Snatching up Commodore VIC 20 games off of Ebay these last eight months or so has been interesting in a lot of ways, but the best part has been the surprises popping up along the way. My knowledge of the VIC 20’s software library has been based on what I had owned and played and read about back in the day before selling it all off in 2008.
So finding a game that has a unique twist on a classic theme, or even something new, weird, and experimental that I was unaware of in the olden times has been a real treat. I did minimal research when pulling the trigger on Ebay for these games and each one has now made it to the category of “must have” games for the system. All of these games are on cartridge.
Videomania (Creative Software)
by Tom Griner
There are not too many Robotron 2084 clones out there for any console or computer of that era, as Atari nabbed the license to that arcade hit and published multiple versions here and there. Robotron 2084 was a simple top-down, single-screen-with-no-walls twin-stick shooter where the player is dropped into the busy room full of robots, running around and shooting at them all while they try to rescue some NPC humans as well. It's loud, flashy, frantic, and over quick until one gets the hang of it.
Killer Bees on the Odyssey 2 is an example of a game that seems based on Robotron 2084 but then adds a lot of other gameplay aspects, but Videomania here is more true to its arcade inspiration. One wonders if Tom Griner was inspired by Steve Cartwright's Atari 2600 classic Megamania in both the obvious use of the "-mania" suffix and the fact that the enemies are not constrained to being just spaceships or robots, but rather shapes. Megamania has some vague-shaped enemies and more obvious things like bowties, car tires, and clothes irons, but Videomania's three enemies are just weird shapes - a hollow diamond, a twirling "X" shape with feet, and a shrinking/expanding box rectangle shape.
I'd describe Videomania as "approachable Robotron" as the first few levels have less enemies and the player really has a chance to get the feel for how they move and how to dodge them. After four of five levels the sheer number of enemies increases and thus the difficulty ramps up. The levels do not have a time limit, but the Killerbox enemies will continue to spawn outside the normal count of enemies and those types of foes track down the player. The player always starts on the left/center edge of the screen, so starting each level means having one's eyes there to assess where to move and shoot right away, as enemies might be coming right at the player upon the level start.
Also approachable is the one-football-bullet on the screen at a time gameplay, whereas Robotron 2084 is rapid firing all the time with a second joystick dedicated to just doing that. Videomania, constrained to one joystick, has the player firing only in the direction they are moving, resulting in a gameplay dynamic where the single shot - that yes, looks a little like a football - is carefully considered most of the time and fired in a more measured fashion. Keeping your shots close and not trying to pick off an enemy across the screen is a better strategy.
The three types of enemies each move in a genuinely erratic non-pattern that is the heart of Videomania's challenge. Note that they do not shoot anything at the player, so it's dodge-and-fire all the way. The basic Evil Eye diamond guys bounce like a Pong ball off the walls so tracking them for a kill may seem more manageable, but there are times when they can surprise the player, especially as they fly under the score and extra guys displayed at the top of the screen. The Walwoker "X" guys are absolutely unpredictable and jerky in such a mind-blowing way that I suspect Tom Griner was robbed of a Nobel Prize in Mathematics for his work on their movement algorithm. The previously mentioned Killerbox foes that zero in on the player not only slink toward the player with aplomb, but pulsate their actual size between a bigger box and a smaller one, making shots hard to land as they approach.
I'll just say that overall it felt like the collision detection was off between my player, his bullets, and the enemies. Part of that might be that each foe that dies leaves behind a little cross tombstone that fades over time but while it is sitting there might create detection issues in spite of it not being a solid obstacle while it is there. However, it might also be that there were times I thought I was dead by colliding with an enemy but I got a last-second shot off that was not visible on the screen long enough to notice due to the close range.
There's no one to rescue, no loot to pick up, so each level's simple goal is to just kill all the enemies. Between each level, Tom Griner decided to give us an intermission cartoon a la Pac Man, but it seems there are only two episodes. In the first one, a cyan-colored actual Pac-Man chases the player across the screen, and at the end the player turns into a cyan-colored Pac-Man ghost. In the second and more grisly cartoon, a box truck chases they player down, hits them, sends them flying, and when they land the little cross tombstone appears. These two episodes then repeat as the player moves between every level.
The title screen is also very good, with "The Entertainer" tune playing as letters bounce into place to form the title. Tom Griner must have really been hitting his stride with Videomania in both gameplay and presentation - with the resulting Robotron 2084-inspired game being absolutely fun and challenging - and the bells and whistles like the intermission cartoons showing polish and craftsmanship.
K-Razy Antiks (K-Byte / CBS Software)
by Kenneth & Merrilee Otto, VIC 20 Version by Steve Adams
Pac-Man was good, but Ladybug and K.C. Munchkin were better, as they took the basic maze chase of Pac-Man and added rotating gates or moving dots or other gameplay elements to punch it up a bit. What I am trying to say is that for me, Pac-Man was just kind of there in the arcades, but the imitations and variations that came later with added twists and challenges caught my attention more than their arcade inspiration.
The folks at K-Byte Software must have felt the desire to add something K-Razy to the maze chase game, going waaaay over the top with K-Razy Antiks, with the deliberate misspelling pointing out that the ants in the game are about to have some antics so crazy it warrants some liberties with the title. There's a lot going on here, so just pronounce the title out loud and get on with the game.
You might see a screenshot and think "So, Pac-Man with Ants?", but then you might see another screenshot showing a very large yellow anteater at the top where the score is and think "Whoa that is freaking cool, what is going on here?". My fear was that the Anteater was just background decoration and not an active or consequential part of the game.
Thankfully, the Anteater is a full fledged, periodic, boss-sized environmental hazard to anything it intersects. Keep in mind, this dude is just background trouble to the main maze chase game going on, which I'll get to later. The Anteater, a gloriously gigantic sprite in all yellow from snout to tail, struts out from time to time to the center hole at the top of the maze like a badass and sticks his Gene Simmons-level tongue into the maze, twisting through corridors in search of food - the player, the enemy ants, and any eggs it can find. The tongue is fast and unpredictable, wrapping around itself and even going through the side exit on the left and emerging from the right, not slowed down in the slightest. It reminded me of the classic game Oil's Well, the way it snaked, and it can snake all of the way to the bottom if it wants.
While not as graphically outstanding as a GIANT ANTEATER strutting across the screen (sorry, it was a big deal to have a large sprite object back then), the other environmental hazard is nonetheless equally deadly and impressive in the form of sudden torrential rains coming down and flooding the ant hill from the bottom up. Any ants caught up in the rising water die, but at least the eggs are spared. Rain falls at the top while the water is rising, creating a cool effect as one scrambles to get away.
The maze that these annoyoing but realistic natural terrors torment is where the player finds themselves, deposited as a white ant at the upper left side entrance and immediately under pursuit by four enemy ants, each a different color, but not like Pac-Man where one color is faster than the others. Elsewhere in the maze are eggs, both the player's eggs in yellow and the enemy ones as smaller dots. In the upper center of the maze is a box where the enemy ants end up once they are defeated by the player and have no eggs to respawn back into the maze. Defeating all four ants and getting them into that box clears the level.
K-Razy Antiks is largely about egg management as much as it is the Pac-Man-style back-and-forth between vulnerability and a brief chance to fight back. The player guides their white ant through the maze, always making sure that they lay a few eggs around in case they die while trying to take out the enemy eggs and ants. There is really nowhere safe, as the mazes are not that expansive, to place eggs where the enemy won't find them. Thus, while having forty eggs in reserve at the start of the game might seem like a lot, the player can burn through them fast.
Fortunately, large flashing lines appear at the top area to warn the player that their last egg is there. The manual points out that the VIC 20 version starts with 5 white eggs on the screen that are inedibled for the enemies. One wonders of that was a result of playtesting showing that without those five starter eggs, players were sometimes getting killed before they could lay egg one. As frantic as the start of the game can be sometimes, I would believe that theory.
Under hot and heavy pursuit from four enemy ants, the only weapon the player has to fight back are unhatched enemy eggs. Running over one before it hatches causes the player's white ant to flash, as the player is now carrying a charged, exploding egg that they can drop by pressing the button. The idea is to get an enemy chasing close behind the player and drop it, but the explosion does last a few seconds, so sometimes multiple enemies can get caught up in it.
But realistically, this can be hard to time while keeping an eye on one's own eggs around the maze. The main focus must remain on elimnating enemy eggs to prevent them from respawning and send them to the center ant trap. Keeping the maze clear of enemy eggs, laying enough eggs to keep respawing the player's ant, watching out for the giant anteater and the flood waters...as I stated earlier, there really are a lot of antics going on.
There are no score-based milestones to get extra lives/eggs, so once the forty are gone the respawing ends. Likewise, the game ends if the player dies without leaving any eggs in the maze itself, meaning the unattentive player can die right away with an extra forty lives sitting there unused if they are not careful. The manual mentions two ways to get five extra lives, however. Dropping an exploding egg on a hatching enemy egg will do the trick, but five extra lives are also granted if the anteater eats a hatching egg. I have not pulled either of these off that I could tell in my sessions.
Clearing the level by trapping all four ants in the ant trap resets the maze with the four enemy ants marching out from the top right, into the hole, and across the maze to the tune of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home". One they are scattered across the maze, the song ends and another audio signal lets the player know that they are about to appear in the maze. This occurs on every level after the first, giving the player time to get oriented before the action begins anew.
K-Razy Antiks is a masterpiece of misspelling and mayhem, with deeper design elements than one would think by just glancing at a screenshot. This is the kind of hidden gem I was hoping to find once I started collecting for the Commodore VIC 20 again, not just a twist on a classic game design, but so many twists that it keeps it interesting every time one plays.
Mutant Herd (Thorn EMI Video)
Designed by Jerermy Smith, Programmed by G. Hampton-Matthews
Mutant Herd is unlike any game that I can remember and not a twist on an arcade classic - this is a completely unique two-stage challenge where the first screen might have the same appearance as Robotron 2084 - hordes of enemies on the screen at once - but how one plays and what happens later takes it into a whole new realm of weirdness. Strap yourselves in for a purely unique Commodore VIC 20 exclusive.
The game starts with a top-down view of an open playfield, with a rectangular "powerhouse" in the center and four holes not far from the corners of the screen. There is a thick blue horizontal line and a similar vertical line intersecting it, and that is the player on this stage. One plays here as the laser barriers that are used to herd the mutants away from the center powerhouse. The joystick controls the intersection of the laser barriers and the player moves that intersection around the screen to keep the horde of mutants away from the center powerhouse.
When I first saw this game on Ebay, my lazy mind assumed "Herd" was being used in the title to let the player know that a herd of mutants was being sent to attack them. It turns out, the player is the one doing the herding using the laser barriers, rather than jumping in the playfield themselves with two guns blazing or something as trite as that. This is a very original gameplay element and with enemies filling the screen, pretty challenging.
If the game's goal was just to herd the mutants away from the center, it would still feel like a unique and rewarding game. However, those four holes at the screen corners are just going to keep on pouring out mutants, so the player must take the fight to the source, the Queen herself. She's down there laying eggs and causing all of this and the player fights back by sending their own "mutant slayers" down there.
There are a limited number of mutant slayers available, shown in a line at the bottom of the screen next to the little cross symbols that represent the player's remaining lives. They pop into the screen as little purple Q-Bert shaped dudes, and the player must use their laser barriers to herd the little spazzes into one of the four spawn holes near the corner - while still keeping the mutants from the center powerhouse. This is the real challenge - herding mutants away from the powerhouse while herding slayers into the holes to start the second stage.
With the limited count of slayers the player must take care not to herd them off of the screen with the rest of the riff-raff, and pressing the button as the barrier makes contact with the slayer allows only the slayer to pass through, giving the player some level of control in directing the slayers into holes. It seems that every time the player pulls this off, finishes the second stage, and returns to the first stage, the powerhouse is reset to cleared and any mutants clinging to it when one entered the hole are gone.
The second stage is down in the hole, where the player no longer controls laser barriers, but rather the mutant slayer itself. This is a 2D platform level, with the player starting at the top and the Queen guarding her eggs at the bottom. A ladder runs down along the left side, and from the right side, rocks come tumbling out across the platforms, falling straight down when they reach the ladder. The player must descend the ladder, avoiding the rocks, run to the eggs and press the button to drop a bomb, and quickly dodge the rocks again to climb the ladder back to the top and reach the detonator to set off the bomb.
This is all of course under a time limit and the queen can reach and disarm the bomb if the player does not return to the detonator fast enough. If that happens, the player must go back down and reset the bomb and try again. The manual said the queen can also eat the player but I did not stick around to find out if that was true. Setting off the bomb destroys five out of fifteen eggs and returns the player back to the first stage, with the hole sometimes closing behind the player and no longer being accessable for future mutant slayer infiltration.
Back on the first stage, the goal remains the same - herd them away, herd your slayers to holes - but the laser barrier is "weakened" meaning it now has gaps in it and moves slower. Rinse and repeat with the player's slayers herding down the holes, blowing up five more eggs, and repeating until just the queen is down there. To kill the queen, the bomb must be placed at the far right side and detonated only when she is above it. She patrols back and forth across the bottom, I should have mentioned earlier.
Successfully blowing up the queen starts the game over with a larger center powerhouse to protect and even more mayhem on-screen. I imagine how hard it gets after that, as I failed quickly at that stage. The joystick controls are pretty tight and precise, but can be unforgiving in the second stage climbing parts.
Mutant Herd is a completely refreshing, original title whose action is frantic but fair, with mutliple stages that really showcase how game designers during that time had a blank check to create the kind of games they themselves wanted to play. Finding a game like this, that I had never heard of, with gameplay like that, is a huge part of the reason why I reacquired a Commodore VIC 20.
Being pleasantly suprised by computer games over forty years old is really satisfying, and these three for the Commodore VIC 20 all provided plenty of surprises.
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