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.
