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.
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