Tender Viccles

As long-time readers know, my first video game system was the Odyssey2, but my first home computer was Commodore's VIC-20, given to me by an uncle in the tech industry. It was a modest machine even by the standards of the early 1980s, with less than 4K of RAM, harsh four channel sound, and a resolution so chunky you could spread it on celery sticks, but as a makeshift game system it more than made up for the Odyssey2's shortcomings. VIC-20 games were both plentiful and cheap during Commodore's transition to the more powerful Commodore 64, and life for this young nerd in training was good.

Fast-forward to... uh, now. Yeah, now works. The VIC-20 is ancient history in this era of high capacity hard drives, infinitely accommodating USB ports, and high definition flat-screen displays, but I still get the urge to dig up some of its games. Unfortunately, the system that was described as "the user friendly computer" in 1981 is anything but over thirty five years later. Only a handful of VIC emulators exist, with most of those getting orphaned by their designers years ago, and cartridge games are typically split into two files, forcing the user to guess which files go where, and which mode is required to run them, before the game will start. A000? 6000? What is this crazy moon language, anyway? It makes you nostalgic for the convenience of the VIC-20's grabby cartridge slot. Sure, you might not get the cartridge back out once it's in there, but at least it works.

That was the grim reality of playing VIC-20 games in VICE... until the emulator broadened its support to include the Mega Cart. This multicart by Anders Carlsson offers nearly every VIC-20 cartridge and a substantial chunk of VIC-20 tapes in one ROM. Want to play a different game? Just press ALT+R on your keyboard and you're sent back to a handy menu. There are even brief descriptions of each game that remind you of what you'll need to do to begin, if the software you've chosen doesn't start with a touch of the fire button. Now that's user friendly.

And these are a few of the games available for the system. I've chosen a random assortment of VIC-20 titles from high-profile arcade ports to easily overlooked indie releases, covering the good, the bad... and whatever the hell Parker Bros. was making. (Look guys, I know you were a board game manufacturer before Hasbro swooped in and swallowed half the toy industry whole, but video games need animation. Ask anybody.)

ROBOTRON: 2084
AtariSoft
"Guided by their infallible logic, the Robotrons conclude: The VIC-20 is too wimpy, and will be overburdened."

AtariSoft's VIC-20 games could go one of two ways. Either they were incredibly faithful to their arcade counterparts in spite of the VIC-20's handicaps, or they were incredibly too faithful to their arcade counterparts for the VIC-20 to realistically handle. Robotron: 2084, an overreaching conversion of the Williams arcade classic, fits squarely into the latter category. 

In its defense, it's a complete arcade port. You get the strobing title screen, which makes a strong case for why video game instruction manuals have epilepsy warnings on the first page. You get eight way firing, although it's a lot clumsier without a second controller port on the VIC-20. You get all the deadly robots and every member of the last human family, important details that could have been omitted.

However, this conversion of Robotron feels like someone at Atari stuck the arcade game into a shoebox, and stomped on it with their foot until they could put the lid back on it. It's cramped and slow, and the VIC's coarse resolution makes all the sprites too large and uncomfortably abstract. While it's easy enough to tell Mommy from the hordes of androids chasing her, she's got the shoulders of a linebacker and the pointy hair of a supporting character from the Dilbert comic.

It's not for lack of effort on the parts of the designers... they worked as hard as they could to get Robotron: 2084 on this system, common sense be damned. Unfortunately, like the game's killer robots, this is something that should have gone unmade. C

MOUNTAIN KING
CBS Software
"Beat on the bat, beat on the bat, beat on the bat with a baseball bat..."

Here's another overachiever on the VIC-20 hardware; a port of Mountain King that's nearly on par with the Atari 5200 version. The massive playfield that proved too much for the ColecoVision to handle scrolls smoothly in all directions here, and your hero's flashlight reveals hidden treasures and the dancing flame spirit as silhouettes, a nifty special effect. There are some weird quirks, like an invisible spider lurking at the bottom of the screen and pressing down to climb up to the crown in the inner chamber. However, everything you loved about Mountain King is present and accounted for... along with that one thing you hated.

Yes, it's the bat. The stupid bat that flits across the screen at regular intervals, snatching the crown off your head and forcing you to start your quest from the beginning. You have no defense against this maddening creature, and the tight corridors leading to the top of the mountain make it tough to avoid it. Generally, you'll get trapped in a long thin cave, and the leather-winged creep will meet you at the opening to take your crown and replace it with a steaming pile of guano. This is an issue with every version of Mountain King, but it somehow seems even worse on the VIC-20, because you have to press up to jump and it's harder to climb and dismount ladders than it should have been.

This is still one of the better ways to play this action game, which remains refreshingly unique after all these years. It's just a pity that when the bat appears, you can't swap the flashlight for a butcher knife, or a flamethrower, or an anti-tank missile... B

GARDEN WARS
Commodore
"Brought to you by Depends."

You flick the power switch on your VIC-20. A bomb angrily hums, then explodes, violently shaking the screen. You haven't even started this game yet and you already know you're in trouble.

Maybe you got the wrong impression from the title, or the cute mouse pulling back a bow on the front of the box. Let's clear up those misconceptions right now... there's nothing cute or peaceful about this game. It's relentlessly loud, hostile, and chaotic, in the tradition of the best arcade games of the early 1980s. Bugs swarm the maze-like playfield, dropping instantly fatal bombs and eggs. Fail to catch the eggs in time and they hatch into yellow spiders. Fail to kill the yellow spiders and they grow into bullet-resistant blue ones. Let them mutate into black spiders and your death is assured.

The only way to save yourself and move onto the next stage is to kill all the snails and caterpillars spawning eggs, but it can be hard to focus on that goal when the screen is choked with distractions. It's not just the roaming bugs, but the bonus items, strange random shapes which litter the playfield and pulse madly, threatening to send you into a state of sensory overload. If any game deserves the title of the urban legend Polybius, it's this one.

Garden Wars is likely the most intimidating game in the VIC-20 library, but it's got a lot of issues beyond the psychological trauma it might inflict on players. The control isn't as tight as it ought to be, and both the objective and the blocky graphics are unclear. All of these issues could be fixed in a remake, and while that's not likely to happen, it's fun to imagine the utter terror it could bring to today's players. Five Nights At Freddie's, eat your heart out. C+ 

ATLANTIS
Imagic
"Water we do now? We die."

As the legend goes, Imagic spread itself too thin in 1983, publishing its library of titles for more game systems and computers than it could realistically support. Without an adequate reserve of money or a plan of retreat from the declining video game industry, the company was doomed, officially going out of business in 1986.

Maybe it wasn't wise for Imagic to publish games for the VIC-20, but anyone who owned the system wasn't about to correct them! Their ports of Atlantis, Demon Attack, and Dragonfire were among the highlights of the VIC-20 library; easily as good as their Atari 2600 counterparts.

Atlantis makes an unexpected swerve from the original, however. Instead of giving the player three cannons to defend the fabled underwater city from a steadily advancing fleet of ships, they have just two. These cannons are fixed at an angle, making it a challenge to aim and adding to the tension when the ships get close. However, the player gets one smart bomb for each stage... if an enemy slips through your cannon fire, just let 'er rip with the fire button and every onscreen enemy is obliterated. Satisfying!

Beyond that, it's the same game as it was on the 2600. The ships makes an ominous droning noise as they cut through the night sky, stopping only to fire laser beams down on your cities and power generators. The ocean gently laps against the shore and all the sprites are built with layers of colors. It's a real treat for the eyes and ears, making up for the fairly simplistic gameplay. B

CAPTURE THE FLAG
Sirius Software
"You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like."

This one's impressive on two counts. The first is that Capture the Flag and its predecessor, Wayout, were first-person video games designed well before Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, or even MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, typically considered the foundations of this genre. Capture the Flag doesn't use the lame 90 degree turns that were so common on 8-bit and 16-bit game systems either, but a real-time 3D viewpoint, with walls drawn at various angles. They're plainly drawn, looking more like cubicle partitions than the towering metal and stone walls in Doom, but hey, you've gotta start somewhere.

The second is that this is running on a VIC-20. The Atari line of computers got a version of Capture the Flag too, and it's more impressive than this one, but the fact that they got this running at all on Commodore's budget computer is worthy of applause. There are two separate 3D views, one for the player and the other for the computer, an overhead view of the maze that's mapped out as you explore it, and a catchy film noir soundtrack that adds suspense to the action. Designer Paul Edelstein aimed high with this one, and it shows.

As a demonstration of the VIC-20's full potential, Capture the Flag is bested only by the demoscene programs released much later. As a game, it's plodding and a little confusing. Where do you go? What do you do? Where is that flag, anyway? None of that matters... just fire up the cartridge and drink in the sights and sounds. B-

AE
Broderbund
"Bombs bursting in air, fish guts everywhere..."

Tired of being regarded as the dopey, harmless cousins of the shark, stingrays have revolted, flying through the air in mesmerizing patterns while dumping bombs on the world below. Your only defense is a cannon armed with concussive missiles. Keep the fire button held down to send the missile upward, then release it to trigger an explosion which will turn any nearby rays into cat food.

AE was developed by a Japanese team named Programmers-3. Nobody really knows who that is... some have speculated that they went on to form Compile, while others insist that the team became SystemSoft, the creators of the Master of Monsters series. What we can ascertain from AE is that Programmers-3 were big fans of the challenging stages from Galaga, as this plays a whole lot like them. The big difference is the concussive missile, which demands strategy from the player. You can't fire directly at the stingrays... you've got to instead anticipate their movement and set a trap in their paths.

It's kind of clever, but is it fun? Eh, not really. The missile explosions are too small to be effective... the stingrays have to be in the dead center of the blast to be, uh, dead. It doesn't help that the rays are really small and blend in with the white parts of the background, sometimes zipping behind buildings and planets to evade your shots. AE is one of those games that's technically sound but conceptually broken, offering a twist to the Galaga style of gameplay that nobody really wanted. C

LUNAR LEEPER
Sierra On-Line
"Nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."

It's worth noting that the Leeper in the game's title became the star of Learning with Leeper, an edutainment title for pre-schoolers. It's also worth noting that Leeper is an eyeball monster with a pair of stilt-like legs, which it uses to lunge for spacecraft, and a pair of pincer-like jaws, which it uses to force the spacecraft into its mouth. There is no part of Leeper that should be educating your children. You would be better off hiring a rhinoceros with a short temper and a criminal record as your babysitter.

Anyway. (Ahem.) Lunar Leeper is a shooter that's a bit like Defender and a bit like the Atari 2600 obscurity Cosmic Commuter. You're in a flying saucer, and it's up to you to collect stranded astronauts and drop them off at a safe point at the start of the stage. Leepers wander the surface of this forbidden planet, and will attempt to snatch the astronauts out from under your ship as you fly over them. It's possible to shoot the aliens while they're in the air, but if they manage to catch you, you'll be treated to an animation of the Leeper folding your ship into its mouth, swallowing it whole, and belching. The scene is played up for laughs, but it puts the Leeper near the top of my list of most terrifying space creatures. I'm just saying, even the xenos in Aliens don't grab you out of the air and devour you in one gulp.

Save all the astronauts (or more likely, watch the Leepers eat half of them) and you're whisked off to a bonus stage, where you navigate a cramped cavern. A giant eyeball waits at the end of this level, which I have to imagine is the Queen Leeper and which I also imagine deserves the worst death possible for bringing these wretched creatures into existence. Too bad you'll have to settle for a laser blast in the pupil. It's not a pleasant death, but it could have been so much worse...

Lunar Leeper isn't a bad game by any means... your ship has slightly too much inertia and the Leepers are too smart to actually let themselves get shot (damn it), but it's animated well and the play mechanics work. I just can't fathom why Sierra thought this... thing was mascot material. Go to hell, Leeper. C+

DONKEY KONG
AtariSoft
"Hail to the Kong, baby."

AtariSoft was a confusing chapter in Atari's history. The company took its sizable library of licensed arcade games and brought them to competing home computers and video game systems. However, unlike Mattel and Coleco, the games often wound up being better than what was available on Atari's own machines! In way of illustration, here's Galaxian on the ColecoVision, and here's the same game on the Atari 5200. You've got to be pretty arrogant, or pretty desperate, to not only take your star attractions to the competition, but improve them on the way there.

Donkey Kong on the VIC-20 wasn't better than the Atari computer version, but it nevertheless illustrates the hard work AtariSoft put into its games... for systems not made by Atari. (Maybe it was the cocaine. People did a lot of cocaine in the 1980s, right?) It's got all four stages from the arcade game, while other ports offered three or even two. It's got the intermissions and the "How high can you get?" stage transitions from the arcade game... the ColecoVision port had none of these. It even feels more like the arcade game than other ports thanks to more onscreen barrels and proper scoring for when you leap over several at once.

That's not to say the VIC-20 version of Donkey Kong is a perfect arcade port. Thanks to the computer's low resolution and color output, it looks like someone ran over it a few times with a monster truck. Mario climbs ladders sideways, and Donkey Kong flashes blue buck teeth when he's angry, making him look like a radioactive David Letterman. It's also worth mentioning that jumping is a little odd. Unlike the arcade game, Mario can be controlled in mid-air, so you'll have to lean hard on the joystick if you want to clear that barrel rolling your way.

Still, this is a very good conversion of Donkey Kong... better than Atari had to make it. It might even be better than they should have made it, all things considered. A-