Sunday again so it’s time to have a bit more of a rummage through the back cattle-log of the good old Vic.

The first game took me rather by surprise as I was trawling through Gamebase, since at first I thought a wrong screenshot had come up for one of the games. Took me a couple of looks to be sure of what I was seeing. Understandable I am sure you’ll agree:

what the…?

…erm…

Bit of confusion there, definitely caused me to do a double take.

The game itself is a weird old thing, it must be said. There’s a blue guy a bit like the Snitch out of Matrix who runs across the top and doesn’t do anything discernable at all apart from that. There are boxes which turn into more boxes if you shoot them, and everything changes state once in a while a bit like the Pods in Gridrunner. Some things eventually turn into green things which we like. Some things turn into other things that bounce around diagonally when shot. Those are the things that usually kill you.

Quite why the guy decided it’d be a great idea to make it look almost identical to Gridrunner I don’t know. It would have been easy enough to use a different tile shape to make the grid look slightly different, or even use a different grid colour.

Next up and continuing the theme of stealing bits out of my games we have “Minitron” by Anirog.

This is a sort of minimal version of Robotron for the unexpanded Vic-20 (if you can call anything with pixels that size “minimal”. It’s actually ok in a very raw kind of a way (but would have been improved immeasurably with just a couple of tweaks to the firing mechanism) if you don’t mind graphics so chunky they could have your eye out. The character font is lovingly stolen from Attack of the Mutant Camels on the C64. As you’ll see in the video Game Over isn’t properly debounced and in the heat of the action it’s possible for it to happen invisibly and unless you’re paying attention you could miss it. Ultimately lack of variety and lack of space exhaust the fun in this one after more than a few minutes, but it’s not as diabolically, unrelentingly awful as some of the stuff people put out for the unexpanded Vic.

While we’re on the theme of stolen character sets let’s have a quick goosey at “Fire Galaxy” by Kingsoft:

In the commentary I actually malign this game for excessive chuffing, but I discovered afterwards I’d left an instance of the previous game running in the background and it was that that was chuffing while I was playing this. This definitely was making noises a lot like a guinea pig we used to have when i was a nipper though.

The game itself is a rather chunky but not unremittingly awful version of “Scramble”, featuring my character set from out of “Andes Attack/Defenda”. It’s not terrible but not particularly engaging either, and one go is plenty for anyone really. Kingsoft are notable in Llamasoft history as the creators of the Turboload system on the C64, which I licensed off them for use in our games starting with Revenge of the Mutant Camels. They also did a version of Stargate for the expanded Vic which is fairly well ugly but actually rather good to play. I’ll do that one of these days.

To follow that we have “Frantic” by Imagine. If you want to see one of the reasons Imagine went bust you need look no further than this. I mean take a look at the ad for the game that appeared in C&VG:

That’s pretty snazzy artwork for the time right there, and just look at the blurb off to the side. It actually promises a “visually breathtaking view” as you “plummet towards the centre of Spectrum” (ah, that’s why you can’t fucking go up in the game then), waffles on about mythical aliens and goes on about how you will see “the sort of full-colour, hi-rez graphics and sound you have come to expect from Imagine”.

Jesus fuck.

What you actually get is THIS.

Your “breathtaking view” is a scrolling field of red minus signs with occasional white glitches running through them. The fugly, chunky enemies flicker egregiously and are hard to see due to their habit of putting enormous vomit-coloured squares on the screen. The controls are awful, the sound a massed Hoovers chorus, and it’s genuinely difficult to determine if you’ve actually scored any points. Death comes unexpectedly, inexplicably, and above all mercifully.

See that’s why I bloody hate marketing types. The only sensible marketing decision that should have been made regarding this game was “jesus fuck, hell no, get it away from me”, but somebody, knowing full well how dreadful it was, instead deliberately put together all that burbling tosh deliberately to con kids out of their pocket money to line their own pockets. Bruce fucking Everiss went on fucking holidays on the back of that behaviour. It makes me utterly sick to my stomach. No wonder Imagine crashed and burned, fuck’s sake.

Anyway. Deep breath and let’s moo-ve on.

Next we have “Ludwig’s Lemon Lasers”.

This is a game which is the videogame equivalent of having a really boring job on a production line, the sort of thing that people used to have to do for 8 hours a day on minimum wage back in the bad old days, but which is now done using digital vision systems and cleverly timed blasts of compressed air just like you see on “How It’s Made”. You have to keep some lemons away from some other lemons for a reason that is never so much as even hinted at, never mind actually explained. The game’s sole gimmick is that it constantly plays a bit of “Fur Elise” over and over and over again, justifying both the inclusion of “Ludwig” in the title and the psychotic homicidal rage you’d be worked up to by the time you’d heard it constantly while playing this game for 8 hours a day on minimum wage.

A game that makes you thankful for the advent of machine vision systems and industrial robotics.

Next is a brief look at Solar Software’s “Cavern Raider”.

This is a piss-poor attempt at cloning the much more polished “Caverns of Mars” from the 8-bit Atari. It has all the grace of those racing games that everyone used to do on the ZX81 because they were dead easy to do in BASIC by just scrolling the screen using PRINT statements. It’s only a brief look because I was feeling increasing levels of drowsiness during the first two sectors and then simple irritation at the third which led me to the conclusion that I simply could not be arsed.

To follow that and cleanse the palette here’s an even worse version of the same game by masters of shit on the Vic 20 “Nufekop”.

It’s simply unbelievably bad. For some reason you can’t fire at all and the only way to get the fuel you need to progress is to kind of try to smear it off the platforms as you clunk by. If you die by colliding with a wall it says YOU DIED 75 MILES DOWN or somesuch, but if you miraculously manage to evade the walls long enough (not always a simple task mainly because when you move your ship it often completely disappears, making it hard to see where you are) it says YOU DIED 65 METRES DOWN. I have no idea why you should be measured in imperial if you die by collision and in metric if you run out of fuel, or why there’s such a huge discrepancy in the distances reported. However far down though death comes as a merciful release from a horrible, dreadful game.

It’s a tossup really as to who was worse on the Vic, Nufekop or Interceptor Micro’s. Certainly both were capable of inflicting some eyewateringly bad games on people and somehow actually having the barefaced cheek to make money out of it. The guy from Nufekop has apparently written a book about it. I almost want to read it just to see how he justifies inflicting such wilfully vile crap on people back then.

Here’s another gem from Nufekop in which they actually demonstrate a marginally greater degree of competence than Interceptor in the ripping off Donkey Kong department:

Not by much, I am sure you’ll agree, but at least it is possible to go more than a few steps without turning into a green thing or having your head come off. They get round the tricky problem of implementing ladders by simply not having any at all and settle for a kind of staircase thing that wraps awkwardly at the screen edges. Inexplicably there appear to be indicators for three lives at the top of the screen but you never actually get them; the game ends at your first demise regardless. And then expects you to wait while it plays its crappy jingle before deigning to allow you to restart, although God only knows why you would want to unless you’re some kind of masochistic videogame pervert.

Finally let’s have a little look at “Cyclons” by Rabbit Software.

For all it’s not got the most spectacular graphics in the world I actually like this game. Motion is smooth and fluid, very unusually for a Vic-20 game, and it’s a challenging little inertia-filled shooter that’s actually quite fun to play. I always quite liked Rabbit for their anthropomorphic bunny logo and some of their games were utter tosh it’s true, but some of them were actually not terribly awful.

And so on that not terribly awful note it’s time to wrap up this week’s look into the world of ancient software of questionable quality. More in due course!

Oh and lest you go away feeling bad about seeing poor old Caverns of Mars so hideously butchered not once but twice I’ll just remind you of this.

There, all better .

I wanted to do a bit of a balancing entry to the one I did yesterday where I took the piss out of several bad Vic-20 games, lest I give the impression that I am a complete curmudgeon and that the Vic was incapable of hosting great games. For all its limitations the Vic was actually a great little machine, reasonably fast with some decent graphical capabilities if you didn’t mind pixels the size of house bricks, sturdy and reliable with a good keyboard (my original Vic-20 still works just fine to this day).

There weren’t any sprites or aught, so it was either use character mode or if you were super clever, write software sprite routines instead. Memory was at a premium too, but cartridge games didn’t use up any RAM for code and so were often able to produce decent games even within the constraints of the system’s 5.5K of unexpanded RAM.

Let’s kick off with one of my personal favourites, “Spiders of Mars” by Peter Fokos.

This is a fairly simple left/right Defender style scroller, characterised by its nice fluid movement (a rarity on the Vic) and escalatingly hectic gameplay. Objects in the game move fairly slowly, but as you work your way up through the levels the screen becomes filled with a metric arseload of baddies and insidious floating dust-mines. There was no autofire so one had to keep up a rapid firing cadence with the old thumb, something that was quite painful on the joysticks of the day.

My original Spiders of Mars cartridge went to one of my brothers along with one of my old Vics and I remember him saying even as late as the end of the 90s that he’d occasionally still drag out that old thing and play a game of SoM. The game stands up well to being revisited in emulation and remains a simple, fun and challenging blaster.

Interestingly enough the author Peter Fokos still works in games, but now he works for God and has done a Jesusly interpretation of Dance Dance Revolution called Dance Praise. But I’m sure he wouldn’t've got kicked out of Heaven for this excellent Vic shooter.

Next up: Omega Race.

This is a conversion which surely shouldn’t have worked out at all. Raster conversions of vector games tended to look ugly at the best of times, and the Vic’s gigantic pixels should have made this look like smeg. Instead it came out rather well – the aspect ratio of the pixels makes everything look a little odd, and yes everything’s blocky, but the motion is fluid and the ship turns and moves smoothly in a way that would have made S. Munnery weep if he’d had any shame. The rotation seems a bit quick and the thrust control a bit touchy but upon finding the actual arcade game some years later and playing it I can tell you that’s pretty much how it was on the coinop too. Presentation is great too, with a nice attract mode just like in the coinop, the option to use paddles or joysticks, and even to change the colour of the graphics. If you can get over the chunkiness and sound effects that only mildly make you think of Hoovers you’re in for a jolly nice and challenging arcade conversion.

Next: Predator by Tom Griner

This is a peculiar one, by Tom Griner who was for a while my stablemate at Human Engineered Software. Tom was quite prolific on the Vic and whereas his early games were often a bit crude (as were those of all of us I think) you could see that he was developing a remarkable degree of technical skill as he went along. By the time of Predator I think he was just about the best coder there was on the Vic. Sometimes the actual gameplay wasn’t that great but technically he could make the Vic sing. He was evidently a big fan of Eugene Jarvis and Robotron as will be evident when you look at this game – check out the proportional font work, the style of the hiscore tables and the enemy explosions – dude loved him some Jarvis that’s for sure. Beautiful presentation, technically lovely.

I was actually briefly in touch with TEG some years later when I was living in the US – we emailed briefly while he was working at Silicon Graphics, but then he kind of dropped out of touch after making some comment about how he didn’t approve of my “lifestyle choices”. Lordy knows what that was about.

But yes, a fantastic Vic-20 coder, no doubt about that.

Next up: something from a company not known for their Vic-20 presence…

Jetpac by Ultimate (or ACG as they were still known at that time).

Call me a heathen but I still think Jetpac was the best thing Ultimate ever did – you can keep the maze exploration things that came later and especially all that dreadful isometric stuff that was a massive triumph of tech over gameplay. Jetpac was frantic, fluid shooting action, borrowing a bit from Defender in style, tremendous fun to play on both the Speccy and in this Vic incarnation. It’s a bit flickery and chunky but who cares when it’s this good to play.

No need to say much more than that about it really, so let’s moo-ve on to:

Jelly Monsters, Commodore’s *ahem* unofficial clone of Pac-Man for the Vic. It may look a bit odd as due to screen space limitations they’ve left off the outer edge of the maze border entirely, but look past that and you’ll see how good this clone really is. Remember the Vic had no sprites, so they’ve implemented impressively large and smooth software ones, allowing the gameplay to be fluid and smooth-flowing. I’d go so far as to say this is one of the best conversions of Pac-Man on any of the 8-bit systems, including the “official” Atarisoft conversion which was OK but not nearly as good. It certainly puts to abject shame all the endless character-mode clones that the smaller software houses did (I myself bought the Bug Byte one which had the Pac-Man with the continuously flapping lips and I remember trying to convince myself that I didn’t really mind that it moved in huge character sized steps and was really difficult to get to go around corners properly; a delusion which did not survive once I laid eyes on Jelly Monsters).

Predictably enough Atari didn’t like this at all, and Commodore were forced to rework it into something involving satellites floating round a maze, which was still very nice (being based on the same code) but lacked the charm that the original had of being just an awesome home version of Pac-Man on a system that not many would’ve thought could sustain it.

To further illustrate the gulf between small tinpot software houses doing rubbish character-mode versions of arcade games and a decent developer with the advantage of working off a cartridge, remember that dog awful abomination Crazy Kong from Interceptor that I mentioned last entry, and then check out:

Donkey Kong on the Vic-20, the official (and excellent) Atarisoft conversion. Yes, it’s chunky as hell, because it’s in Vic-20 multicolour mode with pixels the size of Lego Duplo, but it’s again one of the best home versions of DK on any 8-bit system nonetheless, containing all the levels except the pie factory as most home versions back then did, but including intermissions such as the How High Can You Try screen and Kong falling off the girders on the rivets stage. Gameplay is fluid and well implemented making it fun to play and a credit to the Vic. Really jolly good. And you don’t keep turning into a green thing.

Finally let’s have a look at an excellent conversion of a simple game:

Commodore’s Vic Avenger, which was an unofficial but remarkably close clone of Taito’s Space Invaders. The screen looks a little bit cramped, as due to the Vic’s lower resolution than the coinop there’s not as much space for the Invaders to march left and right, but apart from that this version is probably a closer copy than most of the 8-bit versions. It was faithful enough that those of us who knew certain techniques that worked in the arcade version (like counting 22-14-14 to maximise the points you got for shooting the saucers, and the Execution Method where you culd exploit a bug which meant Invaders right on the lowest row close to the ground couldn’t shoot you) could apply exactly the same techniques on Vic Avenger and they’d work.

So yeah, the Vic may have had not much memory and got laughed at for having fat little pixels but in the right hands it was capable of some great games and fantastic arcade conversions, some of which could even be considered to be best in class when compared to other much more expensive 8-bit machines of the day.

There was still a load of wank out there too, mind, and I’ll be back to take the piss out of that some more in the not too distant future. But I’ll also be mentioning some more of the great stuff too. Got to be fair to my old mate Vic .

While twittering on the tweetatron this morning the subject of “Asteroids” by S. Munnery came up. This legendarily terrible version of Asteroids was, as I have documented before in the History of Llamasoft, at least partially responsible for the very existence of Llamasoft, mainly due to the sheer cheek of Bug-Byte charging seven whole quid for it and making me think “bloody hell if they want seven quid for that I could bloody do better and people would pay for it”. I’ve been threatening for ages to do some occasional blog posts about bad games from back in the day, because boy was there a metric smegload of them, some of them my own. But let’s begin this look back with the seminal (with the emphasis on semen) “Asteroids” by S. Munnery.

Now Asteroids was a game that was at least in part defined by the smoothness, precision and fluidity of its gameplay. These are not qualities which translate well to objects that are moving in character-sized steps on the Vic-20′s extremely low-resolution screen.

Munnery’s version actually eschews the idea of having separate projectiles fired by the ship in favour of the simple technique of drawing a string of full stops in a line out of the craft’s nose whilst making a sound like a Hoover. In fact the sound effects are evidence of the fact that the programmer wasn’t aware that there were any volume levels at all on the Vic-20 sound chip apart from “OFF” and “HOOVER”.

It’s also pretty hard to see the string of full stops at times because it looks like he doesn’t poke the colour memory behind the full stops to white.

I suppose it wouldn’t've been that bad of a game if you and your mates had knocked it up yourselves while learning your way round the Vic, but at seven quid Bug Byte truly were taking the piss, and exemplifying the lamentable tendency of early software houses to slap the name of a famous arcade game on any old pile of toss they could lay their hands on and charge the masses of eager but naive punters significant coin for it.

Continuing that theme we now present another Munnery classic “Cosmiads”.

- a version of Galaxians in which you are beset by what look like tiny flying cat heads while a chorus of Hoovers drone on in the background (still not discovered the volume settings on the sound chip yet apparently). Now it must be said that although I enjoy taking the piss out of Munnery’s early games it’s evident that he is at least making some kind of effort to put some actual gameplay in there. For all that everything jerks around a bit in character mode the cat heads do recognisably leave the formation and fly down firing at you, and fair play he’s had a crack at trying to make your gun move smoothly even if nothing else does.

But this version of Galaxians is actually awesome compared to our next offering:

“Galaxzions” by Interceptor Micro’s, testament to the bizarre belief shared by a lot of software houses back then that one could avoid copyright issues and the righteous wrath of Atari by the simple expedient of spelling the name of an arcade game with a gratuitous “z” in it or somesuch (we shall not speak of Llamasoft’s own early Vic 20 game “Defenda” in this regard, for that would not be appropriate).

This game looks and plays much like a broken Game and Watch, with enemies not so much moving as just kind of randomly spazzing about on the screen, appearing in semi-random positions whilst the Hoovers blare away. Enemy shots don’t appear to actually move at all; white blobs just appear in set positions every now and again and woe betide you if your strangely knob-and-bollocks-shaped craft should happen to be near them at the time. Munnery’s game seems well-crafted by comparison; this game could probably have been bettered by my ex-cat sneezing at the keyboard while the assembler cartridge was plugged in.

Our next exhibit exemplifies a flaw shared by quite a few early Interceptor Micro’s titles: a complete lack of any gameplay at all.

Created to cash in on the famous arcade game “Defender” (and skilfully sidestepping copyright issues by putting “Jupiter” in front) we have “Jupiter Defender”. Now Defender brought many original features to arcade gaming, not least a world larger than the screen through which the player had to fly in order to perform his defence and rescue mission. With Reverse and Thrust buttons the player could chart his course at will through this game world, using his “Scanner” radar to identify trouble spots and fly to the rescue. Defender was most of all known for its fierce and unrelenting challenge, making it a favourite of those arcade pilots who considered themselves the best of the best.

Jupiter Defender has nothing in common with Defender apart from the name “Defender” in the title, and the vague shapes of some of the ships. You can’t reverse. You can kind of change your speed, but there’s no reason ever to do so. In fact, nothing ever moves in anything but a single horizontal direction, and so the best strategy in the game is simply to stay where you started and hold down the FIRE button. That’s it. You can see me using my awesome skillz to rack up 20,000 points without losing a life in that video.

Our final title for today then is another Interceptor Micro’s gem, “Crazy Kong”.

Superficially it does look a bit like a mashup of some of the levels of Donkey Kong. There’s platforms and ladders and pies, oh my. Unfortunately it is just beyond horrible to play. I’m generally pretty good at playing hokey old computer games in emulation, since collecting old emulator games is kind of a hobby of mine (and I was there to play them back in the day when they first came out too). But I genuinely could not get that little man to do anything apart from turn into a green thing on the bottom of the screen, although I did make his head come off a couple of times. I did once get him onto one of the ladders, where a barrel went through his head, but then I fell off and turned into a green thing again.

Well, that’s it for this instalment of “terrible games”, I’m sure there will be more. And although I did take the piss out of Munnery he was at least trying to make playable versions of the games he cloned; looking at the Interceptor Micro’s ones I’m not sure they were even trying to do that at all, more like they were just putting out things that looked vaguely like famous games and charging six quid for them regardless of the fact that they weren’t any fun to play at all, not even remotely; and that’s far worse than anything poor old S. Munnery ever did.

Interceptor weren’t the only ones doing that; there are plenty more egregious examples which I’ll be back to take the piss out of in other entries, no doubt. But that’s all my poor eyes, ears and thumbs can take for now.