Down With O.P.P. (Other Publishers’ Programs) for the VIC 20

 When the Commodore VIC 20 exploded onto the scene, the ensuing software rush took many forms. Some companies translated their established software hits in-house, but some liscensed their games to other publishers entirely and allowed then to translate them to the VIC. Let’s look at three.

Apple Panic (Originally Published by Broderbund, VIC 20 Version Published by Creative Software)

VIC 20 Version By Unknown. Possibly Tom Griner but he was too ashamed to put his name on it.

While everyone was cranking out Space Invaders clones and later Pac-Man, Centipede, and Defender clones as a part of their software lineup, some clever programmers went to the arcade and looked for more obscure inspiration to rip off. Ben Serki at Broderbund apparently saw Space Panic, the first arcade platform-and-ladder game, and brought it to the Apple II as Apple Panic, making it an early hit for Broderbund as well as an early computer platform game.

Space Panic predates Donkey Kong and the player does not jump nor ascend to the top to rescue anyone. Instead they dig holes, trap enemies in said holes, and fill them in to eliminate them. Apple Panic does this too, just on the Apple II. Oddly enough, the Atari computer version was not Atari Panic and the translation to the TRS-80 was not TRS-80 Panic. Thus we arrive at Creative Software’s (licensed from Broderbund) version of Apple Panic for the VIC 20, which was not called VIC 20 Panic. It turns out the little blob enemies are "wandering apple monsters" so maybe that's the justification.

I remember playing Space Panic in the arcade when it came out and loving it. A platform and ladder game was a completely new concept ahead of Donkey Kong, and although it did well in Japanese arcades, Space Panic did not make a splash in the USA. I do not remember it controlling badly but that is what one gets with Apple Panic on the Commodore VIC 20.

It's not even the Burgertime effect where the on-screen character one is controlling has to pixel-align very precisely with a ladder to be able to use it. Lots of early platform games have that, and the ladders and character are big enough here to make it manageable. Pushing left or right makes the character move that way until another input stops it - moving up, down, or the opposite direction, as well as pushing the button to dig.

It’s the digging that is bad here. The screens are randomly drawn with platforms and ladders between them each time one plays and at each new level one reaches during play. With at least two ladders intersecting each platform, sometimes more in the middle platforms with above and below ladders reaching them, diggable spots on each platform become scarcer. On top of that, the player cannot dig a hole on the space next to a ladder or another hole, and apparently can't dig while standing next to a hole or ladder either. 

Compounding the limited diggable spots issue is the fact that getting the player to dig on a spot is very touchy. One walks toward the diggable spots away from ladders in that silly animation, and when one is over a certain spot the animation shows a sort of raised shovel, meaning that the spot ahead is diggable. Pressing the button starts the dig, but it seems that if the player animation moves beyond the "shovel held high" part before the player presses the button they miss the dig and have to start walking again and press the button again but aligned with the shovel. I honestly can't say for sure.

Want more design brutality? The player starts on the bottom level of the screen and not on a platform that is diggable, but a Minecraft bedrock kind of floor. So immediately the goal is the climb up at least one level and reach an area with a large enough open spot to dig one hole, avoiding the red blob apple monsters. The first level has three, the second five, and the third level has seven apple monsters to start. Their programming seems to shift from relentless to clueless at times.

I had thought in Space Panic and other versions of Apple Panic that the holes one digs could be aligned and monsters could fall further for more points, but that is not the case with this VIC 20 version. The monsters get trapped in the holes and when filled in, fall to the next platform below and die. Players that run into their own holes fall through but I could not fall more than one platform before landing as the holes would not quite line up. 

The game gives the player a fair amount of time once a monster is trapped in the holes to fill it in and the monster will start flashing blue and sounding a warning before escaping. The goal is simply to trap and bludgeon each monster to clear the level. A bonus timer counts down very very slowly and there is no penalty for letting it count down to zero, so finding a good spot on a wide enough platform and digging two holes and standing on an island in between them worked for me. 

It’s too bad Apple Panic on the Commodore VIC 20 controls so poorly because as a challenging game design it stands alone on its merits. Even with the aforementioned shortcomings it’s still fun enough until one remembers Lode Runner is a thing.

Choplifter (Originally Published by Broderbund, VIC 20 Version Published by Creative Software)

VIC 20 Version By Tom Griner

Younger gamers might not know about how awesome Choplifter is and was when Dan Grolin created it for the Apple II in 1982. Of all the Defender-inspired games that emerged, in my recollection only this one focused more on it’s rescue aspect than the blasting of enemies. It’s not to say Choplifter doesn’t have the player shooting at tanks, jets, and weird satellite drones, because it does, but the gameplay and indeed one’s score is centered around the picking up of sixty-four little pixel guys and landing them safely back at the starting point base. 

I first played it on the Apple II in our high school’s computer lab after a classmate hacked it. It had crisp black and white graphics and smooth scrolling and controlled well. The helicopter can face left, right, and forward and switching between those directions involves pushing left, down, or right while holding down the fire button. It sounds clunky in text but works intuitively in action and is quick to pick up.

The player gets three choppers with no extra lives available and starts at their base, flying left into enemy territory. A parallax-scrolling border fence lets the player know when they’ve crossed into it, a rare example of 2.5D from that time. Some pixel people may be wandering around loose, waving at the chopper to be rescued but most are in houses that must be bombed by the enemy before they run outside for rescue. 

The chopper can hold up to sixteen hostages before the player must return to their base and let them out, where they then get counted as a successful rescue and added to the score. All of this must be done carefully, as the chopper and its bullets can definitely harm the little guys as much as the enemies. The game also counts the ones lost as well; what this means is that the highest score possible is a perfect game of 64 rescues and zero lives lost. 

So the action is a mix of shooting at enemies and rescuing people once the area is clear, a temporary clearance at best as they will quickly spawn more to hinder the rescue. Legendary Commodore VIC 20 programmer Tom Griner was tasked with bringing Choplifter over and he did a great job using three basic colors. The sky is black and dotted with a few stars to help maintain the parallax scrolling effect; the ground is ketchup red, and everything else is lime green from the helicopter, planes, tanks, houses, and rescuees.

There's some lag and flicker when there is a lot going on the screen but it's manageable, and some poor collision between shots and targets seems to be present. A tone sounds out when a jet is fast approaching and a beep to let the player know a life has been lost. A blue line at the top of the screen holds the score, remembers the session high score, and says " By Tom Griner", where the "i" in Griner is replaced by a little pixel guy.

Speaking of the programmer, I think he wanted to show off a little on the VIC at this point, as the start of each of the three choppers used opens up with a weird green kaleidoscopic swirl circling the screen. Part of me feels that Tom was showing off his VIC 20 programming skills with that one. That's fine with me as Choplifter on the Commodore VIC 20 is a lot of fun and a game I consider essential VIC 20 software.

Choplifter was a little later translated and enhanced by Sega into an arcade game that became a hit, and I still have Choplifter HD downloaded on my PS3 whenever I want to, but since I have a love of early 1980s computer software, I'm glad I got the VIC 20 cartridge ready to go whenever I want that classic fix.

Shamus (Originally Published by Synapse, VIC 20 Version Published by Creative Software)

VIC 20 Version By Tom Griner

I saw Shamus in advertisements for the Atari computers at the time and magazine articles but didn't read too deeply into what it was. From the screenshots I saw, I had assumed it was the arcade game Berzerk brought home in style for lucky owners of those early computer powerhouses, and that was that. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I grabbed a complete translation for the Commodore VIC 20 that I realized what Shamus really was: Berzerk combined with Atari VCS's classic Adventure

This is an arcade game with a quest built in, and that was pretty cool to discover when the title screen booted up. Instead of infinite and randomly-generated mazes, Shamus has a persistent map with color-coded keys to discover and use in color-coded doors to reach an definite end boss battle with the Shadow. There are potions here and there for extra lives, and a "?" that when touched can either be another extra life, nothing at all, or summon the Shadow.

The Shadow, in addition to being the end boss, is also this game's "Otto". In Berzerk, Otto appears if the player lingers too long on one screen to hunt the player down and is invincible. When the Shadow appears to chase Shamus, the player can shoot at it to slow it down for a few seconds and escape. I found that a manageable tactic in the Commodore VIC 20 version. 

Shamus rapidly shoots "Ion Shivs" at the enemy robots, with a maximum of three on the screen at one time. There are three types of robots - regular Robo-Droids that move and shoot at the player; Snap-Jumpers whose backstory says they snap in and out of the time-space continuum but that's just an excuse for glitchy movement; and Spiral Drones which spin in place and shoot. In the VIC 20 version, it matters little what these guys look like as one enters each room and the enemies are often piled on top of each other like a glitchy blob. Blast away a few and some discernible sprites emerge.

Like Berzerk, the enemies are fun to deal with, shooting a few shots from around a corner and then ducking back before their return fire reaches you, and the action is challenging enough. So let's make the walls electrified and deadly to touch, they said, and make it really tough. Shamus has that and I had to get a modern gamepad controller for my VIC 20 to play it better than I was with the traditional joystick. It's way too easy to walk into a wall in this game, and most of my deaths were from wall hits rather than enemy fire. Of course, I only walked into a wall trying to evade enemy fire.

A tone sounds if the player lingers too long and the Shadow is about to appear and chase Shamus away. Usually, there is a generous amount of time given to clear the room on the Beginner level before the Shadow arrives, but of course there is not enough time to stand around after clearing the room sipping tea. Haste is one's ally here. There are no guarantees in Shamus that upon entering the next room one will not be surrounded and instantly under fire.

Upon death one revives in the same room, restocked with enemies, at the "entry point". So dying while backtracking through previous rooms can actually revive the player on the opposite side of the room they meant to cross anyway. While the enemies restock with each visit to a room, the potions and question marks do not. The instruction sheet claims that the VIC 20 version of Shamus has "two floors of 32 rooms", which could either mean 2 floors/16 rooms each or 2 floors/32 rooms each. Wikipedia claims the VIC has 32 rooms so I'm betting 16 rooms a floor across two floors. The original Atari versionand its other ports have 128 rooms and 4 skill levels. 

The skill levels on the VIC 20 version are Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert, selected at another great Tom Griner title screen by pressing the F1 key. The theme to the television classic "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" plays on this title screen while a small animation of Shamus being chased by a robot appears at the bottom under a list of enemies and scores.

It's take me a lot of effort to just get the red key to the red lock and open more of the maze before dying so this review will not go into what happens if one beats the game. While difficult to play, and having  some collision issues between the player, their shots, and the walls at times, Shamus is the kind of game that would have made younger me giddy with delight. And that's a big part of how I measure all of these Commodore VIC 20 games I write about - through a lens of nostalgia for sure, but also with the memory of what kind of games I was looking for back then, even dreaming about.

Berzerk as an action-adventure with a persistent map and actual campaign? HES was wise to license it from Synapse Software and have Tom Griner skillfully port it to the VIC 20, as it is a masterpiece of a game that invites repeated playthroughs. If I ever actually complete a playthrough, you can bet I will write about Shamus on the Commodore VIC 20 again.

Ricochet: Strategy and Chaos on the VIC 20

 Ricochet (Epyx, 1982, Cassette w/8K Memory Expansion)

By Bernie DeKoven and J.W. Connelley, VIC 20 version by R.C. Campbell

This surprise Ebay find from a few months back checked all of my boxes:

• A game I don’t remember hearing about back in the day
• Published by Epyx (everything they brought to the VIC 20 was great)
• A completely original type of game and gameplay that showcases the diversity of game design of that era

Ricochet is the kind of treasure I was hoping to discover when I dove back into early 1980s computer software and it is an absolute delight to play. At a stretch one might call it a variation of Atari’s Warlords, with the quick, four-player action of that classic replaced by tense, two-player, measured strategy. Warlords has players trying to breach their opponent's defenses with a Pong ball and take out the king, and Ricochet has a similar goal, but victory relies on scores, gained not just by hitting the Bumpers at the opposing end of the screen, but also hitting the other player's Launchers and bouncing off of their Pieces as well.

There is a lot to unpack here, so let's start with a screenshot to help explain the basics.

Ricochet is turn-based, and at the top one can see whether it's their turn or their opponent's. Player 1 is on the left and Player 2 (human or VIC 20) is on the right.

Match Points are shown below that and are the real scoring metric of victory in Ricochet. A Match consists of two-to-five games, and the Game Score for each player appears below that. In the above example, we are just starting a game and I have not taken my turn yet. Game Score is accumulated in a lot of ways and I'll break down the highly complex scoring a little later.

Launchers are in each of the four corners of the screen and only shoot that one direction outward. Next to them is the number of shots left in that launcher. If a launcher is hit, it grants points to the opponent, turns red, and is knocked out for two turns. In later variations, there are random targets that appear along the top and bottom that when hit add more shots to the Launcher opposite of the one that launched the shot that hit it. Everything is twisty-crazy in this game like that.

Bumpers are the large green dots behind the white Pieces. A number next to the Bumper indicates its value in points when hit. This number increases for the winner at the end of each game; but the loser loses a Bumper. So, unlike Warlords, Bumpers are not critical hits, just the most rewarding points one can score. The Bumpers are lost at the end of each game for the player with the lowest score, which I'll detail more later in case your head is already spinning trying to keep all of this straight.

Pieces are those white dashes that sort of guard the Bumpers, or ricochet a shot right into them. When hit, they deflect the ball according to their orientation. While starting the game in a vertical position as shown above, when hit they rotate ninety degrees to a horizontal orientation, and subsequent hits continue switching the Pieces between those two states. These bring the ricocheting to Ricochet, and guess what - they can be moved by the player as well. More on that later too!

Position Markers are the small white dots in place to help one predict their shots in most variations. Shots bounce off of the small "divots" in the green barrier, not the outer part, and then follow the track of the white dots. When trying to predict one's shots out past a few ricochets, these can be helpful.

The Smart Clock at the bottom is counting down as a timer for each turn. There is both a dial with an arrow and a numerical counter next to it. If the time counts down to zero, the opposing player gets a point and the timer starts over. The actual amount of time on the clock reflects how fast one's opponent took on their turn, increasing the tension while trying to predict a ricochet or contemplate moving a piece or two.

The setup of each match involves, well, first, loading the cassette. The Commodore VIC20 needs at least 8K of memory expansion plugged in for Ricochet, which was common for games Epyx brought to the machine. A nice title screen appears and is classy enough to let the player know that there is about five minutes of loading ahead. 

Players select one of five game Variants:

1. Start with five launches (ammo) per Launcher and two Bumpers. With two Bumpers, each Match is two or three Games. With one Bumper lost per game, two or three is logically what it takes to complete a Match.
2. Adds Extra Launch Targets that can be hit for additional ammo. These appear in all subsequent Variants.
3. There are now four Bumpers per side, making the game three-to-five turns.  
4. Start with only three launches in the Launcher.
5. All Position Markers are removed, making shot prediction harder. Launchers are knocked out for the rest of the game once they are hit. 

Next the program asks if the player wants to play against the computer. Entering Y for YES prompts the player to enter the number of the computer opponent, of which there are four. The manual claims they are distinctly different but does not disclose how. I have only been beating up on Computer Opponent #1 so far.

After that, the player is asked to enter their Rating. First time players enter zero, but at the end of each match the Rating is given based on the outcome, and that number is like experience points, so one needs to write it down and enter it in at the start of the next match. The final prompt asks if the human or computer will take the first turn, and the manual hints that there may be some strategy to the decision.

Then the first game of the match starts. Once it is the player's turn they have two options: Shoot or Move.

Shooting blindly might seem like a good place to start, but the player should look at the screen to see what a launch from both the top and bottom might do. Doing so before the Smart Clock timer is up is essential, so extrapolating a ricocheting shot out past a few bounces in that time is the challenge. Also in that tight time frame, it's a good idea to check if an opponent's launch is on track to hit one's Bumpers or Launchers. In that case, it might be prudent to Move a Piece or two.

Selecting Move prompts the player to enter a direction between Up-Down-Left-Right, and then which pieces to move. This game is played entirely on the keyboard, in case that was not obvious, and after choosing a direction, the player chooses which of their pieces to move. The A-F keys represent the left side Pieces, and G-L the right side. One can move as many pieces as they want that one direction, and make only one move per turn. Once the direction to move and the pieces to move are selected, the player presses the Space Bar to enter the move and finish their turn.

The shots that are taken ricochet off of walls, pieces, and bumpers, but stop when they pass either side of the screen, hit a launcher, or hit an extra launch target. Scoring points in a game is done in a variety of ways. Let’s break down Game Points:

Hit any Piece - 1 point 

Hit opponent's Bumper or Launcher - 10 points during the first round, increasing for the winner of each game, meaning that the loser of the first game gets more points for hitting the opponent’s bumper in the second game.

It took me a minute to nail down what ends each Game within the match; the documentation says that “A game ends as soon as one player has run out of launches”, but I think having one launcher out of launches/ammo and the other launcher disabled from enemy fire is enough to end the game as well. If both launchers are knocked out the game ends as well. 

It’s important to win each game, but the goal is to win the match by getting the most Match Points. Dust off those math skills as they will be needed to understand how these points are awarded. Winning a game gives the winner 1 point PLUS one more point for every ten points over the loser’s score they get. So for example if the player wins 121 to 66, the winner would get 1 match point for the win PLUS (121-66=55/10 and rounded down=5 match points) for a total of 6 match points. So it's important to get a high score in each game to get not just the win for that game but also those match points. 

At the end of the match there is a screen with the results and the player’s rating. The player needs to manually write that number down and enter it at the start of the next game. I know, it sounds so primitive, but it’s not a real inconvenience.

It’s a lot of fun to play Ricochet but there are so many strategic options that it can be a bit overwhelming. I’ve played over twenty matches so far and am just now developing shot-projection skills and backtracking a shot from the opponent’s bumpers in my head to see if I have a shot.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of moving the pieces, but grasp the importance of doing so defensively in rounds where I am down to one bumper. Another thought that occurred to me in a game where I had a good early point lead was to target just the two launchers, as taking them out ends the game.

With the Smart Clock timer ticking down, I would try to predict my shots a little, mostly to make sure they weren’t coming right back at my own launchers, which would award my opponent points as well as disable it for two turns. It’s really easy to do that in Ricochet. 

In those higher-numbered variants with four bumpers each, there is more challenge and even more chaos as the additional bumpers block more of the side of the screen. Here, Ricochet dazzles as a programming triumph as a single shot can continue to hit bumpers and pieces and keep bouncing and racking up scores for both players. I would have to say that any shot prediction goes out the door after a half-dozen ricochets unless one is some sort of geometrical savant and part psychic. Instead of "git good", this game is "guess good".

Ricochet is a complex game with complicated play and the game's concept designer, Bernie DeKoven, took it upon himself to write the manual as well. It's his baby and thus his job to tell the world what the heck he has created with programmer J.W. Connelley. In addition to detailing everything I've wrote about above, he waxed a bit philosophical in the manual, and after a little internet digging I came to understand why. I would be remiss in my research of Ricochet without mentioning the influences and the life of the late Bernie DeKoven that brought him to game design in the early 1980s.

He had some extensive experience in games even before the word video was put in front of them. According to his Wikipedia entry, he created something called an "Interplay Curriculum" for the Philadelphia School District published in 1971; a "retreat center for the study of games and play" called The Games Preserve the same year; something for Philadelpia's Bicentennial celebration in 1976; and wrote his seminal work The Well-Played Game in 1978, a book lauded as a must-read for any game designer. I'm buying a copy.

Bernie DeKoven landed up at Epyx in 1982 where he created Ricochet and another strange game called Alien Garden. He must have seen the potential to apply his game design philosophies to a whole new medium, and Epyx must have realized the unique coolness of Ricochet as they published it for the big three - Apple, Atari, and TRS-80 - before porting it to the Commodore VIC 20. 

From his own writing in the manual, he was proud to work in the world of computer game design. He infers that Ricochet would be impossible without a computer, as if the game was stuck in his head until computers came home. His written introduction is three paragraphs describing the journey that the player embarks upon when playing the game, but notes that the challenge for the player is "as deep as you want to take it", meaning that with five variations and four computer opponents there is much to explore for the player that wants it.

Even though I just rambled on for many paragraphs about Ricochet, words cannot do the game justice. This game is original, strategic, silly at times, and so damn refreshing to find. The Commodore VIC 20 port looks fantastic and sounds great. I cannot praise Bernie DeKoven and his team enough for creating this masterpiece that took me over four decades to discover. I knew then, in the early 1980s, that computers had potential for nearly infinite game experiences and games like Ricochet were out there, I just wish I'd caught up sooner.

When Commodore Brought Three Blatant Arcade Game Knock-Offs to the VIC 20

 It’s easier to write about the Commodore VIC 20 games that are awesome, of course. I can’t wait to get to Shamus, Ricochet, and Nukewar, but it’s only fair that I take the time to cover the less flashy stuff, so let’s take a look at some of Commodore’s many self published games this time.

Before third-party software took off, most hardware manufacturers had in-house software development going gangbusters to support it. Over on consoles, Atari, Odyssey 2, and Intellivision made sure their systems were supported with lots of the basics.

When Space Invaders exploded in popularity, everyone just cranked their version out. Sure, Atari actually licensed it but the other companies just treated Space Invaders like they did Football or Blackjack - it was a well known game that they simply made a version of for their machine. 

Atari just had the license to the Space Invaders name and published the official version as far as they were concerned. They just couldn’t call it Space Invaders. Taito and Atari had either no time before they all hit the market or not enough lawyers to go after everyone, I think. Most publishers put some kind of twist on the gameplay, but others like Commodore went for the straight-up copy route.

Vic Avenger (Commodore, 1981)

Even the attract screen is similar in Commodore’s Space Invaders clone, and once one starts playing, the enemies, shots, barriers, and music are extremely close to the original as well. 

It’s not black and white, though, as the enemy ships are brightly colored, with the color dependent on how low on the screen they get. This is a result of the VIC 20’s color limitations but it kind of grew on me.

The gameplay is the same. If you’re reading this I should not have to explain Space Invaders to you. However, for my AI readers, I’ll explain that the player is in a ship at the bottom of the screen shooting upwards at a huge wave of invaders shooting and descending.

Vic Avenger plays well enough, but Space Invaders was never really my jam. Well, it was for a few months but it was honestly repetitive and expensive to play at the arcade as a kid, so my interest in it waned until Galaxian, Asteroids, and Missile Command came out. I’ve been all in ever since, so having a non quarter-eating Space Invaders at home rekindled my interest. I imagine a lot of Commodore VIC 20 owners were glad to get theirs too when VIC Avenger came out.

Cosmic Cruncher (Commodore,1982)

It was a little later when Pac-Man became an arcade smash, but when Odyssey 2’s first-to-release imitator K.C. Munchkin got pulled off the shelves by a court order, most  programmers kept their imitations far enough away from the source. Muncher for the Astrocade got pulled too, which was unfortunate as both were superior to Atari’s own official licensed craptastic Atari 2600 version. 

Commodore went with a space theme in Cosmic Cruncher, with the player being a giant Commodore logo and the ghosts being Killer Satellites that looks like the ones from Atari 2600 Superman. There are four, each a different color, and their pursuit is relentless. They don’t wander around aimlessly too much. 

Instead of four power pellets, one in each corner, Cosmic Cruncher has five lunar lander looking things, with one in the bottom center. Running into it makes the satellites vulnerable to being consumed by your creepy (not as creepy as Sneak King on the Xbox 360) logo guy, after which they rocket as actual ghosts back to their center pen...

...only to immediately emerge out the other side and jump back into the chase. It turned out to be better to eat the lunar lander, make the satellites vulnerable, and not eat them and instead focus on eating all the normal dots to clear the level while they were fleeing. 

Instead of fruit for bonus items to gobble, this one has celestial bodies - Earth, the Moon, etc. at the top of the screen. The single-sheet instructions really go out of its way to trumpet the 300 variations available but those are seemingly variations of the maze and background colors. Make everything the same color so the satellites will be invisible, it’ll be fun, the sheet promises. I’ll pass.

The enemies are flickery like an Atari VCS game and the maze design is such thst there are weird intersections where the gobbler has to turn weirdly to align with the maze walls. Everything feels rushed and a little off with Cosmic Cruncher and there are certainly better Pac-Man clones for the VIC 20.

Radar Rat Race ( Commodore, 1981)

Radar Rat Race is Commodore’s copy of the underrated arcade classic Rally-X, a top-down driving game taking place in a large maze, with only a part of the maze visible at a time. The goal is to collect all of the flags scattered around the maze, avoiding the enemy cars and random oil slicks. 

A small radar screen accompanies the main screen, showing the location of the flags and enemies, and it was really a lot of fun. Commodore simply changed the cars to rats when they brought it home and because Rally-X was awesome, so was Radar Rat Race. The flags from Rally-X are cheese in Radar Rat Race, the pursuers are red rats chasing your blue rat, and the oil slicks are lazy cats that just wait for you to run into them. The player's defense in Rally-X was smoke clouds left behind the player's car to confuse the enemy, in Radar Rat Race it's called a "star screen" but it looks like sparkly rat farts.

To clear the maze, the player must collect all ten cheeses, avoiding the static cat obstacles and the red mice. Like Rally-X, joystick response can be iffy when trying to turn tight corners. It's a little too arcade-accurate, but by all means it's certainly playable. The time limit counts down above the playfield but is certainly not that harsh on the earlier levels. However, using the star screen defense uses up time units, making its use strategic.

I enjoy the larger screen area for a maze chase as it gives the player more escape and evasion options. Radar Rat Race on the Commodore VIC 20 delivers a pretty good clone of Rally-X with it's own unique coat of paint. The scrolling is a little jumpy on the VIC but not game-breaking and damn good for the time. No one else licensed Rally-X for the home that I recall, so someone from Commodore saw its potential and made it work.

Commodore eventually got into the arcade licensing wars themselves, and produced great versions of Gorf and Omega Race for the VIC 20 that I have already praised. But like everyone else making games at the time, they saw the arcades as fertile ground for game ideas and brought a few of them home to the VIC, because you just had to have a Space Invaders and a Pac-Man for your system. 

Samurai Pak: 5 (No Wait, 4)(Actually, Just 3) Great Adventures For Your CBM64 (Crossed Off With "Vic 20" Written In Marker Above It)

Samurai Pak (ComputerMat, 1983, On 3 Cassettes Requiring 8K Memory Expansion)

Shogun and Ninja by Robert Wallace, Talking Adventure, Adventure, and Caves of Silver by Mark William

A weird cassette game set turned up on Ebay, cheap enough for me to bite. I have to admit, the use of the term "Hi-Res Graphic" in the text describing the game still grabs me like it did 46 years ago, and a recent replacement of my Commodore VIC 20 cassette drive with one that works all of the time has me less gun-shy about cassette games. I'll get to the games in a bit, but first I had to do some research on ComputerMat, the company behind this modest package. Let's look at the only included documentation, the game's cover:

The first thing one might notice at the top, CBM was crossed out with a marker and "Vic 20" was written over it. Again at the bottom, one of the game titles is completely crossed out. Under the light, I could tell the game was "Shuttle Voyage".  So this cover was clearly printed for the Commodore 64 version of the game, but the Commodore VIC 20 version was pared down a bit, and they were too lazy to print a cover insert specific to the VIC 20. 

A Google search of "ComputerMat" with "Lake Havasu City, Arizona" turned up an interesting surprise. ComputerMat was not just a software house, they were a retailer of computer software, selling games made by Sierra and Infocom as well. I learned this thanks to the efforts of someone at the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History, who posted the entire ComputerMat 1984 Catalog!

A quick view of the catalog reveals the same color paper and font type as the game cover above, meaning that they just used a catalog sheet for it. Why they choose to use the Commodore 64 page for the cover and edit it with a marker remains a mystery when that same catalog had the VIC 20 game cover on another sheet. I will give them this - the case itself is a nice, three-slot cassette box that seals nicely, and the tapes are labelled clearly.

Not that the actual tape labels correspond to the box. Sure, Shogun and Ninja are there, each on their own cassette, with the only mention anywhere in the package that an 8K or 16K memory expander is required. The third cassette, titled "VIC-ADVENTURE PAK"  claims that Side 1 has "Talking Adventure" and "Adventure-Caves of Silver" so possibly three text adventures? I'll get into what was actually on that cassette later.

I just want to sum up my investigation into what ComputerMat was that they were a successful national-reaching retailer, with small ads in various magazines at the time, that got into some game development of their own. I think I'm a sucker for the small independent software house jumping into the game-making game, so whether or not the games included had any quality, I'm probably going to cut ComputerMat some slack. The above-mentioned catalog has a page recruiting programmers as was sometimes included in game material back then. They did not put out slick ads or even accurate packaging, but did they put out good games?

Shogun 

by Robert Wallace

The same paragraph describing the game on the box and catalog appears as text at the game start. Amazingly ahead of their time, both Shogun and Ninja have built-in instructions that load in front of the main game, and can actually be skipped if the player desires. Was anyone else doing that in 1983, I wonder? Anyway, this text painted a very pretty picture of some sort of strategy game with some level of complexity, which was really what compelled me to pull the trigger on this cheap purchase. Fortunately, the cassette-loaded instructions get a little more detailed, but certainly fail to fully explain everything going on.

To my surprise, Shogun is something really unique for its time on the Commodore VIC 20. This is a strategy role-playing game of sorts, with the player building an army and gathering resources for an eventual attack on Osaka Castle. This game has a campaign with a clear goal and a time limit, which I was able to beat, and it was a lot of fun to get there. After the instructions, the game itself starts with a title screen and a tone before asking the player to input their name and dropping them onto the map.

Like any RPG, the army wanders around on an overhead map, in this case a single screen map with only a small mountain range, a river running across the entire length of the screen, and the objective castle south of the river. Later, the player can find a map that reveals more locations. The player starts north of the river and a boat must be obtained to cross the river. It reminded me a little bit of Dragonstomper on the (Starpath-Supercharged) Atari VCS:

The World Map in Shogun

Each move takes up one turn/day and there is a time limit of 365 turns/days. Sure enough, battles pop up as one wanders, and the screen changes to a list comparing the player and enemy forces so one can choose to fight or flee. Fleeing does not always work and causes some desertion among one's troops. Fighting starts up the battle screen, and weird sound effects mark the start of the battle.

 Color-coded little stick figures are placed on the screen and as the sounds play some are killed. A final tally at the end determines who won, and if the player wins, troops join, resources like cannons are captured, and items like the map are acquired. If the player loses, they loose troops and slink away much weaker. 

The VIC 20 Starts Tallying the Gruesome Pixel Carnage in Shogun

Wandering around has an environmental danger, too, in the form of random earthquakes that cause troop loss, but so far in my sessions this seems to be a one-off event that occurs early in the game. 

The tiny mountain range hides the oracle, and entering her place changes to an actual first-person view of the temple, with the question above, "What Do You Seek". Entering the first letter of what you seek, such as "M" for map and "B" for boat, gets and answer in the form of the map symbol displayed in the center circle, indicating that is where one must go to get that item. Sometime, the oracle displays an enemy, indicating that the item one seeks must be won in battle, which is the oracle's nice way of saying "keep grinding".

The Oracle Tells Me To Head To The Shrine If I Want A Ladder

Following each excursion to such a place, one must return to the oracle to reset the ability to visit any other place. During these jaunts, of course, enemy engagements may occur and that is where most of the items one needs to make that final assault on Castle Osaka will be obtained, sometimes without the need to get them from the places the oracle recommends.

The game does seem to scale encounters with one's experience level, but sometimes throws a superior enemy right at them. But the type of units seem to matter as well, as I engaged a much more experienced army and won by virtue of having five cannons to their none, I think. Defeat does not mean game over, but the player loses troops and resources as they slink away defeated. Combat was fun, watching the screen fill up with troops, seeing them do their thing, and counting the survivors at the end. The victor is simply whomever has the most troops survive. The defeated enemy will also join the player's troops.

Once a boat is obtained, it is possible to cross the river on the map and access the locations there. One of them is called a Torii, an arch that is apparently a meeting place for gathering troops. Walking there, one will see either that the camp is occupied by the enemy, in which case a battle takes place, occupied by friendly troops who will join the player's army, or just empty. 

I found that once I had the map, boat, cannons, and siege ladders required for the final assault, I could simply go to the Torii over and over again, usually generating enemy battles, but sometimes finding friendly troops to add to my army. Once the army gets to over 300 troops, with at least 4 cannons and 4 ladders, the battle for the castle can begin.

I found Shogun to be surprisingly complex and refreshingly original for a Commodore VIC 20 game. The strategy comes in knowing when to engage the enemy or run away, but for the most part it was not difficult to manage everything the game requires in the time limit it puts in place. In one session, the time limit was given an extra 100 days at the last minute, making it even easier. 

I may be the only person on Earth in 2026 bragging about this.

Ninja

by Robert Wallace

Ninja starts out with the same title screen as Shogun, same text color, same background color, and instructions that load first. Again the printed description on the box is repeated here, with additional but sparse gameplay details. This one is a top-down, single-screen mission to break into the Khoga Stronghold and recover the Imperial Sword. The player has five lives, is armed with their own sword and gets to pick three specialty items to help.

The Kyoga Stronghold in Ninja for the VIC 20

Enemies and traps are of course invisible until encountered, and the player has two seconds to respond. Like Shogun, Ninja is keyboard-controlled all the way, with the arrow keys for movement and other keys assigned to item use. It took me a few deaths to understand that I needed to press S for sword when I encountered a guard.

At the start of each of the five lives, the player gets to select three items to take along from a list of six, each designed to counter a specific threat. One can select three of the same item but they do not appear to be consumed upon use, so grabbing three different items seems to be the best strategy. As with Shogun, the player can check these by pressing F1 for an inventory. There is no number next to each item, possibly confirming that they are not consumed.

The items are Tigerclaws, a Lantern, Chainmail, a Jimmy, Explosives, and a Blowgun. Tigerclaws are not a weapon but are used when one encounters a pit. Here is where the player has two seconds to respond with an input before they die, or become as the screen says “ DOOMED”. When the chainmail is in one's inventory it is already considered worn, as the player is seemingly automatically protected from exploding mines if it is there. The Jimmy is one of the game's three keys and opens red doors, but it might take multiple attempts, I think. 

There are no sound effects or warnings of any kind about encounters in the stronghold. So, being a ninja after all, I would take one careful step at a time and spam the sword "S" key, and it usually worked and took out any guards I encountered. If I fell into a pit, and had the Tigerclaws in my inventory, I still had time to quickly press "T" to escape even if I was spamming the "S" when I got there. Paying attention to the text atop the screen is essential to make that quick switch. 

At least one victory over a guard must be won to get the cyan key, which opens the cyan room doors in the stronghold. Once obtained, it remains in one's inventory even if and when subsequent lives are used. With that key, each room entered has its own cool first-person graphic, with locations like the Archives or Armory. Each room must be searched by walking over every available space in hopes of finding the third and final dark blue key that opens up the one checkered-red door in the place, where the sword awaits:

The text translates to Okanena, meaning "no money". Underpaid programmer I guess?

And that's it, no need to escape or fight one's way out. The vague time limit implied by the game's description never reared its head either. Ninja is fun enough for a few rounds and provides a short Commodore VIC 20 adventure with a few items to use. There may be more to the game as I never understood some of the items, but the overall objective and need for exploration make it a worthy effort to bring good old 1980s ninja fun to the VIC.

Talking Adventure (Side 1)

By Mark William

The box insert with the Commodore 64 cover instead of the VIC 20 one claims that Adventure is on this cassette, but the tape label gets it correct with the title Talking Adventure. Presumably, it is called Talking Adventure because the program has the ability to output speech text to a peripheral speech synthesizer should one have it. Commodore themselves did this in their collaboration with Adventure International in bringing five of their text adventures to the VIC 20. I've never had that peripheral for the VIC 20, and there was no instruction or documentation included with Talking Adventure mentioning speech, so who knows if they pulled it off.

As expected, Adventure is a standard early-type text adventure clearly modelled on its granddaddy Colossal Cave Adventure, as the starting instructions tell the player to collect treasures for score, and not much else. In early-type text adventures the word parsers are unforgiving, lacking in any use of synonyms of words that are close, and devoid of any hints. Typing "HELP" just repeats the opening instructions. 

This might be a cool text adventure, but I could not get past the first screen. I could "TAKE LAMP" and "LIGHT LAMP" but could not even figure out how to enter the cave itself. The description mentions a crack in the rocks and a sign saying to go in, but "ENTER CAVE", "GO IN", and "FOLLOW SIGN" didn't work. The four compass directions just took me to a "lost woods" maze which eventually wraps around to the starting screen. Up and Down got me messages telling me I can't do that here. 

"ENTER CRACK", "OPEN CRACK", "MOVE ROCKS", nothing seemed to work. Talking Adventure might be a cool text adventure, but it certainly is obtuse enough that I'll never know.

Adventure (Side 2)

By Mark William

So is this Talking Adventure without the Talking? I'll never know as it crashes upon pressing RETURN to start the game at the same opening screen as Talking Adventure. Booooo!

Caves of Silver (Side 2)

By Mark William

I was hoping for a cheap knock off of Adventure International's Pirate Cove Adventure but apparently the pirates already came by and got my memory:

This is even weirder without the memory expansion inserted.

So to summarize, Samurai Pak for the Commodore VIC 20, instead of the proclaimed "5 great Adventures" has three - one a respectable strategy RPG, one a mediocre top-down ninja game, and one a possibly standard text adventure. Two of the games included did not load. ComputerMat put this package out sometime in 1983 and it ended up here in 2026, picked apart by a sixty-year old gaming veteran who has just enough time to appreciate the effort, especially with Shogun. I even discovered an Easter Egg message in Ninja, so there was that rush too!

Something Deep: Submarine Commander for the VIC 20

Submarine Commander (Thorn EMI Video, 1983)

Written by Dean Lock, VIC 20 Version by Gary Yorke 

Big, bold two-page magazine advertisements heralded the arrival of Thorn EMI’s Submarine Commander, proudly showing off several screenshots of the game and boasting of its complexity. You see, Thorn EMI was a British publisher that was making big money at that point with the emerging home video market (VHS format), and was dipping into computer games with a huge budget for games development and marketing. 

One of the things I wanted to see when I reacquired a Commodore VIC 20 was just how sophisticated  the games managed to get for the machine before it was completely eclipsed by its successor the Commodore 64 - as well as just being abandoned due to the collapse of the videogame market in 1983. I've already covered some pretty complex games for the VIC 20 - Crush, Crumble, & Chomp, Sword of Fargoal, Renaissance, and Monster Maze - but I've acquired soooo many more than I had ever thought were made.

So I knew of Submarine Commander for the Commodore VIC 20 back in the day when I owned one - but I passed on purchasing it as it looked too technical and not that much fun to my teenage self. Forty years later I'm a more seasoned gamer who loves a variety of experiences and is, I like to think anyway, more patient and better prepared to learn such a challenging game. 

Still, it took some willpower to pick it up and put the time into it to get good enough to where I could actually sink ships. And the tiny manual, while complete, did not organize all of the information the player needs to run the submarine, so, yeah I made my own command summary card, and I made it small enough to fold up and put it inside the nice plastic case that Thorn EMI used to hold the game and manual.  

It details what is showing on all of the indicators and smaller screens along the left and right side of the screen. I mostly paid attention to the ATD indicator, the compass, and the depth. Torpedoes can only be fired and the periscope only works at  certain depths. The large center screen can be switched between the map, a sonar screen, and the periscope view if the depth allows. After getting familiar with that, it was time to head out into the open Mediterranean Sea and take out convoys of ships.

My first focus was to just learn how to steer and move the unwieldy sub. The joystick is used like a realistic rudder, where left and right steer that way, but pushing up/forward lowers the depth and pulling back/down raises it. Think of it as steering the front nose end of the submarine. On the left side instrument panel, horizontal and vertical lines help the player monitor the steering. The rudder only goes so far left and right so, just like real life I suppose, the sub cannot turn on a dime. Making turns involves strategic use of speed and rudder control to head the direction one wants.

 Before I could gain any competence at steering, though, I encountered an enemy convoy and they sure spotted me, hurling depth charges my way and doing damage to all systems, as shown on four little indicator squares in the bottom right. Figuring I was about to be sunk, I focused on the fun part - hitting ships with torpedoes - and managed to knock them out before they got me. All four of those indicators had nearly filled with red pixels, but to my surprise that damage was repaired over time.

The other enemy convoys were way over in the western Mediterranean or screwing around near Corsica, so I got back to steering training, failing a few times to thread the ninety mile wide Strait of Sicily before heading their way. In my subsequent encounters, I kept a safe distance and had time to aim my torpedoes. Soon I was sinking convoys with little difficulty and taking little damage as I only got close enough for them to spot me one more time.

The score of the game is really the total weight on what the player sunk in tons, or tonnage, and here is where I got on the easiest level before stopping my play session. 

I think the next time I play I'll do a practice session on level 1 and then try the next level up from that in difficulty. Submarine Commander is a challenging to learn but fun to play simulation game with light arcade elements, sure, but it's also a fine example of how early computer game design was really an open field with so much potential to create all new game experiences. Thankfully, they brought it to the Commodore VIC 20 (after releasing it on Atari computers first) and pulled it off on a machine that even at its height was not known for these types of games. 

Beaten: Dredge (Series X/S)

 Xbox Game Pass is more than I'll ever need, but it is nice to have access to so many games even if just to download them and check them out a little before saying "naaah". Sometimes, though, one finds a gem that grabs them and gets them interested enough to finish. While looking for a casual game I found Dredge, and it definitely is a bit of a gem for me.

One plays as a fisherman in a small open area with five island sections, moving only the boat around the waters, fishing, stopping at docks to visit towns or other points of interest and talking to people, and of course dredging for treasure. The boat moves smoothly and must avoid collision with the shore or rocks. Damage taken during these hits will appear in the cargo menu, where slots represent open cargo spaces, but also spaces taken up by the engine, fishing gear, dredging gear, and other essential boat parts. 

One fishes in designated spots that appear as bubbles on the waves, and the fishing minigame is a pretty standard button-timing mechanism, varying a little bit as the game progresses. The dredging minigame is similar, and neither the fishing nor dredging minigames ever get particularly difficult. The dredging unlocks a little bit into the game as the story progresses. 

At docks, one sells fish, repairs their ship, gets upgrades, and talks to various NPCs that sometimes have quests. Most quests involve getting fish for people. The player can organize their storage, research more upgrades to engines and fishing equipment there as well, and most importantly sleep until dawn. Dredge has a fast day-night cycle and the main story involves the creepy horror elements occurring at night. 

There might be unique fish to be had after dark, but there's also a strange fog that surrounds the player's boat and eventually attacks in the form of weird waterspouts and angry, large sea creatures. Talking to the NPCs at various towns and other places unfolds the story bit by bit, but the thrust of it all is that it's dangerous to be out on the water at night.

At least, it is at the beginning of the game. Later upgrades to the boat had me pretty confident running around at night for the most part, but in the early game it was risky. The main story that unfolds has the fisher collecting five relics, one in each smaller island chain section of the map, and return them to the guy who sets you on the quest. There are several other side-quests and fishing collection quests as well.

Each relic after the first usually has its own set of requirements to retrieve and its own locals around the island chain to help, so the story progresses nicely. Exploration of all of these areas, along with fishing and dredging in every spot, reduces any grind. I did find that using crab traps in one area was very profitable, so I did grind money that way a bit to finance upgrades. Dredging nets raw materials for ship upgrades as well as trinkets and treasures to sell.

Dredge was just the kind of casual fun I was looking for and played like a dream. It had lots of exploration, pleasant sound and graphics, and a cool horror theme going on in the story. At the end of the campaign, I made sure to experience both the good and bad endings. There were some side quests that I did not finish and extra DLC available, but the main campaign was satisfying enough. I am glad I was able to dredge Dredge up from the sea of games available on XBox Game Pass and have a good time playing it.

Using Invaders to Teach Typing: Three Arcade Game Typing Tutors for the VIC 20

 The enormous potential of personal computers for educational purposes was apparent not to just educators, but to smart computer brands all over the place who could use educational software to sell their systems to reluctant parents who might be thinking the kid is just going to play games on it.

Even more savvy were the software manufacturers who said right away that educational software could be fun and offer games and not just dry screens of math tests. One thing personal computers were ideal to teach was the useful skill of typing. Back then, before word processors, spell checks, and pdfs, people used typewriters to produce paper documents and many jobs required proficiency in the skill.

The Commodore VIC 20 has a magnificent keyboard and several software publishers put out typing training games for it. Let’s look at three.

Typing Tutor / Word Invaders (Academy Software, 1982)

This cassette contains Typing Tutor - a mostly no frills trainer, and Word Invaders, where those tutor lessons are applied to save the world from invading words. I'm really hoping the word "bespoke" comes up because I hate how that word is overused here in 2026. Before diving further, a quick reminder of how typing was taught back then. "ASDF" and "JKL;" are the home keys, where one places their eight fingertips as the central starting point to either tap on those keys or to reach each finger out from there to hit the other keys.

Typing Tutor is really four smaller programs. Each of those has tutoring for two skill levels, starting with 1 and 2, then the next program having 3 and 4, and so on. There are eight levels total, so four programs with two levels each. Those are all on one side of the cassette and Word Invaders is on the second side. That means that to train using levels 3 and 4 one would have to load the program starting at a very certain point on the cassette.

Cassette drives back then had three digit numeric counters with a button next to them to reset the counter to zero. To understand where to start, one rewinds the tape until it stops and resets the counter to zero. Now if one knows where the second or third program starts on the cassette, one fast forwards the tape to that point and starts there to load it. Academy Software couldn't tell the player that, apparently, as there is a space in the instruction manual top write down the counter number starting point for the programs for levels 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8. The previous owner did not bother to jot them down either, so it's up to me.

Well, now that I've tried out Typing Tutor a bit, and am not doing good on even level 1, I may not need to load up those advanced levels. The screen throws three lines of letters at the trainee, and I was able to get to 20 -30 WPM at best. Whatever I do on a keyboard at work, often with a mouse in my right hand, does not follow the home keys training I had in school before I ever owned a computer. Yet I can type pretty fast overall when composing emails or writing this blog.

Unless Word Invaders is that hard and I really need to get to 60 words per minute (how typing speed is measured), I think I'll put a pin in further tutoring. Firing up Word Invaders on side two of the tape, it is just one program and not four different ones. The player selects a level from A-D, with A representing the letters used in level 1 and 2 of Typing Tutor and so forth. The words will only be composed of those letters.

One then selects speed from 1-4 with 1 being the slowest. The invaders are various words and the player must type them away, space bars included, from left to right. They of course drop down lower and lower as the game progresses, but they eventually run out and the game is over. I was able to beat level A on the 1 difficulty with a score of 682, 28 errors, and 14.4 WPM. The manual indicates that 12 WPM are required to beat it on that speed setting, so that aligns.

Graphically it's pretty simple. The white ship at the top deploying words is just a white shape and the player's gun is just some built-in shape from the VIC 20's character set. Nonetheless, it is fun to play and definitely a good way to reinforce the tutoring one got from Typing Tutor. Together with Word Invaders, this cassette is really the full package, with a full, clinical typing trainer and a fun game. Academy Software added a sticker to the manual/cover of the game saying "RATED THE BEST EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM FOR THE VIC 20 IN CREATIVE COMPUTING MAGAZINE", a genuine accolade from a publication which was actually kind of a big deal back then for personal computer enthusiasts. After trying it, I can see why it won.

Type Attack (Sirius, 1982)

Designed by Jim Hauser and Ernie Brock, Programmed by Ernie Brock

Making a typing training arcade game was a serious business back them and Sirius software was on it, teaming up professional educator Jim Hauser with programmer Ernie Brock to create a slick, fast paced experience that is fun to play and presumably improves typing skill. 

These guys did not just create a fun arcade game that improves typing; They created fifteen pre-programmed levels, or lessons, each progressively more difficult. On top of that, they include a "Lesson Creator" for the user to choose what letters are used in the Character Attack part of the game, and what words are used in the Word Attack part of the game.

That's right, Type Attack has two game sequences in it, the first being Character Attack. This is the Space Invaders style of gameplay I was assuming was the whole game, with an armada of letters over the player's head, descending but not shooting back. The player shoots back by typing the letters from the bottom up, without worrying about moving or aiming. Typing the letter sends a beam upward and eliminates it.

After two waves of Character Attack, Word Attack begins. In this sequence, short words move from right to left across the screen and the player must type the whole word and press the spacebar to shoot and eliminate it. There may be three or four words travelling across the screen at a time, but only the leftmost one is vulnerable and can be typed. If a mistake is made, the player can use the weird left arrow key on the VIC 20 at the upper left corner of the keyboard to back up. 

As mistakes are made, energy is used up, shown as a bar along the right side of the screen. The player starts with 100 energy and one point is used up for each typing mistake. A whopping 35 units of energy are lost if the player fails Character Attack and lets the letters reach the bottom of the screen. Likewise, any word that passes off the left side of the screen in Word Attack cost one unit.  However, each letter typed in the word passing overhead adds one point when the word is eliminated. That's a pretty cool scoring dynamic.

There's also an awesome bar on the left side of the screen that measures the aforementioned Words Per Minute (WPM). It's a nice touch and one would expect nothing less with a teacher leading the design. Type Attack turned out to be not only a great game with two different sequences, but a whole package of typing training and a lesson creator to practice specific letters or words one finds troublesome. It's not just Space Invaders with letters and words, and that was a pleasant surprise to discover.

Mastertype (Lightning Software, published by Broderbund, 1983)

By Bruce Zweig, VIC 20 Cartridge Version by James Fox and Edward Chu

I know I themed this article as "using Invaders to teach", but Mastertype forgoes Space Invaders for Space Zap, another arcade classic where the player defends a center base from attackers coming from all four compass directions (north, south, east, and west). In Mastertype, the enemy missiles come from the four corners instead, with a letter or word in each corner that must be typed to destroy the incoming projectile.

The ship in the center is where one types, and while the four incoming missiles move slow, they do not have far to travel before hitting the player's ship. Also, there are four of them. When I played the first lesson, I thought that there was a glitch where the letters stopped showing, but then I realized the lesson (again using "lesson" for game skill level) was about the home keys and what was showing on the screen was a colon, which in space looks like more background stars. However, there were not too many background stars so that one was really on me.

Broderbund was one of the greatest of the early software houses, and Mastertype comes with a 25-page, well-written and very organized instruction manual that covers all of the typing basics before even getting to the gameplay. I mean, this book has a troubleshooting guide and an appendix, as well as detailing what each of the eighteen pre-programmed lessons is about. The eighteenth lesson is actually common BASIC programming commands and words, a sign of how important that was at the time.

The cartridge boots up with a demo mode and when the demo player loses and it's ship is destroyed an awesome multicolor, psychedelic explosion expands across the screen from the center, with "THE WORDS WON" appearing at its end. It's quite dramatic, but typing was a serious business back then. Besides the demo mode, there is a beginner mode with just letters and not words, and an extensive submenu under that full of ahead-of-its-time options.

That submenu allows the player to reduce or increase the speed goals, redisplay a score after a game, change lesson, change case to upper or lower, and of course create a new lesson. The custom made lessons contain forty words with a maximum of eight characters each. Not that many Commodore VIC 20 owners had a disk drive, but the player-made lessons can be saved on tape or disk, with the disk option able to list a catalog of saved lessons if the player creates that many. 

As far as the game itself, it does capture the pressure and tension of Space Zap quite well as the player strives to eliminate incoming missiles by typing the letters or words in time. When the word is typed the player presses the SPACE bar to zap, and a little astronaut pop up out of the ship and shoots at the missile.  Each vulnerable quadrant of the ship has one shield that can be destroyed before a second hit to that spot destroys the ship and ends the game.

Mastertype, like Type Attack and Typing Tutor/Word Invaders, uses arcade gaming to help improve typing skills and is designed as a fun trainer. Broderbund claims on the back of the box that Mastertype "is the #1 best-selling typing tutorial". As far as I'm concerned, all three of these arcade game typing trainers were fun to play as well as fully viable training programs for those that need them. It's really a niche part of the early computer software days, but those who made them really put everything they could into making them complete software packages.

Three Games with Rapid Fire for the VIC 20

 The Commodore VIC 20 was a versatile machine in terms of capability, but lacked the memory and speed of Apple and Atari’s computer powerhouses. Display limitations, restrictions on the number of colors that can be displayed at once, and overall movement speed were challenging to programmers using the VIC 20. When it comes to shooters there are many on the VIC that have limits to the number of shots the player can have on the screen at once and how fast they travel. Sometimes that is a game design decision but other times it was due to the restraints mentioned above.

Programmers, however, find a way like life in Jurassic Park, and here are three great examples of pewpewpewpewpewpewew shooter games for the Commodore VIC 20 with rapid fire that allow the player to really blast away.

Video Vermin (UMI)

by Mike Wacker

Video Vermin is a straight-up knockoff of the arcade game Centipede, down to the title and bugs-in-a-garden theme, with very few differences from the revered arcade classic. It's easy to feel some disdain for a designer who simply copies an arcade classic without offering their own twist on it or at least some different theme, but when the source material is Centipede, all is forgiven once the gameplay starts.

Centipede and by design Video Vermin is a fixed-position shooter that takes place in a single playfield, or in this case a mushroom garden, where descending enemies attempt to reach the bottom of the screen to collide with and destroy the player. The main enemy is a marching row of multiple ants, fleas, or beetles rather than a segmented single beast as in the arcade inspiration. They descend through a field of mushrooms, going side-to-side across the screen and dropping a level lower when they reach the side or collide with a mushroom.

The mushrooms are solid obstacles but destructible and it is imperative that the player does so as much as possible, taking about four shots to eliminate the fungus. After the first round, butterflies begin dropping down fast from the top of the screen, laying down columns of yet more mushroom obstacles.  Other enemies include Centipede classics like the spider that pops out from the left or right side of the lower-third of the screen where the player operates, and the snail that goes across the screen making the mushrooms it touches poisonous to a point where contact with a descending enemy sends it straight down the screen rather than just dropping one level.

 It's a good thing that Mr. Wacker gives the player a killer rapid-fire gun and fast movement across the bottom-third of the screen, as that is what captures the fun of these types of games that throw everything at the player. UMI was proud of the rapid-fire in Video Vermin to mention it on the cover of the game as a selling point.

There are only a few gameplay differences between Video Vermin and Centipede that I caught, like the spider spawning four mushrooms when the player shoots it, but the programmer did take the time to put in a nice title screen, showing each enemy type listed next to the points it is worth and then switching to show some gameplay. Upon death, the entire screen quickly sinks down to the bottom and then right back up to the top with the player's next life in place. Another cool touch was the screen border going all rainbow-trippy when the player is awarded an extra life at 10,000 points.

Someday I will start collecting the officially-licensed Atarisoft arcade titles that were published for the VIC 20 and Centipede will be among the games I get. It will be interesting to see if Atari's own efforts to port over Centipede to the system will be as good as what UMI published with Video Vermin. This game has me seriously considering tracking down a tracball controller on Ebay to use instead of the joystick, it's so arcade-accurate.

Deadly Skies (Tronix)

From Dragonfly / Written by Thomas Kim

Tronix was one of those publishers who took out a lot of slick magazine ads but didn't follow it with much, publishing a total of three cartridge and three cassette games for the Commodore VIC 20 and a few other titles for the Commodore 64 and Atari Computers. Deadly Skies is one of their cartridge games for the VIC 20 featuring a helicopter that the player controls rapid-firing bombs at the scrolling buildings and weapons along the bottom of the screen. It was developed by a design team called Dragonfly that made several other games for Tronix to publish.

The player operates in the upper three-quarters of the screen, the titular deadly skies, and the goal is to carpet bomb the crap out of the bottom of the screen to clear the level. At the beginning, the military installations and weapons below are protected by a two-level cloud layer that needs to be bombed away first.  

There are lots of things that make the skies deadly in Deadly Skies, so the bombing the player does is not some free-for-all affair. From below, purple missiles shoot straight up and yellow drones rise up and track the player. One does not see these attacks coming from the ground, they just appear over the clouds and can mean instant death. At the top of the screen, a UFO flies across, just under the score, and drops bombs on the player while the player is dropping bombs below. An evaded UFO missile sadly does not continue to the ground and help the player with the carpet bombing mission.

A few screens in, slow-tumbling asteroids appear coming from the sides and those must be avoided. They change color when hit by the player and reverse direction, so it is possible to help keep the skies less deadly by sending them back toward the side in this manner. A few screens in, they get very thick, making the skies even more deadly. 

Even with all that chaos, the controls are quite precise, and the rapid-fire bombing is effective on the scrolling targets below. From the standard title screen, the player can select any of the 32 levels of play and start there, and yes the Deadly Skies on level 32 really live up to the name. Also impressive for 1983 was a pause feature, with the F7 key on the VIC 20 doing that here.

Deadly Skies is a somewhat unique fixed-position shooter, with the player in the upper part of the screen instead of along the bottom, and just so much danger from all sides. It plays fun and frantic with lots of challenge and its awesomeness certainly warrants all of those magazine ads I saw for it back in the day.

Gridrunner (HES)

By Jeff Minter

Recognized immediately upon its release and in the conversations about the Commodore VIC 20 ever since as a classic, Gridrunner is an absolutely perfect fixed position shooter, clearly inspired by Centipede but given a stylized science fiction makeover and unique gameplay elements to make it stand out proudly on its own. 

I don’t write much about sound effects but Gridrunner exudes big arcade energy during gameplay and during transitions to the next wave. It’s one of those games where the sounds are designed to assist the game itself in presenting the player with intensity.

The player controls a small ship called a “Runner” that can travel across about the bottom third of the grid, shooting upwards as always. The ship is on a grid of bright red vertical and horizontal lines and moves from intersection to intersection rather than over it all. This grid is really a clever way to get around the VIC 20's programming constraints; the built-in character map of the computer used in most games makes smooth scrolling challenging and by "jumping" from grid intersection to intersection this difficulty is overcome through gameplay design rather than deep tinkering in machine language to get at best a flickery ship transition between character map spots. It's brilliant and it works because the movement is fast anyway and the controls are precise.

Other than the grid movement twist and thematic shift from Centipede's garden to a space grid, the main enemies and gameplay dynamics differ a bit as well. The centipede is a "Gridsearch Squad" of linked droids that behave in a similar manner as their arcade inspiration. The squad travels the screen back and forth and drops down one level lower when it hits a "pod" instead of a mushroom. When the player shoots the squad in the middle it separates into two shorter squads, per usual. All in all, it behaves exactly like the centipede in Centipede.

The pods are the obstacles here, and the screen at the beginning is empty of them. They appear when the player shoots a droid segment, but also when the enemies along the left side and bottom of the screen cross their plasma zapper shots once per traversal. With the X-Zapper firing horizontally across the screen as it descends the left side top-to-bottom and the Y-Zapper doing the same left-to-right along the bottom, there is as always in these games an imperative to keep moving.

The pods themselves are similar to Centipede's mushrooms in that they are the solid obstacle that makes the droid squad descend, and they take several consecutive shots to destroy, but they have a unique twist that adds to the challenge. When left alone, they mutate through a cycle which ends with them becoming a missile that fires straight down at the player. 

Extra lives come pretty regularly and the player will need them in later levels as the screen becomes crowded and more dangerous. Jeff Minter also gets huge points for getting a rare-at-the-time pause feature in the game, by pressing "P" on the keyboard. There's little praise I can add to over forty years of Commodore VIC 20 owners own lauding of Gridrunner, but in case it was missed: Gridrunner is an audio-visual arcade delight and a must-own game for the system. 

All of these rapid fire games for the VIC 20 were fun to play and full of challenge, but the Centipede clones in particular have definitely left me with an aching desire to track down and reacquire a tracball controller to play them as they were meant to be played.