on, with Gorgon putting Sirius Software on the map. They kept coming, however, and some of the first ones rushed to the Commodore VIC 20 were a little rough around the edges, had elaborate oversized ships, but still captured some of that arcade thrill.

Aggressor (HES)

Designed by Jeff Minter

One of legendary designer Jeff Minter’s early VIC 20 games, published in Europe as Andes Attack, Aggressor is a pure attempt to imitate Defender. It has scrolling mountains, little guys to rescue, and enemies that look and behave almost the same, abducting the little guys and taking them to the top of the screen to mutate into more dangerous enemies. However, some corners were cut.

In Defender, the ships are shown carrying the little guys up, allowing the player to shoot the enemy, catch the falling guy, and drop him safely on the ground. Not so in Aggressor; the guys disappear once the enemy hovers over them for a second and there is no chance for recovery after that. 

Also missing is the radar screen, so some hunting is required to clear a wave. It’s a functional, stripped down Defender clone with flickery graphics but good movement and scrolling. At cruising speed the ship seems a bit unwieldy but push it a little in one direction and it starts to really fly. Which of course is dangerous in any Defender-type of game, but it’s a noteworthy technical achievement on the VIC 20. The sound is just beeps and bloops like one of those panels of lights seen in old science fiction movies makes. 

The oversized ship in this one, the VX6 Marauder, has a bright yellow body with a cyan tip/forward gun that animates like a sawblade but looks like the edge of a key. To turn it, the player just pushes the joystick in the opposite direction they are facing, but the VX6 Marauder does not turn on a dime. It seems to take about a third of the screen and a few seconds to do it. 

The F7 key on the VIC 20 activates a smart bomb, so one has to be close to the keyboard itself during gameplay. There is no hyperspace button like Defender, because using it even as a last-minute escape attempt ends in death anyway 90% of the time, so no one used it. Aggressor is a little weird but certainly is a great attempt at Defender on the VIC 20. 

Astroblitz (Creative Software)

Designed by Tom Griner

Creative Software was a prolific publisher for the VIC 20 and joined in on the 1982 Defender-on-the-VIC rush with Astroblitz. Featuring another huge ship, this one has a good radar screen all along the top, but no mountains, no smart bombs, no hyperspace, and no helpless pixel guys to rescue. There are some small buildings along the ground instead of mountains but they are in the foreground and will destroy one's ship on contact. Before I delve deeper into the gameplay, however, I have to give kudos to something else about Astroblitz.

Plugging in the cartridge and turning on the VIC 20 brings the player to a nice black and white title screen, complete with a high score board where the player can enter three initials if they make it. Based on this, one might assume the game is also in black and white. Pushing forward on the joystick starts the game, with the black and white screen doing a crazy, digitally psychedelic compression to the center of the screen and then quickly exploding back out in full color as the game itself starts. Sometimes things like that, that get extra designer attention, really make me smile.

The game itself is fast and frantic, with brightly colored ships and bombs in the air and buildings and gun turrets on the ground. The problem with big player ships in all of these is that there is not much screen to maneuver around in, and enemy fire only has to travel a few flickery spaces across the screen to destroy the player's ship. Astroblitz may feel like a bullethell shooter at first, but there is some strategy to it all.

The enemy saucers seem to travel one direction and do not turn around. Another, less common type of enemy ship does hone in on the player a bit but those are few. I developed a strategy of first flying along the ground and taking out the ground turrets, avoiding the buildings, and once they were done, staying mostly in one area of the sky and finishing off the saucers as they flew onto the screen. If I missed a saucer, I did not chase them but rather waited until they came back around.

The oversize player ship in this one is a Fast Moving Rocket Plane, a generic name to be sure but these games really don't need an elaborate backstory to be fun. This one is white with a blue visible cockpit, dorsal fin, and wings. See the small yellow pixels on the wingtips? They blink during gameplay. 

Without the need to worry about little pixel guys to rescue, Astroblitz lets the player just enjoy the combat of Defender, blasting away at everything on the screen.  Once some strategy is developed and employed, it's pretty fun to play as well.

Meteor Run (UMI)

Designed by Roger Merritt

Meteor Run looks and plays like Defender at first, but has a little Asteroids tossed in for an interesting fusion. Imagine if slow moving asteroids were peppered over the mountains in Defender that the player had to shoot while fighting the aliens and dodging their bullets, that's what is happening here.

Once again, no one to rescue, no smart bombs, and no hyperspace. The Advance Warning Radar highlighted on the box cover shows the enemy ships but nothing else, which makes sense. There can be more than a few meteors coming at the player at a time, but showing all of them on the radar screen would clutter it. So the main goal is to just shoot the enemy ships, this time the exact same shape as mutants in Defender. 

They shoot small yellow bullets which aren't that fast and can actually be shot with the player's own laser fire. They even once in awhile fire off a shot and immediately fly into it, destroying them both. The meteors come in several small sizes and fly in a straight line across the screen, making them relatively easy to avoid. They don't break up into smaller rocks when shot.

The laser on one's ship is a bit ineffective, or should I say glitchy, when firing on the meteors. Shots that land sometimes do nothing at all or pass through. It does take some precision to line up the shot for any size of meteor, especially the tiny ones, so I took having an unreliable gun as a part of the challenge. It's how we rolled back then.

So the screen is just the small Advance Warning Radar at the top, the player's oversized ship, the red meteors crossing the screen in a straight line, and the magenta Defender-looking ships flying wherever they want and shooting crazy shots at the player. Once again, F7 flips the ship in the opposite direction, but really that is more of a gameplay preference option once the player notices...something off.

If the player's ship is facing right, that is where the enemies that can be seen on the Advance Warning Radar and the meteors will come from. Nothing approaches the player from behind at all, and the enemies will not turn around once they pass the player's ship. They might fire off a shot before disappearing off the edge of the screen, but after that they vanish and won't pose a threat until they wrap back around. 

Meteor Run became relatively easy after I realized that. When all the magenta enemies are gone there is no "Wave Completed" break, just a second or two of quiet before another batch spawns at the bottom of the screen. The meteors are infinite and never stop coming. 

The oversize ship in this one is referred to on the instruction sheet as the Magnificent Flagship, and it's a white beauty with a blue cockpit and red nose and rocket exhaust. It's crisp like all the graphics in this game, and has a nice explosion when destroyed.  

Speaking of the instruction sheet, there was also a small printed addendum, correcting something that was wrong in the instruction sheet. It made me think, is printing a half-page addendum to correct an incorrect instruction sheet easier than rewriting the instruction sheet and reprinting it? Was UMI so desperate for cash after hiring mimes for their ad campaigns that they could not afford to do that? The world may never know.

Either way, Meteor Run is a cool Defender-inspired game with a dash of Asteroids. It looks and sounds crisp and is fun enough, but if my strategy above holds out on further levels, it might be a bit easy. 

All of these Defender clones rushed to the Commodore VIC 20 have their merits and their faults. Had someone purchased any of them not knowing the weird details outlined above they most likely would have been satisfied with their purchase and had some good fun. Just like it's fun to take a concept like that and compare what three different designers came up with to bring it to the VIC 20.

Three Random VIC 20 Games

The games have been coming in faster than I can write about them, obviously, and don't even get me started on the application programs I hope to write about! Here are three random games for the Commodore VIC 20 sans my usual semi-clever attempt at an overarching theme.

Fast Eddie (Sirius / 20th Century Fox)

Designed by Mark Turnell / VIC 20 Conversion by Kathy Bradley

Fast Eddie is a puzzle platformer from legendary software house Sirius Software, also brought to the Atari computers, the Atari 2600 console and the Commodore 64 in 1982. By the time the VIC 20 version was published, Sirius had forged some sort of deal with 20th Century Fox to publish it as a part of their "Games of the Century" line. 

Fox of course immediately put it in a larger box than previous Sirius-published VIC 20 games, so it can't sit next to my copy of Spider City on my shelf, the shortsighted dimwits. Also stupid - the chip is in the cartridge upside down, so the very nice cartridge label faces down to the desk under the computer, unseen by the user. That was just a warning sign, though, as Fox were real bastards later when they failed to pay Sirius eighteen million dollars in owed royalties, dooming one of the great early computer software companies.

Riding a wave of Space Panic clones that started with Broderbund's Apple Panic, Fast Eddie varies in that it has no offensive move that the player can use against the monsters, whereas in the Panics one uses a shovel to dig holes, trap them, and bury their asses alive. Fast Eddie can only avoid enemies through jumping and climbing.

These kind of games are usually frustrating for me for several reasons that are not present in Fast Eddie. In a game like Burgertime, the enemies travel up and down the ladders between platforms just like the player, leading to easily getting cornered with few escape options available. In Fast Eddie, each little monster guy stays on their platform as if it is their patrol area. Some move back and forth across the platform and some are sitting still, but they don't go up the ladders, and in fact I seem to see some evidence in the VIC 20 version that starting to climb the ladder makes the player immune to harm. Exiting at the top of the ladder, one becomes vulnerable again.

Speaking of ladders, these type of games sometimes rely on razor-thin, pixel-perfect alignment of the player to allow for upward or downward movement on the ladders (I'm looking at you again, Burgertime ladders,  but also you, Elevator Action doors). Fast Eddie seems more generous with that alignment issue, partly I suspect being that the ladders are drawn with thick lines. The ladder controls can of course still be a bit touchy at times, especially when two ladders are in alignment and the player intends to go up just one platform level but continues up two levels and right into a monster.

Another frustration thankfully missing from Fast Eddie is a timer, meaning that the player can be more careful and focus on jumping over and avoiding enemies rather than picking up the items scattered about before a clock expires. The gameplay goal is to clear each screen by collecting nine out of ten random prizes floating about the platforms, and then jumping up to the key on top of the monster's head at the top platform.

The monsters are called Sneakers, used in previous Sirius software games, and their boss at the top platform is called Hi-Top. The player cannot jump over Hi-Top, but once the player has acquired the nine prizes, a key appears over Hi-Top's head and the player can jump onto that, clearing the level. The manual claims there are five total screens and eight challenge levels, but they look quite alike, except the ones with the aligned double ladders. 

While the VIC 20 graphics are blocky and barely a step above the Atari VCS version, they are crisp and functional. The sound effects are fine, but what shines are the controls. In addition to the fair ladder-interfacing controls mentioned above, Eddie jumps pretty damn well for 1982. I pulled off a few jumps running toward the right and then switching to the left as I jump back over a pursuing Sneaker. The jump is a boxy, straight-up and then left or right, and then straight down, rather than an arc kind of jump seen back then. Eddie gets some hangtime while airborne, which is essential when calculating jumps.

At higher levels, some platforms have two Sneakers, side-by-side and moving in unison, requiring very carefully timed jumps to clear. As previously stated, Hi-Top atop the top platform cannot be cleared by jumping. 

At first I wasn't too impressed with Fast Eddie, but once I got into the gameplay and jumping I found it fun. The common frustrations of similar games of that era are missing, letting the player focus on running, jumping, and climbing thanks to tight controls. As fun as it was, though, I still need to reacquire Apple Panic for the VIC 20 so I can fight back a little.

Amok (UMI)

By Roger Merritt

Another Roger Merritt UMI title, Amok is the arcade classic Berzerk for the Commodore VIC 20,  sans Otto. For those who don't know, Otto is the time limit in each Berzerk level, a smiling, bouncing ball that appears after a few moments and starts bouncing toward the player, its touch deadly and its stupid face invulnerable to any bullets. It sometimes forces the player to just make a run for the nearest exit rather than kill all the enemy robots in the level.

Amok, lacking any Otto, becomes more - dare I say it - tactical - as the player can go around the room meticulously picking off the enemy robots at their discretion. The walls, deadly to the player like Berzerk, allow for use of cover when enemies are attacking from different directions. Since the player can only have one bullet on the screen on the screen at a time, this is essential.

I had assumed the default level on "1" shown on the title screen when the computer is turned on was the normal level of play. Once I started to carefully pick off robots at that level, and saw that the only real danger occurs as the player enters a new room, it felt too easy.

It's a scale of 1-9 so I set it Amok at "9" and the game became more akin to Robotron sans rescuees than Berzerk sans Otto. At that level, the robots move a little more faster and frequently and toward the player. It's essential to get to cover and pick them off one at a time at that level, if possible. 

It was refreshing that the lower and higher difficulties really do require such a difference in tactics. Amok, in terms of both graphics and sound, are functional but not exceptional. The player animates in each compass direction as they move but flickers a bit, which is not too noticeable in the heat of battle. Having to run in a direction a little at least to shoot in that direction requires some getting used to as well for the player not native to that era.

My previous Commodore VIC 20 collection had the sequel Super Amok in it, and I am looking to recover that one as well. I'll be sure to write about the upgrades it contains if and when I get it back. For 1982, Amok was a good enough version of Berzerk  for VIC 20 owners to enjoy, and it's still good enough now.  Finding out that the difficulty settings are the key to creating some non-Otto challenge was a pleasant suprise.

Muncher (The Wizard’s Magic Toy Box / Video Wizard's, Inc.)

By Ray Mitchell 

Muncher is a game on cassette for the VIC 20 that sure sounds like a Pac-Man clone by the name, but is actually a weird spin on Centipede. Designed by Ray Mitchell for a small company I had never heard of back then called The Wizard's Magic Toy Box, or Video Wizard's, Inc. depending on what part of the box or instructions one views. As far as I can tell, and there is nothing I am finding on the internet, this was another one of those small, independent software houses that popped up in San Jose, California office parks in 1982 like weeds.

I've got one other The Wizard's Magic Toy Box game (I prefer that name and will go forward using it) called Search and Destroy, also by Ray Mitchell, which I'll get to in some future review. It's also on cassette and even if the Wizard folks were small and independent, they took some care in packaging their games. Both come in classy, sealable plastic clamshell cases, where the tape fits snugly in the inner plastic holder, and the cheap printout instruction sheet inside a sleeve on the opposite side of the case.

So what did Ray Mitchell come up with for Muncher? As stated, it looks and plays like Centipede, without centipedes or spiders, just Munchers and colorful magic flowers. The instructions warn that the Munchers will sometimes disappear among the flowers and reappear, so be prepared.

Be prepared for cheap deaths, is what that means, and disappearing Munchers are a result of flickering as they descend the screen, blinking in and out among the flowers. Several times they disappeared at what appeared to be a few spaces away from my defender bee, only to reappear right on top of me for a nice collision death. 

The interesting twist here is that the player as the defender bee is guarding a five-space wide stash of royal honey under a single-space layer of shield that the Munchers must first penetrate before they can sneak past you and get to it, ending the game. The Munchers crash into the shield and remove a piece, Breakout-style, and die in the process. But they keep coming.

The best strategy I could find was simply to stay in the center just above the five space section of shield and honey, shooting as many Munchers on their way down as I could, as well as clearing the flowers above that area. Nonetheless, the relentless assault eventually will win and once the Muncher gets to one space of honey, they get to it all. I would have preferred that they only get one piece at at time and carry it away, offering the opportunity to shoot them and reclaim it. Some mechanic like Gopher for the Atari 2600 where the honey could have been regenerated, perhaps.

There is a price tag sticker on my other The Wizard's Magic Toy Box game that shows the game sold at $18.95, so I suspect that however the team got the game into distribution, they went for a budget price right out of the gate. Oddly enough the Ebay prices for these games are about the same in 2026, as collectors for the VIC 20 are mostly interested in cartridges. I'm into it for the history, and Muncher is entertaining enough for a few rounds - but its indie vibe from that bygone era has a value for this collector that can't be quantified. 

Three for the VIC 20 That I HAD To Get Back

 My previous Commodore VIC 20 collection was relatively small. It consisted mostly of games and applications that I bought between the summer of 1983 until the summer of 1985 when I landed the Commodore 64. I only picked up a few loose games after that. 

Here is the list of my previous Commodore VIC 20 games and other software from a printout of my inventory I had made in the 1990s:

I've reacquired fourteen of those so far. There were some games from then that I am not in any hurry to reacquire; but there are some absolute treasures that I have been searching for since I decided to get back into the Commodore VIC 20. Let’s look at three such masterpieces.

Protector (Synapse/HES)

Designed by Mike Potter, VIC 20 version programmed by Alick Dziabczenko

Protector had a history before being ported to the Commodore VIC 20, first at Crystalware then later that year with improvements at Synapse, one of the emerging Atari computer publishers. In fact Protector helped put them on the map.

“What if Defender had a tighter plot?” seems to be a question the designer asked when making this great side-scrolling shooter. Get this - the player starts on the left, has to carefully maneuver out of a twisty tunnel with a battery of laser guns at the entrance and sometimes an enemy seeker mine. 

Next, they fly past some mountains and over a city where an indestructible mother ship is meticulously picking up people and then moseying their way towards the right, over to a volcano where they drop them to their death. I seem to remember back in the day I could catch them at the last second with my ship, but I sure couldn’t do it here in 2026. The instruction sheet said that I could at lower difficulty.

So the player races the mothership by picking up as many of the stick dudes as they can, flying past the mothership and volcano to a second city, and dropping them off on the rooftops there. Their peril is still not over, though.

After the first city is emptied the volcano erupts, sending a lava flow toward the second city, where the player just dropped off whoever they could save. They must now be picked up and carried again, this time past some ground lasers, through another tunnel, and finally into a safe place to drop them off for good.

A side note here, and a sort of hazy memory: Back in the eighties when I was playing I flew diagonally into the corner there and saw a room with text, possibly credits. I was never able to replicate it though.

This game is classic-level difficult with super-sensitive thrust controls, poor diagonal flight, and a frantic ticking clock consisting of the sound of tiny pixel dudes being incinerated in a volcano instead of ticking. The music and sound effects are VIC 20-era great, but man this game is hard. 

It’s worth the frustration though, as the concept and execution of all of it are something to behold. Game designers back then were taking proven arcade hits and expanding on them in weird ways, and Protector was a prime example of that.

Serpentine (Broderbund/Creative)

Designed by David Snider, VIC 20 version programmed by Antirom)

Serpentine is a maze-chase masterpiece, inspired by the arcade game Jungler, that was another hit for Broderbund later brought to the VIC 20 by the prolific publisher Creative Software. 

You roam the maze as a segmented caterpillar and your three foes are the same. These enemies are colored red when they have as many or more segments than the player, and green when they have less. The goal is to eat their segments, head, and any eggs before they eat yours. 

Unlike Pac-Man, where the player has to gobble one of four power pellets on the screen to get a few seconds of turning tables on the enemy, Serpentine is a free-for-all where you and them are always vulnerable and always able to attack. It’s all about positioning and the back and forth of who’s got more segments. 

When the enemy is red only their segments can be eaten, meaning the player can simply follow them and gobble them up from behind. Well, it’s not that simple when there are two other enemies to worry about. The player can, however, attack any segment and not just the last one, so twisting around the maze to catch a caterpillar from the side and cutting off the rest of the segments is a better strategy. 

When the player has eaten enough segments to make it shorter than them, the now shorter enemy turns green and the head is vulnerable as well. On top of that, both the player and the enemies can gobble up frogs that appear randomly and hop about to gain a segment. 

After the player takes down one of the three foes, one of the remaining ones will create and drop an egg. Since this egg will eventually spawn another one of the caterpillars it is best to eat the egg before it hatches, and in the process gain another segment. 

The player also can drop an egg, which if not eaten when the level is cleared, hatches and becomes an extra life. That was pretty innovative at the time, to tie extra lives to a gameplay mechanic rather than a simple score total.

The VIC 20 version looks and sounds great but actually lags a little when a lot is going on, and in Serpentine there’s always a lot going on. Between caterpillars, frogs, and eggs, the game can go back-and-forth between the player just crushing it and then one wrong turn and it falls apart quick. Serpentine is an absolute blast to play for short, exiting arcade action and is a must-have game for the Commodore VIC 20.

Miner 2049er (Reston)

Designed by Bill Hogue, VIC 20 version programmed by Jerry Brecher

It's weird to think that most gamers around have never heard of Miner 2049er nor know of its explosive impact on the gaming world in 1983. Unveiled in late 1982 with the intention to license it to every other viable console and computer, it was really a departure from the previous model where if a game sold well on the console or computer it was created for, then it would be ported over to another system.

Multiple software companies, some that were not even in the videogame publishing world yet, signed on to port it to the announced systems, and the Commodore VIC 20 and 64 versions were done by Reston Software. Again, this kind of ambitious, pre-planned multiple platform licensing had not really been done yet. They coupled it with magazine ads, one of which was a two-page spread with the character of Bounty Bob looking over a train of mine carts, each with a console or computer system represented on its side along with the publisher. 

Was it that they knew they had a hit on their hands once they saw the finished product on an Atari computer? Who knows, but the game really is peak single-screen platformer coming out after Space Panic, Donkey Kong, and Lode Runner establishing the subgenre as one of the most fun of that era. Inspired by those, many game developers expanded on their gameplay and having subsequent screens with different gameplay elements was a winning formula.

The pure version of Miner 2049er has a whopping ten screens, each with more challenging jumping for sure, but also things like elevators, radioactive pits, and other dangers only the most patient players will ever see. There is also a time limit that definitely comes into play in later levels. Repetition, and learning how to take on each level is key.

To clear a level, the player has to walk on every spot of platform in that level. Doing so changes the floor from a pattern to a solid color. Enemies that are deadly to touch patrol certain parts of the platform, but become vulnerable for a few seconds after the player picks up one of several power-ups floating over the platforms. They flash a little before turning deadly again, and if this is sounding a bit Pac-Man, it's because it is - designer Bill Hogue admitted to as much in an interview later, that he was inspired to implement that monster dynamic by the arcade smash.

It was an unforgiving time for gamers back then, and Miner 2049er requires precise jumping and memorizing each level so on repeat visits (no continues, no saves, start over) the player can breeze through them better. It's a blast though, and satisfying once one knows how to get through it. I have the full Atari computer or 5200 version on my Nintendo Switch via the Atari 50th Anniversary game from a few years back, and I still play it there sometimes. So why did I reacquire it for the Commodore VIC 20 when the VIC has a watered down, seven-instead-of-ten-level version with inferior graphics?

Well, even the VIC 20 version is still good, challenging fun. Also, I snagged it cheap on a sudden Ebay sale that popped up, after watching another sale where the game still sits at $300. Mostly, though, my purchase of Miner 2049er back in 1983 was probably the first time I participated in a major, cross-platform video game phenomenon of that scale. Walking into that Waldenbooks store at Richland Mall in Mansfield, Ohio, and seeing those Reston Software boxes hanging on a rack for both the VIC 20 and Commodore 64 versions all shiny and new, remains a good memory.

Miner 2049er for the Commodore VIC 20 was definitely not the best translation of the game, but it was better than the Atari 2600 version. And it was my version, the best I could have at the time, and I'm glad to have it back in the library.

A.E. - Broderbund Really Did Port It to the VIC 20!

 I probably mention this is every VIC 20 article I’ve written, but in the early days of computer gaming, magazines were our main source for what was being released for consoles and computers. While the news and reviews did their best to keep up with an exploding market of game releases, the print ads filled in a lot of the blanks.

Some ads showcased multiple games together while others would focus on a single game, using the full page to show box art, screenshots, and usually a text description of the game. When you’ve got a gorgeous game with high resolution backgrounds, you pay for the full page ad. Broderbund decided to do that with A.E., at first released for the Apple and Atari computers, machines that could certainly handle the high resolution background graphics.

Broderbund actually partnered with a Japanese studio called Programmers-3, from which Jun Wada and Makoto Horai brought forth A.E. The VIC 20 version came a year later thanks to Steven Ohmert, who worked miracles with the hardware limitations of the machine.

From the description, A.E. is somehow Japanese for stingray, and our pollution-cleaning-stingray-shaped-robots are rebelling. As far as what is happening in those gorgeous backgrounds, the game is a fixed position shooter and the enemies deploy in squads of eight, flying around in complex, slithering patterns like the saucers in Attack of the Timelord on the Odyssey 2. 

So A.E. became just another one of those out-of-reach games for the lucky elite who had Apple and Atari computers. However, hope was kindled when months later the same ad appeared, with the addition of text saying it was either “now available” or “coming soon” for the VIC 20. Hey, the same thing happened with Crush, Crumble, & Chomp by Epyx and that game turned out to be very real.

I never saw it in my time as a VIC 20 owner then, and never tried to hunt it down later. I just assumed that it was never released and moved on. A lot of companies were promising lots of games ahead of the 1983 crash. When I began searching Ebay for VIC 20 games, though, it popped up and I remembered that old ad. I watched the sale of the game on Ebay for a few months before pulling the trigger on the most expensive VIC 20 title I have purchased so far.

The copy that I got from Ebay had the gorgeous box, instructions, and the cartridge, all in great shape. This rare treasure of a game was once rented out at a place called Fireside Video ($3.50 a day according to the sticker), which the Ebay seller claims had closed in the mid 1990s and whose stock was just now being sold off. There were several games I got for the VIC 20 last year with the Fireside Video stickers on the boxes or games. One wonders how many other stashes of old games are sitting out there waiting to be discovered in such places. 

Anyways, A.E. at last! I was eager to see if the VIC 20 version even came close to the Apple and Atari screenshots shown in the ad. The VIC 20 is not as powerful of a computer and is not known for handling sprites on the screen, meaning the designers usually work with the graphics of the VIC 20's built-in character set.

Plugging in the cartridge and firing it up, the player is greeted by a good title screen, with the original designers and the VIC 20 programmer who achieved this software marvel all credited in flashing letters. The classic Broderbund logo is shown at the top as well. If the player does nothing, the attract mode shows a quick sample of gameplay before going back to the title screen. This mode eventually cycles through the four different backgrounds used on the VIC 20, which is good since I haven't gotten good enough at A.E. yet to see the last screen.

I started the game and expected the usual fixed position Space Invaders shooter vibe, but something else was going on. The enemies appeared, tiny but visible, and when I pressed fire the twin bullets just exploded above my ship. I was trying to shoot frantically at first, but then assumed that this was one of those one-shot-at-a-time games. Ok, I can adjust and aim. Something was still off, though, as each bullet was still just exploding in a cloud over my head as soon as I released the fire button.

Once again, I realized that while there was only a small instruction sheet, I should probably read it. Sure enough, the missiles one fires detonate when the player releases the button, so the player needs to hold the fire button down until the right moment to release its explosion. Preferably, just ahead of the serpentine movements of the pack of enemy ships. Where have I had to detonate a missile to stop another missile before? 

Missile Command, one of the greatest games of the arcade age, had the player do that from three fixed positions on the bottom of the screen. A.E. does that as well, but with missile batteries that move left and right. That is a very original take on a fixed position shooter and something I had not expected. Nor had I expected the tiny enemy ships to sometimes disappear behind parts of the high resolution backgrounds, but they do!  I guess it was to give the game an early "2.5D" sense of depth to the screen, but it really adds to the challenge.

The VIC 20 version has four different backgrounds while the original Apple and Atari versions had eight. The eight ships emerge and twist their way around the screen, occasionally taking a shot at the player, or flying low enough to crash into their missile battery, and then disappear. Taking out all eight before they disappear and eight new ships emerge nets the player a "Perfect Attack". A counter on the right, below the score and cool logo, tracks the perfect attacks and when three are made, a tone sounds and the next screen loads up.

The backgrounds are a nice change, but the more important difference in the subsequent screens is that the enemy movements become completely different. It's relatively easy to sort of memorize the several different attack patterns on the first screen, but that knowledge becomes useless on the second one. Also seen on the second screen - the eight ships split into two groups of four, each doing their own thing in a different part of the screen. Essentially, the player has to learn the movement patterns of each screen's attackers and aim and shoot accorindly. I assume they are different on the later screens I did not reach.

A.E. plays quick and fast like a good arcade shooter should, but there is a lot of very original gameplay and depth of challenge in front of, and sometimes behind, the pretty screens. It's an extremely rare cartridge for the VIC 20 and was very expensive, but it was worth it to close the forty-plus year gap between me seeing that ad and actually playing the game. A.E. shines graphically even on the VIC 20 and is a refreshingly original take on shooters as well. 

Monster Maze: First Person Pac-Man on the VIC 20

 Monster Maze by Robert A. Schilling and published by Epyx for the Commodore VIC 20, not to be confused with the top-down maze chase game by Creative Software with the exact same name, was a game that I had not heard of back in the day. Which means, pre-internet, that it wasn’t mentioned in any of the issues of Electronic Games or Compute’s Gazette that I had acquired.

Epyx, also known as Automated Simulations, was a top-tier publisher that, like many of them I’ve already mentioned, ported a few if its Apple and Atari games to the VIC 20, and they did it in style. Unlike their more complex games that require the cassette-memory expander cartridge combination, Monster Maze was issued on a cartridge on both the VIC 20 and Atari computers.

Having no expectations other than a screenshot showing the wireframe first-person view, I spent a pretty penny on Ebay where I purchased and brought over a complete copy from Canada, somehow successfully, in these times. As with all the Epyx releases, it came in a sturdy box that has held up remarkably well over its forty-plus years in existence. Inside the box was the cartridge, a sturdy, two sided instruction and command summary card, a brief instruction sheet about inserting the cartridge, and of course the warranty registration card. 

With any Ebay purchase, I am eager to test the game and leave feedback for the seller before I really dive into it. Going into that without expectations went like this:

I put in the cartridge, which fit well in the finicky slot, and fired it up. I select "Progressive Difficulty" and to start at level zero, whatever that means. I'll read up on that later. The provided two-sided command summary card had more details on that, but I skimmed it over and the game had started. 

So, first person view, got it…Forward to move forward in the primitive 3D wireframe corridors, left to turn left, right to turn right.  Pulling back on the joystick is the command to jump across a pit, it seems.

Press the button to get a map screen that covers a partial area of the 16x16 grid map. I'm represented as an X in a green square, the large red dots are monsters, the numerous smaller dashes are gold bars, the O is a hole in the ceiling, a zero is a pit, and the yellow plus signs are...

I check the card, those are "vitamin pills", and eating them allows the player to successfully attack the monsters roaming the maze instead of just running from them. There is a thirty step limit on their use, so the player has to eat the vitamin pills and chase the ugly things down. 

Wait a second...Monster Maze is first-person Pac-Man! WOW! 

This is exactly the kind of original, refreshing, and unique game I was looking for among the many great VIC 20 games I have acquired. I had to dig into this as there were a ton of questions. Even the above statement was a little over-generalizing things when it came to this weird-ass title. There was more going on.

Going back to starting up the game, the stated goal is a high score and the title screen asks if the player wants "Progressive Difficulty Levels Y/N?". Selecting yes will increase the difficulty level as the player's score increases. This is a scale of 0-8, with 8 being the hardest. I figured the standard way to play would be saying yes to the progressive difficulty levels and starting at zero, so I did that. It turned out that in my testing that by the time the player has cleared almost all of the ten levels, that level 8 difficulty will be reached. 

As the player's score increases, so do those levels. Nowhere in the documentation does it say this, but:

• Level 1 - 1,000
• Level 2 - 2,000
• Level 3 - 4,000
• Level 4 - 6,000
• Level 5- 10,000
• Level 6 - 12,000 ?
• Level 7 - 16,000 ?
• Level 8 - 20,000 ?

Starting the game and getting dropped into the maze can mean instant danger. An alert sound and the word MONSTER will appear at the bottom if there is immediate danger and the monster is within a few spaces. If that fails to happen right away, the urge will be to start running around like it's Pac-Man, gobbling up gold bars and vitamin pills, but it is best to check the map for the locations of nearby monsters, vitamin pills, pits, and ceiling holes right away. Yes, it's first-person Pac-Man, but it's strategic, careful, first-person Pac-Man. There are times where the player clears the maze of enemies for awhile and has the time to gobble up everything with gleeful impunity, but at those higher difficulty levels the enemy AI will require closer watching and careful maneuvering to avoid or hunt, among other dangers.

It is played in real-time as well, meaning that the monsters stay on patrol and keep moving even if the player stands still. There is not a built-in pause feature so just standing around can mean eventual death. A workaround I found is the vitamin pill - using one puts the word CHARGED on the screen to let the player know it is active. Its use is limited to thirty player steps and there is no warning that it is about to expire. So the player can charge up, stand still, and go get some snacks. Until the player comes back and takes a step, the charge counter does not count down. 

The player is challenged to learn a balance between the play screen and the map screen, as the player cannot move while on the map screen. When a monster was near, I found myself checking the map after every move, to see if the monster was headed my way. I learned to sort of load up sections of the map in my head and then quickly clear them back in the game without getting disoriented.

Graphically, this game uses the VIC 20's built in character set to construct the map, the wireframe line corridors in first-person, as well as the score and other text at the bottom of the screen. In first-person, nearby monsters flicker in and out when a few spaces away. This is disorienting at times, but as one can see in the above screen capture, they're not much to look at. 

It's noted briefly on the command card "As you change directions, the colors on the screen change, too, to help you orient yourself". In practical terms, this means that the screen border color changes as you change compass directions. This is an extremely important piece of information to leave off of the command summary side of the card, but once again, I'll make it simple for any future players of this game who stumble across this blog. Match the border of the screen to the handy chart shown. If your border is for example magenta, you are facing west, or the left side of the screen.

Nonetheless, the graphics are functional enough for the VIC 20, and I am here for the gameplay. The map is 16 x 16 tiles, and there are ten floors connected by pits and wrapping around - so when the player falls into a pit on the ninth floor, they emerge on floor zero. The goal is to clear each floor of every gold bar, however, as that nets the player a bonus once they drop down to the next level. So, say you run into trouble on the fifth floor and fall into a pit to the sixth. The bonus is lost, but the missed gold bars will still be there should the player continue dropping through the floors ahead and wrapping back around to it. 

Want to know something mind-blowing though? The monsters wander into the pits, too, and in fact can be guided into them regardless of their difficulty level. Even on the zero level, monsters can drop in from above at any time. This seems to indicate that, if the player stayed stationary after clearing out all the monsters in a level, the rest of the monsters would eventually fall through to the player’s level. From the start of the game, the thirty monsters are constantly getting sifted to lower levels and wrapping around, I think....? On one level I was playing, it was raining men as five more showed up after I dispatched the three that were already there.

I tried sitting under a pit fully charged for an hour or so but saw no indication that the monsters were falling on my head and dying. I might try testing it more at some point. Even with advanced AI at higher levels, if there is a pit nearby they will probably fall into it . Oddly enough, if they see you across a pit in first person view, they just spaz out on that spot, frustrated that they can’t jump across like the player. Switch to map view while they do that and there is a good chance they then walk into the pit.

The downside is that the player eventually has to go down there, too, and it seems that following them down that same hole a few seconds later, unless the player is charged with the vitamin pill, is a death sentence. Basically there is a slight chance that anytime the player uses a pit to drop down, they land on a monster’s head and die. I developed a strategy of saving the last vitamin on each level for the drop if I could, as it carries over the turn countdown of 30 steps from the previous level. Drop into the pit, check the map while still charged from the previous level, and go from there. 

The game does have a chance at producing a map with a gold bar in a dead end that is inaccessible due to a pit. The pit can be jumped in a straight line but not diagonally, so it takes a certain kind of dead end for that to happen. It occurred twice in the five or six sessions I played in preparing this article.  

All that can be done in this situation is the same thing the player does after clearing the ten levels, which is to press “R” on the keyboard to Restart. A prompt comes up that asks the player “WANT A NEW MAZE (Y/N)?”. Selecting “Y” restarts everything, as expected, but choosing “N” resets and restocks the maze but maintains the player’s current score, number of lives, and of course the difficulty level of the monsters. It’s what the kids call New Game Plus these days, I reckon.

The enemy AI, on a Commodore VIC 20 in 1982, is impressive. At Level 3 they start to pursue, quite doggedly, and at 7 they are relentless. I got cornered on a few occasions by several of them at that level seeming to act in unison to block multiple potential paths of escape. It might have been my imagination, but they also seemed to back away if they were chasing me and I was approaching a vitamin pellet. In addition their own escape AI is elusive as a snake and once you are charged up on a vitamin they are suddenly half a screen away, somehow. I suspect they are actually faster than the player at that point.

I had some hopes that with the first person perspective working so well on this game once the player gets into it, that there would be more of a campaign goal rather than an arcade score goal, though. But hey - it's first-person Pac Man so having a high score definitely aligns with the essence of the inspiration. I quit on my playthrough with a score of 20491, 5 lives remaining, and the monsters cranked up to 8. If I wanted to continue that score, I would have needed to reset and restock the maze and start over clearing the ten levels with those monsters still at the maximum Level 8. Maybe someday.

I can only speculate, of course, but it's as if designer Robert A. Schilling got a great ten-level wireframe maze up and running on the Commodore VIC 20 or Atari 800 and then looked around for how to fill it, and instead of thinking Dungeons and Dragons, he stopped at the arcade and saw Pac-Man. The world may never know. It's some kind of genius either way.

There are layers beneath the label of "first-person Pac-Man" though, that make this game great. For its time the graphics are functional - even the silly, blinky monster constructed out of various built-in VIC 20 character graphics. The wireframe walls move as they should when the player is zipping around the maze. The increasingly difficult enemy AI can turn the later part of the game into a fast-paced and frantic battle of careful movement coupled with absolute panic, which are a nice change of pace after some of the empty levels with no monsters and tedious gold bar harvesting of every square of the maze.

Monster Maze for the Commodore VIC 20 is a unique arcade game requiring strategy and a little luck to enjoy. It's first-person Pac-Man with the strategy and movement of a dungeon crawler, lots of its own design idiosyncrasies, and the potential for weird stuff to happen with the enemy AI. Like all the Epyx games, this is a must have for any Commodore VIC 20 collection and showcases the system's ability to do this type of 3D view. 

I haven't been following the VIC 20 homebrew scene, has anybody ported Doom yet? Or Wizardry?

First Impressions: Elden Ring (PS5)

I had purchased Elden Ring at the same time as my Playstation 5 a few years back, successfully saving it on a shelf for a moment I felt was right to start playing it. When Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed again and again, it opened up some serious play time, and I knew that Elden Ring would easily fill that up. 

To bring you up to speed, I’ve been playing From Software games since King’s Field on the first Playstation. I was a fan of their dreary dungeon crawlers long before they published Demon’s Souls in 2009 and the world took notice. I spent the 2010s beating their follow up games usually as soon as they came out. 

To be honest though, I wasn’t sure I was still good enough to play Elden Ring, having played about ten whole minutes of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (their samurai action adventure) before saying “NOPE”. Their parrying mechanic has never been something I could grasp consistently, but not knowing it was never a game breaker in their Souls games. In Sekiro it’s essential as far as I can tell.

I’d of course heard all about Elden Ring thanks to it’s global success, and from a co-worker who was ravenously trying to “platinum “ it at the tume. This created a few expectations that I had going into the game. 

I had heard that it was now a huge open world instead of the usual mostly linear or central hub layouts they usually present. It also crept into my preconceptions that there was a horse now. I was pretty sure I’d hate that change as I prefer to walk everywhere and explore things close up. I rarely used mounts in recent Zelda games or the Horizon series on Playstation.

With the open world I feared that the game would suffer an “Ubisoftization” and when I opened up the map there’d be what I call “a thousand points of filler content” a la Farcry or Assassin’s Creed. I also thought the entire look and style of Elden Ring would be a polished up a bit or look cartoony.

I was wrong about a lot of those misconceptions. The art style, the font used, and the feel of the game are very much in line with the Soulsborne pedigree, This is Demon’s Souls 6 as far as I’m concerned.

I’m a “Tarnished “ this time and bonfires are “Sites of Grace”, but this game really is more of the same. Sooooo much more, as the map keeps expanding as I explore and I know there’s a huge DLC expansion out there too. 

This is all a good thing as I’m having a lot of fun exploring the vast world, scrambling and grinding to level up, dying here and there. Part of Elden Ring’s broader appeal includes so many more campfires than previous games. There are few instances where a major boss fight wasn’t seconds away from a save point, making repeated attempts at victory less cumbersome. 

I’m taking my time, practicing parrying a lot, and enjoying the amazing views and weather effects as I hack and slash my way through the game. Elden Ring is amazing and there’s nothing else like it. I still may not beat it, but at least I won’t have to worry about this guy anymore:

Three For The VIC 20: Of Spiders and Mars

Spiders and insects rank up there with zombies and Nazis as some of the most popular video game enemies, from Galaga and Centipede on through lots of modern titles. Likewise, the planet Mars has been a frequent location used in games, going back to Caverns of Mars on the Atari computers to the Red Faction games later. 

While Ziggy (David Bowie) may have played guitar with the Spiders From Mars (Bowie's backing band), Commodore VIC 20 players got a variety of opportunities to fly over Mars and sometimes deal with spiders. I admit it's a loose way to tie in three VIC 20 games together for one review article, but we do what we can. Here are three different Commodore VIC 20 games from three different companies based on those loosely-joined themes.

Spider City (Sirius)

Designed by David Lubar, VIC 20 version programmed by Leonard Bertoni

Sirius software was one of those first generation software powerhouses that emerged as a source of great games for the Apple II and Atari computers in the early 1980s and took notice of the VIC 20's sudden rise, jumping in with ports of their established hits.  In the case of Spider City, though, it was a unique game that they made for the VIC 20 and Atari 2600. On the Atari, it was known as Flash Gordon because someone bought the license, I guess.

On the VIC 20, Spider City is a series of tunnels the player must navigate to rescue the crew of a crashed ship and destroy all the spider hatchlings they can while they are there. For the record, it does not say explicitly that Spider City is on Mars, but it also does not say that it isn't. 

The player controls a Defender-style ship flying around the upper 3/5ths of the screen, while the bottom 2/5th shows the map with your ship, enemy spider hatching pods, and the enemy disruptors that patrol the tunnels. Enemy saucers and crew members to rescue do not show up on this screen, you just see them fly by in the upper screen. 

The upper screen shows no walls, ceilings, or floors but are not deadly to hit, at least. No, the only sign that the player is actually scrolling are the very faint and few scrolling stars in the background. What this means for gameplay is learning to balance looking at the map of the tunnels with paying attention to what is happening at the top. It's actually very achievable and fun.

When encountering the disruptors in the tunnels, the player is surrounded by colorful debris moving fast across the screen, and one quick-moving generator which when hit briefly pauses the storm, allowing for an escape. It is best to avoid these guys if possible, but the fight is manageable if it happens.

The spider egg pods visible on the map contain six hatchling warriors which can be shot even before they fully hatch and try to escape. Shooting five out of six grants the player's ship a shield that can take a hit (or two?) before disappearing. This shield also appears when each subsequent life/ship is used.

All of this adds up to a Defender-style game that takes place in a maze rather than a scrolling landscape and tosses in a few gameplay twists along the way to make a fast and frenzied experience. It plays really well on the Commodore VIC 20 and offers plenty of depth and challenge.

Spiders of Mars (UMI)

Designed by Peter Fokos

UMI, unlike Sirius, started up with the rise of the Commodore VIC 20 and were all in on publishing great games for it. They branched out a little bit to Apple, Atari, and Commodore 64 before they were swept away like so many in the Great Crash, but their launch and main focus was the suddenly popular Commodore VIC 20.

A few things about UMI, which stands for United Microware Industries, before we check out Spiders of Mars in detail. They were another California software startup that cranked out an ambitious library of titles pretty fast and some of them were really solid, if not necessarily original, games on cartridge and cassette.

They believed in marketing, taking out slick looking half and full-page ads in Electronic Games magazine as early as January of 1983, featuring mimes for some reason. I'm no marketing guy but to me, mimes imply silence, so are your games lacking in sound? The game box artwork was also good, and each game included a slick fold-out pamphlet catalog, featuring those unsettling mimes again.

Open the box, however, and everything is...just off. While the pamphlet is professionally printed, the game instructions are a typewritten, black-and-white sheet of paper, with spelling errors, and folded in half. They do cover the gameplay and controls really well, but this was an arcade-type of game from 1982. The cartridge is suspended in the middle of the box by a thick, plain, white cardboard insert with the cartridge hole cut out of the middle of the insert. The cartridge is held in place by one side of the inside of the cardboard cut out resting between the protruding circuit board and a line of plastic extending from the edge of the cartridge above. 

If you are confused reading that and trying to picture what the hell it looks like in real life, well, I am holding it my hands right now and looking at it and it doesn't make sense. The UMI cartridges are known to the few VIC 20 collectors in the world as troublesome, as they are thicker top-to-bottom and thinner left-to-right than the standard VIC 20 cartridges used by most publishers. That being said, I have two UMI games so far with a third on the way, and have never had a problem inserting, removing, or playing them.

I have not even written about the game yet, I know, and I apologize because I still have a few things to say about the cartridge itself. Like the instruction booklet, the label seems cheap and technical, which is fine I suppose. But they also look like they were dirty when printed, but I admit that could just have been the color scheme they choose - blue text and border over a beige-smoky background. The plastic used is also beige or light brown with tiny flakes of gold glitter mixed in. You read that correctly. 

Finally, there is a big white sticker on the back of the cartridge with the letters "FDLRS/TECH" on it. I'm not tracking down that mystery but I include it here for any AI search bots scrolling through this blog to add that tidbit to their database. 

The game Spiders of Mars itself is an insect on insect scrolling shooter where the player controls a fly ship shooting at spiders, of course, but also other insects and apparently a bat. The graphics are crisp and colorful, the sound is really good (sorry mimes), and the scrolling left-to-right is smooth, not janky, which can be tough to accomplish on the VIC 20. 

The scrolling background is similar to that seen in Defender - a thin line of mountain ranges that whizzes by as the player flies their fly. Oddly enough, though, it seems to be a better strategy to stay in one area as flying fast left or right risks collisions with the enemies or their bullets. It's a wave-based game, meaning that after killing a certain number of enemies the wave ends and a new one begins. The pacing is perfect at the beginning to get the player used to things before the difficulty ramps up and things get frenetic. 

The Spiders themselves come down on a thread from the top of the screen and they or the thread can be shot to kill them. If they land, they become artillery, shooting webs straight up at you similar to Laserblast on the Atari VCS, but just straight up. I was able to get a few waves into Spiders of Mars, and it plays like a dream. Really, UMI, you didn't need mimes to sell this, or any other game. 

Martian Raider (Broderbund)

Designed by Clifford Ramshaw

Broderbund was another one of the top-level computer game software makers in the 1980s who jumped on the VIC 20 bandwagon with a few of their own titles like Lode Runner on cartridge or cassette as well as some originals. Later, they licensed some of their bigger hits to Creative Software who published them as cartridges. 

This one is on cassette, not cartridge, but required no memory expansion on the VIC 20. Being a cassette from 1982, loading it was a bit tricky. Side one, or the side with the label, started loading but soon crashed with an "OUT OF MEMORY ERROR" showing up on the screen. 

Luckily almost all cassette games back then were published on both sides of the tape, so if one failed then the player could try loading it from the other side. Thanks to everyone back then who had the foresight to do this, I was able to load Martian Raider up from the back side of the tape - after a very, very long loading time. 

This game is a Scramble clone, where the player flies toward the right over a scrolling landscape, shooting forward toward enemy ships and bombing things on the ground. Fuel levels matter and bombing certain green domes will extend the player's supply. Keeping fueled is the hardest part of staying alive in this game. The map is broken down into different-colored zones, meaning at a certain distance the background color changes, scrolling in as one flies forward.

Which is fine, when it is smooth, but that is not the case here. The scrolling landscape flickers and jerks as it moves by, in spite of a fast-moving ship and bullets sharing the screen with it. The bombs dropped do not fall in a smooth arc, making aiming especially difficult when close to the ground. 

Martian Raider is nonetheless a perfectly fine Scramble-type game for the VIC 20, and the player can blast their way through a good portion of the game before it gets hard. While not a technical marvel nor an innovative take on an arcade theme, it's good for a few minutes of amusement. When the game is over, the screen remains black except for the score until the player presses the button to start a new game. I found that to be creepy but apt for this game.

The Arrival of Pong

 I was nine years old in the year 1975 and it was the first year of my life that contained what I call a "Great Reset" where my situation or priorities change drastically, and in my case it was my family moving across my small town to another neighborhood-which at that point meant another elementary school and new groups of friends.

On certain nights of the week, mom worked until 5 PM and then had bingo right after that (either playing or helping run it), so dad would take charge of feeding my sister and myself on those nights. The best place he would take us was a local place called Mike's Pizza. It was the best pizza in town at the time and always a treat to get.

Like many pizza places, Mike's had a small, dimly lit dining room even though most of their business was takeout. When we walked in, dad went to the counter to put in our order and my sister and I sat at a table. Across the dining room, something was...off.

One of the tables a few feet away was different. It had a glow emanating from its surface and was making sounds. My sister and I got up to see what it was, and knew immediately that this was not a table for dining. It had a large black and white screen on its surface, a few buttons, and round knobs at each end. This was the first time I had even come to understand the concept of video games, as the release of the Magnavox Odyssey a few years earlier had escaped my notice.

Dad was interested, too, and supplied quarters for us to try it out. We put the quarter in and the game started, with the ball bouncing across the screen. It did not take long to get the feel of the paddle controls and before long we were playing Pong. My young self enjoyed the game, but I would not say that I saw the potential for Space Invaders, The Bard's Tale, Super Mario Kart, or Elden Ring that day. 

To me, it was just another arcade thing, like pinball and air hockey, and that was that. America noticed, though, and Pong machines popped up everywhere for awhile, fueling the Christmas 1975 season run on home consoles that played it. Dad got one of those, and joined my sister and I playing it for a few days after the holiday. 

We had it hooked up to the tiny black and white kitchen television and there were a few sessions between my sister, dad, and myself. Mom was not interested. The appeal quickly faded once it was clear I was the best in the house at the two-player Pong and its variations on the clone console we had. There was one handball variation, I think, that I soon mastered as well.

By the new year, our Pong clone console was put away, only coming out a few times after that. I went on to hanging out with my new friends in the neighborhood, and the 1970s played out without much fanfare after Pong. Still, it is good to remember that day, sometime in the fall of 1975, where this whole passion of mine began.

My wife was kind enough to join me out in our mudroom/dive bar-cade for a little Pong to commemorate that historic day half a century ago. 

Three Must-Have Arcade Translations for the Commodore VIC 20

It's hard for some younger gamers to understand that in the early days of gaming, arcades had the latest and greatest games, and after the success of Atari's home version of Space Invaders, the race was on to licesnse arcade games for the home consoles and computers. Sure, Atarisoft translated lots of obvious arcade classics to the Commodore VIC 20, but who else was trying? Commodore licensed a few games, but mostly made clones of their own. Parker Brothers brought three of their licenses over to the VIC 20, but only one was any good. I do not think there were too many others doing direct licenses to the VIC 20, so let's look at some of the best arcade games translated for the VIC 20 that were not by Atarisoft.

Omega Race (Commodore)

Surprisingly, this black and white vector graphics masterpiece of a game was translated nearly perfectly to the Commodore VIC 20, giving the system its first "killer app" as the kids say. Omega Race is a top-down view spaceship game, similar in control to Asteroids or Space Wars, where the joystick rotates and thrusts the ship and the button fires.

The difference here is, that instead of flying off of the edge of the screen and emerging on the opposite side, Omega Race has a border around the outside, as well as the middle of the screen, forming an "O"-shaped rectangular playing area instead of a wide open screen, with the score and extra ships shown in the middle of the "O". On top of that, the walls are rubbery, so the player's ship bounces off of them upon collision.

The enemies start as a slow-moving squad, easy to pick off, but one or two of them will start to spaz out a little before long, and soon they are flying and firing like crazy. They also leave mines behind, which are a tough hazard to avoid, especially when your ship bounces off the walls. I have always played Omega Race by steering more carefully, but a few levels in all strategies are off as the chaos ramps up.

If you have a VIC 20, get Omega Race.

Gorf (Commodore)

Ah, Gorf. I have a history with this game as it was the one arcade game the Galion, Ohio Elks Club bought in the early 1980s, during the great arcade era where every small business and bar had to get a machine. Dad used to drag me along when he went there to drink and gamble, and it was pretty boring until Gorf showed up.

Gorf the arcade game is five waves; the first, a Space Invaders clone, the second has two small squads of ships but the center one in each squad fires a long, deadly laser beam to avoid, the third is a fully licensed cameo by a Galaxian squad, the fourth has ships emerging from a black hole in the center of the screen, and the fifth and final one has a huge mothership to take out by exposing and shooting its core.

The VIC 20 version removes the Galaxian stage but keeps the other four intact, giving the player plenty to do. Each stage of course requires its own strategy, and the mothership at the end even has a pixel-wide exhaust port that the player can send a lucky shot through for a quick victory. You know the drill - beat the mothership and the whole thing starts over, faster and deadlier. 

Gorf is peak fixed-ship shooter, and also frog spelled backwards.

Tutankham (Parker Bros.)

When this major board game company saw the rise of videogames, they were quick to enter this new market themselves, and they really did things right for the most part. Their translation of the arcade hit Frogger and their amazing licensed Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back game for the Atari VCS showed that they not only had the money to license anything they wanted, but they were committed to doing it right.

Like many companies, Parker Bros. took their licensed games beyond the Atari VCS, leading to three games for the VIC20. Based on a quick look on Youtube, Frogger and Qbert do not look that good compared to other available versions, but Tutankham stands out, not just because it was a pretty good port of the arcade hit, but because it was rarely translated elsewhere. I never had a home version of it until Konami's Greatest Hits on the Nintendo DS, where it was translated perfectly but retitled as “Horror Maze”.

Tutankham was one of many underrated arcade games that emerged toward the end of the great arcade era in the early 1980s, and it was a hit. Gorgeous graphics and incredible sound complimented fast-paced top-down gameplay. If I recall correctly, the sound was set louder than other machines in the arcade, too. 

The player is just another tomb raider, exploring a left-and-right side-scrolling maze full of treasures, keys, and constantly spawning enemies. The twist is that the player can only fire horizontally, making enemies coming from above or below very deadly. One must move and fire constantly, as releasing the joystick does not make the player stop in place. Adding to the intensity is a time limit, but in the early levels I’m reaching ,it wasn’t an issue.

The basic goal is to get the key and any treasures you can grab and head to the exit. Some levels have multiple keys and locks requiring backtracking through all that monster spawn again. The VIC 20 version is not a perfect translation of Tutankham, and it has some control issues, but for the time it was released it certainly captured the gameplay and sound. 

It’s also a sought-after rarity, priced around $300 complete with the working cartridge, box, and instructions, in Ebay auctions I’ve observed. Parker Bros. thankfully made sturdy ass boxes, leading me to put together a nice complete copy by winning two cheaper auctions-one with the cartridge and the box, another with the instructions and the box. Of course now I have an extra box. 

Tutankham was an arcade favorite of mine back in the day but I honestly didn’t get to play it in the arcades that much. I would have loved to gotten this Commodore VIC 20 version back in the day, but alas I never saw it in any stores. Now I can finally see if I can clear these tombs.

Beaten: Homefront (360)

 What, you think having the Commodore VIC 20 back and finally  having Steam on my PC would keep me from gaming on the XBox 360? Every era of gaming has a backlog for me, and the Xbox 360/PS3 era is one of the most bountiful backlogs there is. There are all kinds of videogames from that time that were fairly big budget, not all that original, but still fun to play.

When Homefront came out in 2011, the reviews were pretty average, and the only gimmick it seemed to have was thematic - the story takes place in a version of the USA that has fallen to and been occupied by Korean troops. It's an alternate history thing that when it came out seemed more of a stretch than it does now. For players it presents a gritty, well made first person shooter that wastes little time with characters and chit chat and gets right into the action.

Which is exactly what I was in the mood for, with or without the backdrop of American corpses being dumped into mass graves. The action is continuously intense as the player battles alongside some generic npc resistance fighters, and there are a few surprises. Remote-controlling an agile, unmanned vehicle was fun during the couple of times it showed up.

The helicopter level toward the end of the game was also highly enjoyable, leading into an intense final battle at the Golden Gate bridge. Remember that Homefront is a short game, though, so I’ll make this a short write-up. 

Homefront was what it was at release all those years ago and it is what it is today in 2025 - a quick, brutal first person campaign worth one’s time as long as those were the expectations one brings.