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.