Three More Random Commodore VIC 20 Games

 K-Star Patrol (Published by K-Byte / CBS, Copyright 1983 Kay Enterprises)

Program Created and Written by Dr. Keith Dreyer and Torre Meeder, VIC 20 version by Jim Stolzenfeld

I’ve written about K-Byte’s other Commodore VIC  20 game, K-Razy Antiks, and sure enough K-Star Patrol is of a similar theme, where an arcade game is used as a starting point for an even better game. Before I get into that, though, for those of you wondering the significance of putting the letter “K” in front of words back then, all I can say is that marketing teams just loved it. K-Mart, K-Byte, Chrysler K-Cars, K-Tel Records (who oddly enough entered the software game as Xonox) were all a thing somehow. 

In the case of K-Star Patrol, the very loose starting point is Scramble, an arcade side-scrolling shooter (and bomber) where the player is scrolling to the right across a long surface that is mapped out at the top of the screen in a sort of radar. There’s no bombing, just scrolling to the right and shooting enemies with a forward barrage of shots. There are some major twists from there that make K-Star Patrol stand out as a  unique game.

Note the use of the word "Patrol" in the title. That is because the ship you control is escorting an entire patrol squad through the gauntlet of enemy fire, and that's a heavy load to bear. On the left side of the screen are your precious eight extra lives, following dutifully behind the player's ship but not defending themselves for some reason and completely vulnerable to being rammed by any ships the player lets slip past. If the player dies, the ship at the top is immediately deployed as the new ship used by the player to defend the rest. 

Here's the next twist: The player has a shield that they can use briefly to defend the reserve ships by pressing left. A thin line of dots will appear to indicate it is working. It seems to work multiple times per charge but there is no on-screen indicator of it. To recharge the shield, one dips a wing of the moving ship into one of the lakes at the bottom of the screen and the ship's color changes back to blue, meaning the shield is charged. 

It is a difficult maneuver to complete without hitting the bottom of the lake or one of the mountains at the end of the lake, all while maintaining a barrage of fire against the endless assault trying to destroy your patrol. The extreme difficulty in recharging the shield this way makes using it a rare tactical decision rather than a regular part of gameplay. 

Also rare is the use of the smart bomb one gets, activated by doing a full rotation of the joystick in either direction. This one is best reserved for a specific pain-in-the-ass enemy I'll detail later. As far as I can tell, there is no count of these displayed on the screen but the manual says the player starts with three and is awarded one for completing a sector. I'm having trouble getting this to activate sometimes with that control method, but it could just be me. 

The ten sectors are shown on the mini-map at the top of the screen and clearing one first slows the screen down all laggy before another screen appears telling the player which sector is next. Other than the dileniation of sectors, the only other thing the minimap shows are the locations of the invincible Leech enemies that are a major threat to the patrol.

The main regular enemies are little lunar-lander looking losers who lift up from the bottom (once the player enters their airspace) to a random height then transform into a rocket that bolts toward the player and/or the patrol in full kamikaze mode. They don’t shoot but their sudden speed once they transform makes them deadly enough. Mowing down these guys as they are rising or in mid-transformation is essential to keeping them in check. 

It’s not enough to protect the player’s ship and patrol; one must prevent them from passing off the left side of the screen entirely as a progressive point penalty is taken from the player’s score for each enemy that passes successfully. It’s a rare early example of negative scoring penalties in a game but just another wacky day at the office for the K-Star Patrol. 

Starting in the second sector are ground units that fire upward at a 45-degree angle and topping out at halfway up the screen, making lower altitude flight more deadly from there. At least this barrage of fire does not seem to damage the reserve ships. In the instruction manual it notes that in the Commodore VIC 20 version the smart bomb does not take those out, but again, the smart bomb is for the third type of enemy anyway.

The Leech is a faint and blinky swarm of dots similar to Odyssey 2’s killer bees that seem to just buzz around the screen aimlessly for a few seconds but eventually zero in on the player’s ship. Laser fire can repel it a little but once they attach they live up to their name and leech power from the player’s shield and lasers, meaning no pew pew pew until one activates the smart bomb to throw the leech off. It’s not destroyed, it’s just repelled for a few moments. I have yet to get far enough to see if new leeches spawn in later sectors but in all my play sessions I’ve just seen the one leech just buzzing around wherever I was at. 

Put all this together and one gets a pretty unique arcade shooter that allows for multiple strategic approaches to getting through it with better scores. All of these twists in gameplay are combined with crisp graphics and stunning arcade sound to make K-Star Patrol another Commodore VIC 20 gem. 

River Rescue (Published by Thorn EMI 1982)

Programmed by W. Kemp.

Most videogame consoles and home computers could handle scrolling screens to various degrees in the early 1980s and the Commodore VIC 20 was certainly capable of smooth gameplay along those lines. River Rescue seems proud of its randomly-generated scrolling river as it cranks by, sometimes narrowing to barely enough room to pass. The goal is to scroll to the right, shooting vaguely shaped enemies out of the way, and to rescue three explorers and drop them off at the end.

Left and right control the speed of the boat, with bonus points awarded for faster speeds, while up and down steer. At the slowest speeds, shooting oncoming obstacles is easy enough in spite of sometimes needing pixel-accurate shots to make contact. The enemies are crocodiles, anacondas, and dugout canoes if one accepts the manual at its word; the symbols used in-game are vague.

A tone sounds when one is getting close to a dock where the explorers await, although sometimes there are long delays after the tone as the computer will just keep generating a narrow river rather than one wide enough for the dock. Docking with these is truly challenging, requiring the boat to be slowed to as slow as it can go and aligning within a few pixels alongside the dock. The explorer will then run out and board the ship. Picking up all three of them nets the player a bonus at the end, but if one is missed there is not much in the way of a penalty other than the point loss.

Finish the first river and the whole thing starts over with another river but with a new background colors that are unsettling to say the least. Just because a programmer can switch background colors between levels does not mean they should.

There is really not much else to talk about with this game. The scrolling works well enough to play in spite of minor jumpiness and the shooting is fun. Docking the ship is frustrating but taken as an overall package, River Rescue is good enough for 1982 on the VIC 20. It's no River Raid for the Atari VCS, but it will do.

Search & Destroy (The Wizard's Magic Toy Box, 1982)

By Ray Mitchell

Another cassette classic from the plucky little studio that gave VIC 20 owners Muncher and Dodge Cars, Search and Destroy is the classic boardgame Battleship, that loads up fast and plays quick with simple graphics and sound effects. It reduces the number of ships from five to four, and each type of ship only takes up one square of the grid, so the player and computer are in a race to get to four hits first.

After setting up one's four ships, the computer does the same, and the hunt is on. The grid is 8x8 or 64 total squares so it moves pretty fast. In the standard version, misses are recorded as red squares on the spaces in the grid after the shot, but a more advanced version is offered where only one's memory is used to remember where they struck before. A score tally at the bottom helps remember how many enemy ships are left, at least.

Search and Destroy won't light the world on fire with it's rendition of Battleship on the Commodore VIC 20, but it's fun enough for solo play against a computer. Sadly there is no two-player versus mode included.