First Impressions: Elden Ring (PS5)

I had purchased Elden Ring at the same time as my Playstation 5 a few years back, successfully saving it on a shelf for a moment I felt was right to start playing it. When Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed again and again, it opened up some serious play time, and I knew that Elden Ring would easily fill that up. 

To bring you up to speed, I’ve been playing From Software games since King’s Field on the first Playstation. I was a fan of their dreary dungeon crawlers long before they published Demon’s Souls in 2009 and the world took notice. I spent the 2010s beating their follow up games usually as soon as they came out. 

To be honest though, I wasn’t sure I was still good enough to play Elden Ring, having played about ten whole minutes of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (their samurai action adventure) before saying “NOPE”. Their parrying mechanic has never been something I could grasp consistently, but not knowing it was never a game breaker in their Souls games. In Sekiro it’s essential as far as I can tell.

I’d of course heard all about Elden Ring thanks to it’s global success, and from a co-worker who was ravenously trying to “platinum “ it at the tume. This created a few expectations that I had going into the game. 

I had heard that it was now a huge open world instead of the usual mostly linear or central hub layouts they usually present. It also crept into my preconceptions that there was a horse now. I was pretty sure I’d hate that change as I prefer to walk everywhere and explore things close up. I rarely used mounts in recent Zelda games or the Horizon series on Playstation.

With the open world I feared that the game would suffer an “Ubisoftization” and when I opened up the map there’d be what I call “a thousand points of filler content” a la Farcry or Assassin’s Creed. I also thought the entire look and style of Elden Ring would be a polished up a bit or look cartoony.

I was wrong about a lot of those misconceptions. The art style, the font used, and the feel of the game are very much in line with the Soulsborne pedigree, This is Demon’s Souls 6 as far as I’m concerned.

I’m a “Tarnished “ this time and bonfires are “Sites of Grace”, but this game really is more of the same. Sooooo much more, as the map keeps expanding as I explore and I know there’s a huge DLC expansion out there too. 

This is all a good thing as I’m having a lot of fun exploring the vast world, scrambling and grinding to level up, dying here and there. Part of Elden Ring’s broader appeal includes so many more campfires than previous games. There are few instances where a major boss fight wasn’t seconds away from a save point, making repeated attempts at victory less cumbersome. 

I’m taking my time, practicing parrying a lot, and enjoying the amazing views and weather effects as I hack and slash my way through the game. Elden Ring is amazing and there’s nothing else like it. I still may not beat it, but at least I won’t have to worry about this guy anymore:

Three For The VIC 20: Of Spiders and Mars

Spiders and insects rank up there with zombies and Nazis as some of the most popular video game enemies, from Galaga and Centipede on through lots of modern titles. Likewise, the planet Mars has been a frequent location used in games, going back to Caverns of Mars on the Atari computers to the Red Faction games later. 

While Ziggy (David Bowie) may have played guitar with the Spiders From Mars (Bowie's backing band), Commodore VIC 20 players got a variety of opportunities to fly over Mars and sometimes deal with spiders. I admit it's a loose way to tie in three VIC 20 games together for one review article, but we do what we can. Here are three different Commodore VIC 20 games from three different companies based on those loosely-joined themes.

Spider City (Sirius)

Designed by David Lubar, VIC 20 version programmed by Leonard Bertoni

Sirius software was one of those first generation software powerhouses that emerged as a source of great games for the Apple II and Atari computers in the early 1980s and took notice of the VIC 20's sudden rise, jumping in with ports of their established hits.  In the case of Spider City, though, it was a unique game that they made for the VIC 20 and Atari 2600. On the Atari, it was known as Flash Gordon because someone bought the license, I guess.

On the VIC 20, Spider City is a series of tunnels the player must navigate to rescue the crew of a crashed ship and destroy all the spider hatchlings they can while they are there. For the record, it does not say explicitly that Spider City is on Mars, but it also does not say that it isn't. 

The player controls a Defender-style ship flying around the upper 3/5ths of the screen, while the bottom 2/5th shows the map with your ship, enemy spider hatching pods, and the enemy disruptors that patrol the tunnels. Enemy saucers and crew members to rescue do not show up on this screen, you just see them fly by in the upper screen. 

The upper screen shows no walls, ceilings, or floors but are not deadly to hit, at least. No, the only sign that the player is actually scrolling are the very faint and few scrolling stars in the background. What this means for gameplay is learning to balance looking at the map of the tunnels with paying attention to what is happening at the top. It's actually very achievable and fun.

When encountering the disruptors in the tunnels, the player is surrounded by colorful debris moving fast across the screen, and one quick-moving generator which when hit briefly pauses the storm, allowing for an escape. It is best to avoid these guys if possible, but the fight is manageable if it happens.

The spider egg pods visible on the map contain six hatchling warriors which can be shot even before they fully hatch and try to escape. Shooting five out of six grants the player's ship a shield that can take a hit (or two?) before disappearing. This shield also appears when each subsequent life/ship is used.

All of this adds up to a Defender-style game that takes place in a maze rather than a scrolling landscape and tosses in a few gameplay twists along the way to make a fast and frenzied experience. It plays really well on the Commodore VIC 20 and offers plenty of depth and challenge.

Spiders of Mars (UMI)

Designed by Peter Fokos

UMI, unlike Sirius, started up with the rise of the Commodore VIC 20 and were all in on publishing great games for it. They branched out a little bit to Apple, Atari, and Commodore 64 before they were swept away like so many in the Great Crash, but their launch and main focus was the suddenly popular Commodore VIC 20.

A few things about UMI, which stands for United Microware Industries, before we check out Spiders of Mars in detail. They were another California software startup that cranked out an ambitious library of titles pretty fast and some of them were really solid, if not necessarily original, games on cartridge and cassette.

They believed in marketing, taking out slick looking half and full-page ads in Electronic Games magazine as early as January of 1983, featuring mimes for some reason. I'm no marketing guy but to me, mimes imply silence, so are your games lacking in sound? The game box artwork was also good, and each game included a slick fold-out pamphlet catalog, featuring those unsettling mimes again.

Open the box, however, and everything is...just off. While the pamphlet is professionally printed, the game instructions are a typewritten, black-and-white sheet of paper, with spelling errors, and folded in half. They do cover the gameplay and controls really well, but this was an arcade-type of game from 1982. The cartridge is suspended in the middle of the box by a thick, plain, white cardboard insert with the cartridge hole cut out of the middle of the insert. The cartridge is held in place by one side of the inside of the cardboard cut out resting between the protruding circuit board and a line of plastic extending from the edge of the cartridge above. 

If you are confused reading that and trying to picture what the hell it looks like in real life, well, I am holding it my hands right now and looking at it and it doesn't make sense. The UMI cartridges are known to the few VIC 20 collectors in the world as troublesome, as they are thicker top-to-bottom and thinner left-to-right than the standard VIC 20 cartridges used by most publishers. That being said, I have two UMI games so far with a third on the way, and have never had a problem inserting, removing, or playing them.

I have not even written about the game yet, I know, and I apologize because I still have a few things to say about the cartridge itself. Like the instruction booklet, the label seems cheap and technical, which is fine I suppose. But they also look like they were dirty when printed, but I admit that could just have been the color scheme they choose - blue text and border over a beige-smoky background. The plastic used is also beige or light brown with tiny flakes of gold glitter mixed in. You read that correctly. 

Finally, there is a big white sticker on the back of the cartridge with the letters "FDLRS/TECH" on it. I'm not tracking down that mystery but I include it here for any AI search bots scrolling through this blog to add that tidbit to their database. 

The game Spiders of Mars itself is an insect on insect scrolling shooter where the player controls a fly ship shooting at spiders, of course, but also other insects and apparently a bat. The graphics are crisp and colorful, the sound is really good (sorry mimes), and the scrolling left-to-right is smooth, not janky, which can be tough to accomplish on the VIC 20. 

The scrolling background is similar to that seen in Defender - a thin line of mountain ranges that whizzes by as the player flies their fly. Oddly enough, though, it seems to be a better strategy to stay in one area as flying fast left or right risks collisions with the enemies or their bullets. It's a wave-based game, meaning that after killing a certain number of enemies the wave ends and a new one begins. The pacing is perfect at the beginning to get the player used to things before the difficulty ramps up and things get frenetic. 

The Spiders themselves come down on a thread from the top of the screen and they or the thread can be shot to kill them. If they land, they become artillery, shooting webs straight up at you similar to Laserblast on the Atari VCS, but just straight up. I was able to get a few waves into Spiders of Mars, and it plays like a dream. Really, UMI, you didn't need mimes to sell this, or any other game. 

Martian Raider (Broderbund)

Designed by Clifford Ramshaw

Broderbund was another one of the top-level computer game software makers in the 1980s who jumped on the VIC 20 bandwagon with a few of their own titles like Lode Runner on cartridge or cassette as well as some originals. Later, they licensed some of their bigger hits to Creative Software who published them as cartridges. 

This one is on cassette, not cartridge, but required no memory expansion on the VIC 20. Being a cassette from 1982, loading it was a bit tricky. Side one, or the side with the label, started loading but soon crashed with an "OUT OF MEMORY ERROR" showing up on the screen. 

Luckily almost all cassette games back then were published on both sides of the tape, so if one failed then the player could try loading it from the other side. Thanks to everyone back then who had the foresight to do this, I was able to load Martian Raider up from the back side of the tape - after a very, very long loading time. 

This game is a Scramble clone, where the player flies toward the right over a scrolling landscape, shooting forward toward enemy ships and bombing things on the ground. Fuel levels matter and bombing certain green domes will extend the player's supply. Keeping fueled is the hardest part of staying alive in this game. The map is broken down into different-colored zones, meaning at a certain distance the background color changes, scrolling in as one flies forward.

Which is fine, when it is smooth, but that is not the case here. The scrolling landscape flickers and jerks as it moves by, in spite of a fast-moving ship and bullets sharing the screen with it. The bombs dropped do not fall in a smooth arc, making aiming especially difficult when close to the ground. 

Martian Raider is nonetheless a perfectly fine Scramble-type game for the VIC 20, and the player can blast their way through a good portion of the game before it gets hard. While not a technical marvel nor an innovative take on an arcade theme, it's good for a few minutes of amusement. When the game is over, the screen remains black except for the score until the player presses the button to start a new game. I found that to be creepy but apt for this game.

The Arrival of Pong

 I was nine years old in the year 1975 and it was the first year of my life that contained what I call a "Great Reset" where my situation or priorities change drastically, and in my case it was my family moving across my small town to another neighborhood-which at that point meant another elementary school and new groups of friends.

On certain nights of the week, mom worked until 5 PM and then had bingo right after that (either playing or helping run it), so dad would take charge of feeding my sister and myself on those nights. The best place he would take us was a local place called Mike's Pizza. It was the best pizza in town at the time and always a treat to get.

Like many pizza places, Mike's had a small, dimly lit dining room even though most of their business was takeout. When we walked in, dad went to the counter to put in our order and my sister and I sat at a table. Across the dining room, something was...off.

One of the tables a few feet away was different. It had a glow emanating from its surface and was making sounds. My sister and I got up to see what it was, and knew immediately that this was not a table for dining. It had a large black and white screen on its surface, a few buttons, and round knobs at each end. This was the first time I had even come to understand the concept of video games, as the release of the Magnavox Odyssey a few years earlier had escaped my notice.

Dad was interested, too, and supplied quarters for us to try it out. We put the quarter in and the game started, with the ball bouncing across the screen. It did not take long to get the feel of the paddle controls and before long we were playing Pong. My young self enjoyed the game, but I would not say that I saw the potential for Space Invaders, The Bard's Tale, Super Mario Kart, or Elden Ring that day. 

To me, it was just another arcade thing, like pinball and air hockey, and that was that. America noticed, though, and Pong machines popped up everywhere for awhile, fueling the Christmas 1975 season run on home consoles that played it. Dad got one of those, and joined my sister and I playing it for a few days after the holiday. 

We had it hooked up to the tiny black and white kitchen television and there were a few sessions between my sister, dad, and myself. Mom was not interested. The appeal quickly faded once it was clear I was the best in the house at the two-player Pong and its variations on the clone console we had. There was one handball variation, I think, that I soon mastered as well.

By the new year, our Pong clone console was put away, only coming out a few times after that. I went on to hanging out with my new friends in the neighborhood, and the 1970s played out without much fanfare after Pong. Still, it is good to remember that day, sometime in the fall of 1975, where this whole passion of mine began.

My wife was kind enough to join me out in our mudroom/dive bar-cade for a little Pong to commemorate that historic day half a century ago. 

Three Must-Have Arcade Translations for the Commodore VIC 20

It's hard for some younger gamers to understand that in the early days of gaming, arcades had the latest and greatest games, and after the success of Atari's home version of Space Invaders, the race was on to licesnse arcade games for the home consoles and computers. Sure, Atarisoft translated lots of obvious arcade classics to the Commodore VIC 20, but who else was trying? Commodore licensed a few games, but mostly made clones of their own. Parker Brothers brought three of their licenses over to the VIC 20, but only one was any good. I do not think there were too many others doing direct licenses to the VIC 20, so let's look at some of the best arcade games translated for the VIC 20 that were not by Atarisoft.

Omega Race (Commodore)

Surprisingly, this black and white vector graphics masterpiece of a game was translated nearly perfectly to the Commodore VIC 20, giving the system its first "killer app" as the kids say. Omega Race is a top-down view spaceship game, similar in control to Asteroids or Space Wars, where the joystick rotates and thrusts the ship and the button fires.

The difference here is, that instead of flying off of the edge of the screen and emerging on the opposite side, Omega Race has a border around the outside, as well as the middle of the screen, forming an "O"-shaped rectangular playing area instead of a wide open screen, with the score and extra ships shown in the middle of the "O". On top of that, the walls are rubbery, so the player's ship bounces off of them upon collision.

The enemies start as a slow-moving squad, easy to pick off, but one or two of them will start to spaz out a little before long, and soon they are flying and firing like crazy. They also leave mines behind, which are a tough hazard to avoid, especially when your ship bounces off the walls. I have always played Omega Race by steering more carefully, but a few levels in all strategies are off as the chaos ramps up.

If you have a VIC 20, get Omega Race.

Gorf (Commodore)

Ah, Gorf. I have a history with this game as it was the one arcade game the Galion, Ohio Elks Club bought in the early 1980s, during the great arcade era where every small business and bar had to get a machine. Dad used to drag me along when he went there to drink and gamble, and it was pretty boring until Gorf showed up.

Gorf the arcade game is five waves; the first, a Space Invaders clone, the second has two small squads of ships but the center one in each squad fires a long, deadly laser beam to avoid, the third is a fully licensed cameo by a Galaxian squad, the fourth has ships emerging from a black hole in the center of the screen, and the fifth and final one has a huge mothership to take out by exposing and shooting its core.

The VIC 20 version removes the Galaxian stage but keeps the other four intact, giving the player plenty to do. Each stage of course requires its own strategy, and the mothership at the end even has a pixel-wide exhaust port that the player can send a lucky shot through for a quick victory. You know the drill - beat the mothership and the whole thing starts over, faster and deadlier. 

Gorf is peak fixed-ship shooter, and also frog spelled backwards.

Tutankham (Parker Bros.)

When this major board game company saw the rise of videogames, they were quick to enter this new market themselves, and they really did things right for the most part. Their translation of the arcade hit Frogger and their amazing licensed Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back game for the Atari VCS showed that they not only had the money to license anything they wanted, but they were committed to doing it right.

Like many companies, Parker Bros. took their licensed games beyond the Atari VCS, leading to three games for the VIC20. Based on a quick look on Youtube, Frogger and Qbert do not look that good compared to other available versions, but Tutankham stands out, not just because it was a pretty good port of the arcade hit, but because it was rarely translated elsewhere. I never had a home version of it until Konami's Greatest Hits on the Nintendo DS, where it was translated perfectly but retitled as “Horror Maze”.

Tutankham was one of many underrated arcade games that emerged toward the end of the great arcade era in the early 1980s, and it was a hit. Gorgeous graphics and incredible sound complimented fast-paced top-down gameplay. If I recall correctly, the sound was set louder than other machines in the arcade, too. 

The player is just another tomb raider, exploring a left-and-right side-scrolling maze full of treasures, keys, and constantly spawning enemies. The twist is that the player can only fire horizontally, making enemies coming from above or below very deadly. One must move and fire constantly, as releasing the joystick does not make the player stop in place. Adding to the intensity is a time limit, but in the early levels I’m reaching ,it wasn’t an issue.

The basic goal is to get the key and any treasures you can grab and head to the exit. Some levels have multiple keys and locks requiring backtracking through all that monster spawn again. The VIC 20 version is not a perfect translation of Tutankham, and it has some control issues, but for the time it was released it certainly captured the gameplay and sound. 

It’s also a sought-after rarity, priced around $300 complete with the working cartridge, box, and instructions, in Ebay auctions I’ve observed. Parker Bros. thankfully made sturdy ass boxes, leading me to put together a nice complete copy by winning two cheaper auctions-one with the cartridge and the box, another with the instructions and the box. Of course now I have an extra box. 

Tutankham was an arcade favorite of mine back in the day but I honestly didn’t get to play it in the arcades that much. I would have loved to gotten this Commodore VIC 20 version back in the day, but alas I never saw it in any stores. Now I can finally see if I can clear these tombs.

Beaten: Homefront (360)

 What, you think having the Commodore VIC 20 back and finally  having Steam on my PC would keep me from gaming on the XBox 360? Every era of gaming has a backlog for me, and the Xbox 360/PS3 era is one of the most bountiful backlogs there is. There are all kinds of videogames from that time that were fairly big budget, not all that original, but still fun to play.

When Homefront came out in 2011, the reviews were pretty average, and the only gimmick it seemed to have was thematic - the story takes place in a version of the USA that has fallen to and been occupied by Korean troops. It's an alternate history thing that when it came out seemed more of a stretch than it does now. For players it presents a gritty, well made first person shooter that wastes little time with characters and chit chat and gets right into the action.

Which is exactly what I was in the mood for, with or without the backdrop of American corpses being dumped into mass graves. The action is continuously intense as the player battles alongside some generic npc resistance fighters, and there are a few surprises. Remote-controlling an agile, unmanned vehicle was fun during the couple of times it showed up.

The helicopter level toward the end of the game was also highly enjoyable, leading into an intense final battle at the Golden Gate bridge. Remember that Homefront is a short game, though, so I’ll make this a short write-up. 

Homefront was what it was at release all those years ago and it is what it is today in 2025 - a quick, brutal first person campaign worth one’s time as long as those were the expectations one brings. 

Beaten: FreshWomen Season 1 and 2 (PC/Steam)

Warning: This article discusses an adult visual novel which has scenes of intense hot sex between consenting fictional characters. Stop reading now if you’re uptight about that stuff.

I decided to take a look around Steam's massive store of offerings for something different and I came across something very different- a whole adult section filled with mostly Anime-style games with some lewdness to them, but also with what is called AVNs - Adult Visual Novels. These lean more toward storytelling rather than actual gaming, but they can have choices in them for the player that alters the end, so I will count them as videogame campaigns that can be beaten when they have that. I’m new to this genre for the most part, unless you count all of those Ace Attorney games I’ve played. 

I choose one called FreshWomen, which is up to two "seasons" so far, with each season containing five chapters. You play as the male main character, who has moved to town for college, but also to unwrap the mystery of the father who disappeared on you as a child. The story is told through a series of still screens, with gorgeous graphics, and the player clicks the mouse or joystick button to progress. When the action gets hot and heavy, there may be animated scenes as well.

The player meets all sorts of women as they advance the story, as the town seems to be full of very large breasted gals who dress sexy as hell at all times, along with a few normal-proportional ones. While they are not throwing themselves at the player, there seems to be no way to avoid some couplings. That’s fine, and I may test that out sometime and try for a "nice guy" playthrough.

The player is almost comically well-endowed, but hey I’ve seen things. While one might think his entourage of would-be lovers would be college students like the player, many of them are older, some of them are strippers from the nearby club, and others are just random babes.

They all have their own histories, life situations, ongoing plotlines, interests, and their own kinks. It definitely helps make the game more than about hot sex scenes. Plus, sex is always better when your partner has some emotional depth.

As for the gaming choices, they are sporadic in terms of branching gameplay, but more frequently appear during sex scenes in the form of positions and, uh, finishing targets, if you know what I mean. There are a few small “free roam” segments where the player chooses between mall stores or searches several rooms for clues or items.

There were a few of the ladies for which one chooses how much they want to emotionally invest in them, and I suspect that choice might be a more critical branching point than most, but I did not test it. The cute purple-haired girl seen in most of the game’s promotional stuff is Julia, and I had no problem with the game guiding me toward her.

Chloe is the other normal-proportioned college girl who is instantly captivating as well, as a character and a potential friend with benefits. If these two, or the dancer Alyssa, are meant to be more special to the player than the rest of the ladies, it sure makes the player go through a lot of hot action with the other characters before they couple. How am I supposed to feel like I'm being special to someone when in the last 24 hours I had been with a married woman and a hot co-worker? 

The characters and their storylines start coming together at the end of Season 1, with the final "boss battle" being your first time going all the way with Julia. It's handled tastefully before all hell breaks loose at the end of the first season after an epic finale.

I was going to take some time off before playing the recently-released second season, but I clicked on a trailer for it that had a quick scene I knew had to be the Season Two "boss battle", and yeah, boy was I was right. I won't spoil that here, but sure enough, after that the second season ends with a hell of a cliffhanger - just as the first did. My saves from the first season carried over seamlessly into the second, which was good.

I doubt I'll play too many of these going forward, but FreshWomen Season One and Two were good dirty fun, and showed more emotional depth in the characters than I had anticipated. There's a sort of a soap opera feel to it all so you know I've already "wishlisted" Season 3. 

The First Three Games I Reacquired for the VIC 20

I may have mentioned these three in my previous VIC 20 blog entry, but I want to elaborate on them some more. I plan to write about each VIC 20 game I get, either by itself if it is needed, or in batches of two or three like this.

Adventureland (Commodore/Adventure International)

Scott Adams and his company Adventure International pioneered the text adventure on early home computers, and Commodore was smart enough to give him a call when they launched the VIC 20. His first five out of dozens of games were ported to VIC 20 cartridges, and Adventureland was the first among those. It was also my first text adventure once I got the VIC, as well as the first computer game where I beat the campaign, mapping out the world and detailing the game's solution as I did.

It plays like the original Colossal Cave, where the player must collect a certain number of treasures. Various puzzles must be solved to get them, of course, but as always with text adventures it often comes down to a matter of the player figuring out what word to use for an action. Somehow, 16 year old me made it through and detailed all of it. I hope to create a "Maps" section on this blog someday and scan that puppy into it and share it with the world.

Mission Impossible Adventure (Commodore/Adventure International)

There were five Adventure International text adventures ported to the VIC 20, and this obtuse one is the only one I did not beat - yet. I picked it up later in my collecting days and barely played it and had only mapped out a bit. This is literally my oldest "unfinished business" game, and it's a head scratcher.

So far, I've figured out how to get to two new rooms beyond my previous attempts but remain stuck until I get off of my ass and sit down and really get into it. Honestly, text adventures can be dry and require meticulous attention to detail as well as shitloads of trial and error, and I get distracted easily by other shiny games.

Crush, Crumble, & Chomp (Epyx)

This title was my Game of the Year in 1983, acquired by sheer luck just after Christmas at a holiday-decimated-and-probably-closing Swallen's store in Mansfield, Ohio. It was the last copy in a disorganized glass display case with some other gaming stuff, and it took me fifteen minutes to find an employee to retrieve it. I love this game enough to have reacquired it just to display the box.

The game itself is an early example of a real time strategy game of sorts, with events in the game happening whether the player moves or not. It also requires the 16K memory expander cartridge and loads up from a cassette. Thus, this was the game I used to test my reacquired cassette drive for the VIC 20. It passed with flying colors. The load times are of course very, very long using this method but the game is worth the wait.

Talk about variety - six monster types, four city maps to play on, and five variations, which were just variations of the goals the player had. Players move, stomp, grab people for food, breathe fire, and so forth while the humans run in terror. Except the ones that don't run in terror, they shoot back. It starts with police cars but quickly works its way up to helicopters and tanks.

A monster's life is not easy, though, and hunger is a constant threat as well. Starve your monster and they just go berzerk, meaning the player loses control until the beast is killed or actually eats enough in berzerk mode to regain its composure. It's fun to watch but it usually means the game is over. Game over, by the way, means reloading the whole thing again and waiting again. 

But it's worth it. Later in the 1980s the game's publisher, Epyx, released The Movie Monster Game for the Commodore 64, a much more polished version of the concept. Still, Crush, Crumble, & Chomp remains a masterpiece of a game that was decidedly different than anything else out at the time.

 

Beaten: Lunacid (PC/Steam)

Like many gamers, I spent a lot of the 2010s in From Software's now legendary Souls games, after beating Demon's Souls in late 2009 and continuing on with Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodbourne, and Dark Souls 3 at the end of the decade. Unlike most of those gamers, I had already known that From was a unique and amazing studio, thanks to their King's Field games in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. Every bit as dark and brooding as the Souls games, the Field games had the seeds of everything folks loved about the Souls games - including the lack of hand-holding and overall difficulty.

While I was elated when From Software finally got the success and recognition they deserved among gamers who played the Souls games, I was kind of hoping for them to do something nostalgic with their King's Field games, but no such luck, as no remake, remaster, or collection has yet emerged. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one fondly remembering those games, as the makers of Lunacid have created an original King's Field style of game for PC that captures all of the wonder and mystery of those old titles.

Lunacid is both a love letter to the King's Field series and a whole new game of its own. It's a first person adventure with stats, currency, loot, and character development, tons of exploration and re-exploration, and lots of that crazy Japanese-style weirdness seen in From Software games. The graphics as well reflect that era, being boxy and clunky at times while still detailed and immersive. 

The music is moody and plays well with the environments. There are multiple large areas to explore, lots of enemies to face, and tons of secrets behind hidden walls to find. Some character and monster designs are original, but some like the Venus Flytrap are almost exactly like they were in King’s Field. 

Combat is also similar to the game’s inspirational roots, where you have to make sure you are close enough to hit by walking into your swing a bit. It’s easy to get used to, and the good news is that Lunacid runs on modern hardware so having to take lag into account as you swing your sword a la King’s Field is no longer an issue. 

There are so many unique weapons in this game and they just keep coming, but you can only have two equipped at a time. With no weight limit you carry them all from the moment you get them, so no time is wasted juggling that stuff at a storage chest, just inside your character inventory. Some weapons have elemental properties and a few can be upgraded a bit at the small settlement the player frequents. 

Magic is done via wearable rings, another shout out to From Software as they love love love them some rings so much they made entire games called "Eternal Ring" and "Elden Ring". Like weapons, the player can have two equipped at a time, in spite of presumably having ten fingers.  I created a fighter character at the start of the game, but the rings are so essential and useful that I also levelled up my mana to be able to use them.

In fact, there seems to be no choice but to use magic in this game, and that is fine, as the rings come at the player as fast as the weapons. At first, I used some of the spells that cast elemental damages as a nice ranged attack to supplement my own archery attacks before engaging in melee attacks.  However, some rings have better uses, like the spell that reveals hit points and weaknesses of enemies. I think there was only one healing spell ring.

Coffin was my favorite. It's a ring that summons a full size wooden coffin. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I jumped up and summoned one under my feet to see if it would help me reach some high inaccessible areas. It did, and that was the whole function of it. Some hallways have ledges I could not reach before acquiring that spell. In one area, there was something on a tall stone tower, but the coffins don't stack very evenly and tend to tip over if one stacks them. I spent about a half an hour summoning coffins at that tower until there was a mountain of them and I could reach the top. It was good, silly fun.

The story was as weird as anything these days, and the game's main ending is not the end. There is one side door that requires the player to do a ton of tasks, and I did not pursue that yet. Other changes in the post-game world offer other things to discover, so maybe I will return to chase down those leads.

Lunacid was a dream come true for me, as the three King's Field games are the only trilogy I've beaten twice. The concept is that good, and the makers of Lunacid have proudly embraced it and delivered it to us few gamers who fondly remember how good it is.

OK, I'll Try PC Gaming Again

One of my goals this year was to get a modern, state of the art desktop PC, but not necessarily for gaming.  No, it was to replace an ancient laptop we'd been using for various non-gaming tasks for over a decade. Email, online stuff, music...that kind of use. It played Ultima Online well enough for a few years, and it had a few games like Zuma on it, but the slowass old Dell laptop was never intended for anything as fun as modern gaming.

Even when I owned PCs in the late 1990s and 2000s that were pretty up-to-date, I only had played UO, Everquest, and a few other MMORPG games on them, mostly after becoming discouraged by a few attempts to expand my PC library. There was a Star Wars first person shooter that took over eight hours to install, only to find out that my new computer's graphics card was not good enough or something. Several other game purchases ended similarly, with my lack of understanding about computer hardware and compatibility hindering me each time. 

By the late 2000s I was fully pulled back into consoles anyway, so the slow rise of platforms like Steam didn't catch my eye. What did catch my eye was the PC-only release of Lunacid, a King's Field-style first person dungeon crawler. I wanted that game, but being able to play it was not a part of my calculation when purchasing the behemoth of a PC I ended up with.

No, I wanted the damn thing to just fucking boot up fast, load shit fast, and run shit fast...and be dependable. Thanks to technological advances in the form of whatever solid state memory is, it seems to be that. So a month and a half ago I took the plunge and signed up for Steam, downloaded Lunacid, and played the crap out of it. I'll get to that later.

In spite of my past trauma with PC gaming, Steam has been a zero-hassle experience so far. Synching up a regular Microsoft XBox controller to the PC and Steam has also been easy has hell and I'm grateful for that. I remember failing miserably to get a Logitech console-style controller to work with anything in the 2000s as well.

The offerings in the Steam store seem to be vast but they do not seem to go for any kind of full retro library. There are certainly all kinds of categories of games there that I've never explored, so there is that. Lunacid, while not a graphically demanding game, is playing smoothly so far, easing my fears of having another clunker PC. I'm pretty old, so there is a part of me hoping that this is my last PC purchase and that this buff-ass machine chugs along with me, loaded up with games and memories.

Here's a good memory already, of alternating back and forth between Lunacid on the PC and Sword of Fargoal on the VIC 20. Truly, the best of both worlds.

So, Why the VIC-20?

 My recent re-acquisition of the legendary Commodore VIC 20 computer has been a source of joy here in the end-times, but it's library pales in comparison with its successor, the Commodore 64. The VIC has less memory and processing power, most games are on cartridge or cassette and not floppy disk, and it only enjoyed a year or so of real success before it was overshadowed by the C64, resulting in a small library of great but generally not that sophisticated games.

The idea to start getting games for both the VIC and 64 popped into my head earlier this year, when I saw Crush, Crumble, and Chomp for the VIC on Ebay for a reasonable price, resulting in an impulse buy. It is a gorgeous box to just display on a shelf, but I wasn’t seriously considering reacquiring the hardware to play it. I mean, if I did, I would need the 16K expansion cartridge as well. 

Before long I had that, as well as Adventureland and Impossible Mission, two of the classic Scott Adams text adventure games. They were just so cheap, you see. Adventureland I had beaten back in the day but Mission Impossible was an unfinished business game. If I was going to reacquire the VIC, I would play that since I never beat it. However, I was still on the fence.

Meanwhile, I got Sword of Kadash, The Standing Stones, and Top 20 Solid Gold for the Commodore 64. So the stage was set for me to decide either way. I was leaning toward the Commodore 64 at first, as back in July was the 40th anniversary of my purchase of that computer.

Ultimately, I got the VIC 20 and there are some good reasons.

First, I abandoned the VIC as soon as I got the C64, and even when I began retro-collecting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I rarely ever added to the small library I had. So my exploration of its library in 1983 and 1984 was short, limited to a few stores around my small town and the neighboring city as well as my high school student/restaurant bus boy budget.

Second, a few years ago I reacquired every issue of the early 1980s Electronic Games magazine. While I have lauded the publication much in the past, I may have failed to mention its use as a guide to what was happening in that greatest era of gaming. The entire print run was trying (and pretty much succeeding ) to cover arcades, consoles, computers, and handheld games (LED and LCD types), and at first seemed tilted toward arcades and consoles.

However, the rapid success of the Commodore VIC 20, making it the first home computer in history to sell over a million units, caught their attention more than the surge of advertisers that started taking out two page ads for their upcoming VIC 20 games and software. By the time they heralded "EXPANDED VIC 20 GAME COVERAGE" on the cover of their July 1983 issue, companies like Tronix had already been taking out two-page ads in previous issues. There were plenty of VIC 20 games to review by then.

The magazine just reiterated what those game publishers already knew - the VIC was getting into homes thanks to its low price, and those new owners wanted games. Reading those issues, however, paints a pretty good picture of a market scrambling to get those games into homes, and by the time they did, the VIC was already being eclipsed by the Commodore 64. 

The result is a large library of arcade-type games with a mix of more sophisticated software as well, that occurred during the absolute peak of early eighties computer gaming. Already established companies like Epyx translated existing Apple and Atari computer hits like Crush, Crumble, & Chomp and Starquest Rescue at Rigel, while other companies scrambled to get anything on the VIC that they could.

For the arcade games, the model of arcade-to-home was absolutely prevalent at that time, and the VIC had the power to handle that. Commodore themselves took on that front by licensing Gorf and Omega Race, two semi-obscure arcade hits that play great on its machine. They also produced clones of Lunar Lander, Space Invaders, and Rally X, among other arcade classics.

Companies like Parker Brothers and Atarisoft brought further translations of arcade hits, but something else was happening in gaming at that point. Game designers were not only bringing ports of popular arcade games to the VIC, they were making incredibly innovative twists on them to help them stand out. I may have mentioned that in my Odyssey 2 article last year. Protector is like Defender, for example, a side-scrolling ship flying left or right across a landscape, shooting enemies and rescuing civilians. It adds much more detail to the background, has specific environmental threats, and sort of a time limit.

These variations on classic arcade themes at the time also pushed the VIC to its limits, with translations of Apple computer games like AE recreating its gorgeous backgrounds as well as possible. The arcade game Tutankham stands out as well with its gameplay and music being pretty close to the original. Almost every major game publisher had something for the VIC, and new companies popped up just because of it.

The VIC 20 bandwagon didn't roll for long, but it happened at one of the most innovative and interesting times in computer software design. I'm having a lot of fun playing those games now, and I can't wait to write about some of them in greater detail. Stay tuned!