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. 

Beaten: FreshWomen Season 1 and 2 (PC/Steam)

Warning: This article discusses an adult visual novel which has scenes of intense hot sex between consenting fictional characters. Stop reading now if you’re uptight about that stuff.

I decided to take a look around Steam's massive store of offerings for something different and I came across something very different- a whole adult section filled with mostly Anime-style games with some lewdness to them, but also with what is called AVNs - Adult Visual Novels. These lean more toward storytelling rather than actual gaming, but they can have choices in them for the player that alters the end, so I will count them as videogame campaigns that can be beaten when they have that. I’m new to this genre for the most part, unless you count all of those Ace Attorney games I’ve played. 

I choose one called FreshWomen, which is up to two "seasons" so far, with each season containing five chapters. You play as the male main character, who has moved to town for college, but also to unwrap the mystery of the father who disappeared on you as a child. The story is told through a series of still screens, with gorgeous graphics, and the player clicks the mouse or joystick button to progress. When the action gets hot and heavy, there may be animated scenes as well.

The player meets all sorts of women as they advance the story, as the town seems to be full of very large breasted gals who dress sexy as hell at all times, along with a few normal-proportional ones. While they are not throwing themselves at the player, there seems to be no way to avoid some couplings. That’s fine, and I may test that out sometime and try for a "nice guy" playthrough.

The player is almost comically well-endowed, but hey I’ve seen things. While one might think his entourage of would-be lovers would be college students like the player, many of them are older, some of them are strippers from the nearby club, and others are just random babes.

They all have their own histories, life situations, ongoing plotlines, interests, and their own kinks. It definitely helps make the game more than about hot sex scenes. Plus, sex is always better when your partner has some emotional depth.

As for the gaming choices, they are sporadic in terms of branching gameplay, but more frequently appear during sex scenes in the form of positions and, uh, finishing targets, if you know what I mean. There are a few small “free roam” segments where the player chooses between mall stores or searches several rooms for clues or items.

There were a few of the ladies for which one chooses how much they want to emotionally invest in them, and I suspect that choice might be a more critical branching point than most, but I did not test it. The cute purple-haired girl seen in most of the game’s promotional stuff is Julia, and I had no problem with the game guiding me toward her.

Chloe is the other normal-proportioned college girl who is instantly captivating as well, as a character and a potential friend with benefits. If these two, or the dancer Alyssa, are meant to be more special to the player than the rest of the ladies, it sure makes the player go through a lot of hot action with the other characters before they couple. How am I supposed to feel like I'm being special to someone when in the last 24 hours I had been with a married woman and a hot co-worker? 

The characters and their storylines start coming together at the end of Season 1, with the final "boss battle" being your first time going all the way with Julia. It's handled tastefully before all hell breaks loose at the end of the first season after an epic finale.

I was going to take some time off before playing the recently-released second season, but I clicked on a trailer for it that had a quick scene I knew had to be the Season Two "boss battle", and yeah, boy was I was right. I won't spoil that here, but sure enough, after that the second season ends with a hell of a cliffhanger - just as the first did. My saves from the first season carried over seamlessly into the second, which was good.

I doubt I'll play too many of these going forward, but FreshWomen Season One and Two were good dirty fun, and showed more emotional depth in the characters than I had anticipated. There's a sort of a soap opera feel to it all so you know I've already "wishlisted" Season 3. 

The First Three Games I Reacquired for the VIC 20

I may have mentioned these three in my previous VIC 20 blog entry, but I want to elaborate on them some more. I plan to write about each VIC 20 game I get, either by itself if it is needed, or in batches of two or three like this.

Adventureland (Commodore/Adventure International)

Scott Adams and his company Adventure International pioneered the text adventure on early home computers, and Commodore was smart enough to give him a call when they launched the VIC 20. His first five out of dozens of games were ported to VIC 20 cartridges, and Adventureland was the first among those. It was also my first text adventure once I got the VIC, as well as the first computer game where I beat the campaign, mapping out the world and detailing the game's solution as I did.

It plays like the original Colossal Cave, where the player must collect a certain number of treasures. Various puzzles must be solved to get them, of course, but as always with text adventures it often comes down to a matter of the player figuring out what word to use for an action. Somehow, 16 year old me made it through and detailed all of it. I hope to create a "Maps" section on this blog someday and scan that puppy into it and share it with the world.

Mission Impossible Adventure (Commodore/Adventure International)

There were five Adventure International text adventures ported to the VIC 20, and this obtuse one is the only one I did not beat - yet. I picked it up later in my collecting days and barely played it and had only mapped out a bit. This is literally my oldest "unfinished business" game, and it's a head scratcher.

So far, I've figured out how to get to two new rooms beyond my previous attempts but remain stuck until I get off of my ass and sit down and really get into it. Honestly, text adventures can be dry and require meticulous attention to detail as well as shitloads of trial and error, and I get distracted easily by other shiny games.

Crush, Crumble, & Chomp (Epyx)

This title was my Game of the Year in 1983, acquired by sheer luck just after Christmas at a holiday-decimated-and-probably-closing Swallen's store in Mansfield, Ohio. It was the last copy in a disorganized glass display case with some other gaming stuff, and it took me fifteen minutes to find an employee to retrieve it. I love this game enough to have reacquired it just to display the box.

The game itself is an early example of a real time strategy game of sorts, with events in the game happening whether the player moves or not. It also requires the 16K memory expander cartridge and loads up from a cassette. Thus, this was the game I used to test my reacquired cassette drive for the VIC 20. It passed with flying colors. The load times are of course very, very long using this method but the game is worth the wait.

Talk about variety - six monster types, four city maps to play on, and five variations, which were just variations of the goals the player had. Players move, stomp, grab people for food, breathe fire, and so forth while the humans run in terror. Except the ones that don't run in terror, they shoot back. It starts with police cars but quickly works its way up to helicopters and tanks.

A monster's life is not easy, though, and hunger is a constant threat as well. Starve your monster and they just go berzerk, meaning the player loses control until the beast is killed or actually eats enough in berzerk mode to regain its composure. It's fun to watch but it usually means the game is over. Game over, by the way, means reloading the whole thing again and waiting again. 

But it's worth it. Later in the 1980s the game's publisher, Epyx, released The Movie Monster Game for the Commodore 64, a much more polished version of the concept. Still, Crush, Crumble, & Chomp remains a masterpiece of a game that was decidedly different than anything else out at the time.

 

Beaten: Lunacid (PC/Steam)

Like many gamers, I spent a lot of the 2010s in From Software's now legendary Souls games, after beating Demon's Souls in late 2009 and continuing on with Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodbourne, and Dark Souls 3 at the end of the decade. Unlike most of those gamers, I had already known that From was a unique and amazing studio, thanks to their King's Field games in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. Every bit as dark and brooding as the Souls games, the Field games had the seeds of everything folks loved about the Souls games - including the lack of hand-holding and overall difficulty.

While I was elated when From Software finally got the success and recognition they deserved among gamers who played the Souls games, I was kind of hoping for them to do something nostalgic with their King's Field games, but no such luck, as no remake, remaster, or collection has yet emerged. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one fondly remembering those games, as the makers of Lunacid have created an original King's Field style of game for PC that captures all of the wonder and mystery of those old titles.

Lunacid is both a love letter to the King's Field series and a whole new game of its own. It's a first person adventure with stats, currency, loot, and character development, tons of exploration and re-exploration, and lots of that crazy Japanese-style weirdness seen in From Software games. The graphics as well reflect that era, being boxy and clunky at times while still detailed and immersive. 

The music is moody and plays well with the environments. There are multiple large areas to explore, lots of enemies to face, and tons of secrets behind hidden walls to find. Some character and monster designs are original, but some like the Venus Flytrap are almost exactly like they were in King’s Field. 

Combat is also similar to the game’s inspirational roots, where you have to make sure you are close enough to hit by walking into your swing a bit. It’s easy to get used to, and the good news is that Lunacid runs on modern hardware so having to take lag into account as you swing your sword a la King’s Field is no longer an issue. 

There are so many unique weapons in this game and they just keep coming, but you can only have two equipped at a time. With no weight limit you carry them all from the moment you get them, so no time is wasted juggling that stuff at a storage chest, just inside your character inventory. Some weapons have elemental properties and a few can be upgraded a bit at the small settlement the player frequents. 

Magic is done via wearable rings, another shout out to From Software as they love love love them some rings so much they made entire games called "Eternal Ring" and "Elden Ring". Like weapons, the player can have two equipped at a time, in spite of presumably having ten fingers.  I created a fighter character at the start of the game, but the rings are so essential and useful that I also levelled up my mana to be able to use them.

In fact, there seems to be no choice but to use magic in this game, and that is fine, as the rings come at the player as fast as the weapons. At first, I used some of the spells that cast elemental damages as a nice ranged attack to supplement my own archery attacks before engaging in melee attacks.  However, some rings have better uses, like the spell that reveals hit points and weaknesses of enemies. I think there was only one healing spell ring.

Coffin was my favorite. It's a ring that summons a full size wooden coffin. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I jumped up and summoned one under my feet to see if it would help me reach some high inaccessible areas. It did, and that was the whole function of it. Some hallways have ledges I could not reach before acquiring that spell. In one area, there was something on a tall stone tower, but the coffins don't stack very evenly and tend to tip over if one stacks them. I spent about a half an hour summoning coffins at that tower until there was a mountain of them and I could reach the top. It was good, silly fun.

The story was as weird as anything these days, and the game's main ending is not the end. There is one side door that requires the player to do a ton of tasks, and I did not pursue that yet. Other changes in the post-game world offer other things to discover, so maybe I will return to chase down those leads.

Lunacid was a dream come true for me, as the three King's Field games are the only trilogy I've beaten twice. The concept is that good, and the makers of Lunacid have proudly embraced it and delivered it to us few gamers who fondly remember how good it is.