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

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

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

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.