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.

Spider 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.