The first difference is there’s no scrolling levels, so you see everything on screen and completion of a level will sometimes require some planning.  Once you complete a level, you can choose the next level by leaving via exits at the edges of the screen.  This creates a maze of levels and allows you to choose your route through the game.  Once a level is complete you can return to it to get access to other levels, although you will not have to complete it a second time fortunately.

To complete a level you simply have to collect all the rings without making intimate contact with a falling boulder or baddie that wander the levels.  You’ve also got to dodge some poisonous skulls littered around the place.  Each level has a set number of rings, but two are placed at random along with two skulls and two baddies (the number of skulls and baddies increases later on).  This makes the levels a bit random, you can not always tackle them the same way twice, especially if a pesky skull is in the way!

The levels themselves are designed well, giving a challenge and requiring a strategy to complete.  What is a bit irritating is the placements of the random skulls and baddies can sometimes make a level impossible to solve.  The worst is when a baddie starts up next to you … if you are quick you can just about escape (see the video!).  Another niggle are the controls, they are not as responsive as they could be, which can add a frustrating level of difficulty when attempting precise maneuvers.

However the gameplay shines through and then some.  Overall difficulty is set right despite those niggles and its a game you can easily come back to time and time again.  The graphics are big and bold with an extended screen display so that the levels are a decent size.  The sound is pretty good for a Vic game although the music may eventually grind your ears into submission.

Navigate and complete all the levels in the game and it starts over, with more baddies and skulls to contend with.  Not that it will be an easy task to complete, but with the choice of route through the game and the random placement of some rings, skulls and baddies, you’ll be returning to Rockman time and time again.

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You begin by falling down the screen, your thrusters propel you upwards otherwise you descend to the base of the screen.  With left and right movement and independent twin blasters it takes all your skill and luck to survive the onslaught of level ones alien rockets that zoom across the top of the screen gradually descending towards you.  What makes it insanely hard is the rockets fire down at you very quickly and it is hard to avoid them.  But that’s not all, your twin blasters have a limited range, meaning you have to get very close to your enemy to have a chance of hitting them and the closer you get the hard it is to avoid their annoyingly lucky shots.

Yes, Arcadia is very hard and you’ll spend a lot of your time being blown up but it so addictive.  Partly to just beat it but also to see what aliens you will be pitted against next.  To complete a level you must destroy everything on screen within the time limit.  If you do this before the time is up you’ll get a very brief suicidal attack just so you’re not short changed.  Each level has a different set of aliens which behave differently.  Some are easier to handle than others.  Defeat all the alien waves and you loop around to the beginning - not something you’ll be doing that often!

You often hear gamers talking about being in “the zone” when playing insanely fast games and Arcadia is certainly fast.  It may seem like it is pure luck to get to level two when you first play the game, but with lots of practice you do get into the zone and find reacting to the aliens and their attacks almost intuitive.  Yes luck will still play a part in it, but it is a game that can be mastered and you’ll soon find yourself progressing through the levels.

Imagine released a number of pretty good games for the Vic initially, then it kind of dried up with pap and filler.  Not surprising really when you watch the Commercial Breaks TV programme that were following Imagine just as they collapsed!

Arcadia is a game worth checking out on the Vic-20 as it combines most things that makes a game good - fun, addictive and challenging to beat.

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You start on a grid that fills most of the screen and can move around the bottom third of it.  From above come centipede-like aliens snaking their way down to you.  Shoot them and the segment turns into a mine while the rest of the segments split away to continue their descent.  The mines if left alone will grow until they explode, dangerously firing a missile down the grid.  Shoot it several times to shrink it until it is destroyed.

While watching what the centipede-like aliens are doing and trying to keep track of the mines, you also have to contend with a laser defences.  One moves horizontally across the bottom of the grid and the other vertically to the left.  At regular intervals they will fire and where the two converge a mine is created.  If the player or the aliens get in the way they are zapped.  With all this action going on it can be a challenge to keep on top it all. 

The first grid is quite easy to clear.  There are only two centipede aliens and they are pretty short.  However as you progress through the levels more and longer centipede aliens are introduced. 

The graphics are big, bold, colourful and fit that arcade mold perfectly.  The sound does not disappoint either, with some truely bold arcade sounds.  The gameplay, while tough at times grabs you from your first game and doesn’t let go.  A game everyone should play at least once, but be warned you might not be able to put it down again!

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The instructions go on some length, and there’s attention to detail on every millimeter of the cassette inlay.  It doesn”t stop there, from the moment the game starts it oozes the quality alien blasting, rocket building goodness of it’s bigger Spectrum cousin.  If you’ve never played Jetpac then where have you been?

You are said chief test pilot, or otherwise later known as Jetman who likes dressing up in spacesuits and flying around hostile planets with a big jet-pack on your back blasting the local inhabitants with your quad photon laser phaser.  Better I suppose that trying to blast the local inhabitants dressed as a drag queen with pom-poms and a tutu.

So with Jetpac on back you start the game next to the bottom stage of your rocket.  The other two pieces are scattered around the screen on floating platforms.  Fly up to the middle stage of your rocket to pick it up and drop it on top of the bottom stage.  To complete your rocket get the top stage and drop it on top.

Your rocket has no fuel, but luckily fuel pods will start to fall to the ground ready for you to pick up like you did with the stages and drop over the completed rocket.  Collect enough fuel (six are needed in the Vic-20 version) and the spaceship will flash ready for you get on board and take off to the next planet.

Sounds pretty simple huh?  It would be but for the local inhabitants who swarm around the screen in various patterns.  Contact with these will result in the loss of a life but fortunately your QPLP (Quad Photon Laser Phaser) dispatches them quickly.  It fires a lot like the lasers in Defender and Nemesis/Gradius and is very satisfying in its reach.

The inhabitants of the first planet, a kind of fury fireballs, drift in one general direction and explode when they touch the platforms or ground.  While they don’t pose much of a threat they can crowd the screen and cause you plenty of headaches.  The second planet has these molecule type aliens that are a little more robust and bounce around rather than self destruct.  Each planet gets a little harder, for example the fourth planet has UFO like aliens whom swarm in to your general direction and are a pain to avoid.  Best advice here is to get them under a platform while you are safely above and shoot any stragglers.

The aliens are relentless and are replaced by another when once is destroyed.  So once your rocket is refuelled it is best to get in it and launch off to the next planet.  Once you arrive your rocket needs refueling again to proceed to the next planet.  When all planets have been cleared you return to the first, which is a little harder and your rocket is back in pieces needing reassembly. 

The graphics are similar to the Spectrum and move pixel smoothly around the screen.  There’s no music but the sound effects are decent and help give some atmosphere to what would be a pretty quiet world.  The gameplay is where Vic’s Jetpac shines through in equal portions to the Speccy, giving plenty of challenge and that one more go appeal.

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• Full graphic display.
• Multi screen (16 screens)
• Demands high skill.
• Super Soft Sprite Action.

That’s the blurb out of the way!  The game is a clone of Hunchback set in the Punch & Judy universe.  Most of the elements from Hunchback are present and this is a better game than the official release by Ocean.  To begin with the graphics are big, bold and colourful.  There is a mixture of double width multi-colour pixel graphic elements and higher resolution single colour graphics, all combined to make a perfectly designed game screen.  There are even transitions between screens which is a nice touch.

You control Bobby the Policeman, who moves with “Super Soft Sprite Action” which basically means moving a pixel at a time - although one fat pixel at a time.  This is still a marked improvement on Hunchback for the Vic.   Using the joystick you can move left or right and do so at a decent speed.  You can also jump with the fire button, which is essential for most of the obstacles that face you, but unfortunately you do so at a painfully slow pace.

The game is incredibly difficult from the start.  On the first screen you get to practice those slow-mo jumps to avoid a fireball that hurtles towards you (I don’t remember fireballs in the traditional Punch & Judy ;)).  With some practice you can time these jumps fairly easily.

Next comes a screen with a flying carpet you must jump onto while watching out for a flying sausage overhead.  Jump at the wrong time and you’ll either end up at the bottom of the pit for the crocodiles or get brained by the sausage!  Practice again makes perfect but it’s a bit of a chore because once you loose all your lives (you have three) you go back to screen one and have to work your way back.  This gets more of a frustration the further you get.  Once you have mastered a screen you can move on to the next.  The trouble is that every jump and every collision is unforgiving and requires pixel perfect precision.  Making your way to the end is going to be tough…making it past the third screen is going to be tough!

Punchy is a unique take on the Hunchback game with great graphics and decent sound.  It’s just very tough and requires a lot of time and practice to get even a screen closer to the end.  If it’s possible for the average gamer to complete I don’t know … I don’t think I’ve ever got past the fourth screen!

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A very simple concept for the game, even simpler controls - the spacebar to drop bombs and that’s it.  It’s so easy to play that even my Nan could play it.  Yes, very easy to play but like every game that has a just one more go appeal it is very difficult to master.

First off you have to quickly assess the landscape as each time you play the height of each building is randomly generated.  You get a brief moment to watch the city being built to do this.  Then you have plan which buildings you are going to target first.  Dropping a bomb will knock away several stories upon impact and you can’t drop another bomb until this is finished.  Your best bet is to go for the taller buildings, not only because with each fly by you get lower but if your bomb falls on a low building or empty space you have to wait longer before you can drop another bomb.  You’ve also got to try to not leave two similarly high buildings close to each other as it will be impossible to flatten them both should you need to in one pass.  Lastly you’ll have best luck if you can drop two bombs on one pass to do maximum damage. 

Luck is certainly a factor and the city you are given at the start of the game can sometimes be impossible while most of the time nearly impossible to clear.  But despite this, each time you fail you just have to have another go.  Next time you’ll do better.  Next time you won’t mis-time that bomb.  Next time you’ll get a better city.  Next time you’ll win.  Sometimes you will and when you do it feels like a great achievement.

Due to Blitz’s simplicity, it has been copied time and time again.  I don’t know if Vic-20 Blitz was the first of it’s type or if it was a copy of a previous game, but it was the first I’d seen and one game I’ve never forgotten.

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Once you are past the instructions you can choose a difficulty setting from 1 to 4, 1 being easy and 4 impossible.  Why they made a difficulty setting so high is a mystery - maybe it was just to show off how fast the scrolling could get

You control a bike heading down the screen, which is where the scrolling comes in.  The scrolling looks like it’s simply the print command reaching the bottom of the screen and forcing an automatic scroll up (I would not be surprised).   The bike is kind of like a space invader, but you can imagine what they were trying to draw in that 8×8 pixel character.  Ahead of you are the cars, driving towards you, or more accurately advancing with the scrolling (they don’t actually move!).  The cars look more like cars than the bike looks like a bike, but I guess it’s easier to draw them.

You can press S to stop, which really means quit the level, or you can press z and / keys to move left and right.  You’ll need to do this to avoid the cars as you approach them.  To the left of each line on the screen is a number, denoting the distance you have travelled.  Once you reach 300 the game is over.  Really, it’s over.  You can play again, and choose a harder level, but that’s it folks.  If you hit a car or the kerb you crash and burn … or turn into some dots to represent your pixelated body parts (or so I imagine).

There’s not a great deal of challenge on the first couple of difficulty settings.  The nearer you get to 300 the faster the scrolling gets and the harder it is to dodge the on-coming cars.  Still, it’s fairly easy to survive as there is only one car per line on the screen so there’s always a path through the traffic.

To be fair, this game has appeared in cheap-o-McDonald toys from time to time and compared to those, Race is infinitely better.  Unfortunately infitity in Vic20 Race does have it’s limits and you’ll probably try out the handy quit option before long. 

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Hoppit Screenshot

That sums up Hoppit, an early game released by Commodore.  Like Frogger in the arcades, you control a frog that starts at the bottom of the screen and must make its way to the top.  Where it differs is instead of avoiding the traffic, you are encouraged to hop on to it.  More specifically you will for some reason have your entrails splatted the length of the word SPLAT !!!!!!! along with a nice tomb stone to mark your demise if you even think about venturing on the road.

Hoppit isn’t a bad game, and for its time is OK.  It came on a tape with later Vic 20 computers along with Blitz, Race and Type-a-tune which gives you something else to load once you’ve had enough of that damn frog.

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So you are Willy, from Miner Willy and Jet Set Willy fame, drunk and stumbling your way home through 33 challenging levels.  It’s a standard platformer by design which sees you timing jumps to get to hard to reach platforms and treasure notes or to avoid the nasties that patrol parts of the screen.  To help or hinder you along the way are collapsible platforms that crumble under foot and conveyor belts that force you to wander in the same direction they are rolling.  All this to collect a number of notes strategically placed around the level to proceed to the next.

Everything on screen moves smoothly, pixel by pixel although with some flicker, but this is forgiven by most Vic owners as many games at the time were usually constrained to moving on a grid of 8 pixels due to the way the Vic 20 screen memory is character mapped.  While the graphics give a good first impression, the music on the other hand soon becomes annoying as it loops a very short tune over and over and over and you  can’t turn it off.  The volume control on the telly is definitely recommended!

The first level eases you in gently, with enough challenge to get used to how Willy moves and requiring a little thought about your route through the screen.  It may not be immediately obvious but there’s been more thought placed in the design of the levels and the way Willy moves than is first apparent.  For example, Willy has a big toe that you can use to your advantage and which is sometimes the only way to navigate tricky areas of the screen.  When you fall or jump, your toe can catch on to a platform next to you.  Turning the other way will allow you to unhook if you wish or you can choose to walk fully on to the platform.  Not something I think I’ve seen in other games in the series.  Another design feature is that when you jump, you jump exactly two blocks and one pixel.  That last pixel means your top hat will just about poke up through the platforms above so care must be taken to avoid the nasties that might be patrolling directly above you.

The nasties are varied from level to level and some require careful timing when jumping over them.  Generally they move either vertically or horizontally.  Sometimes patience is required to find the best time to jump past the various nasties when there are several in close proxity but sometimes quick reflexes are the only way to get through.  Yet with all this the game is never unfair.  Collision is pixel perfect and when you loose a life you know it is because you messed up.

The Perils of Willy is a real gem on the Vic 20 and gives others such as Manic Miner a run for their money.  The graphics may make Willy wider, due to the Vic screen resolution, which may put you off playing if you’re used to Jet Set Willy on the C64 for example, but give it a chance and you’ll soon be losing many hours trying to get that little bit further.

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This is one of the first things you’re presented with after inserting the cartridge and typing SYS32592 and it was a bit of a shock.  Where’s the graphics?  How do I start this game?  Is it a game?  Oh my god have I just blown my hard saved pocket money on this?  What shall I do now?

To put that in to context, back in the day as an eleven year old standing in the Walsall branch of Boots’ excellent computer & electronic department (yes, it used to sell more interesting things than paracetamol and baby wipes) I was pondering the choice between a cartridge game with enticing box art or a considerably cheaper game on tape.  The big box with the impressive artwork won hands down, afterall it was on cartridge so it must be better.

So here I am back home facing the message “What shall I do now?“.  You see Adventureland is a text adventure game and this was the first time I’d come across one.  No spaceships whizzing by, no frogs hopping about, no graphics at all.  Even the joystick seemed redundant.  The instructions booklet was a puzzle in itself, waffling on about drawing maps or something.  Having spending so much monies on it I wasn’t about to give up that easily and after much trial and error it all suddenly clicked into place.

Instead of those spaceships and frogs hopping about, the game describes where you are, what has changed and what is going on as if you were reading a story.  Only instead of a linear page turning experience you controlled the main character and the story moved with you.  To interact with this world you typed short commands in the form of “verb noun” such as climb tree or walk north.  To help reduce RSI, or maybe it was also because it took up less memory, you could shorten words to the beginning three letters.  There were also some shortcuts for common commands such as “n” instead of “walk north”, “i” instead of “inventory” and “l” instead of look for example.

With the concept of how the game works sorted I must have spent a good year playing through it, exploring further into its world and obtaining the *treasures* needed to complete your adventure.  Adventureland is pretty basic by modern text adventure standards but this is one reason I like it so much.  It’s very easy to get in to, with plenty of puzzles to challenge you without being too frustrating.  The fantasy setting and the pace of the game play fits together well, something that I felt was weaker in later games in the series.  Other versions of the game released on more powerful platforms had graphics accompanying the text location descriptions which while nice, they kind of made it into a picture book and as such diluted the power of the words on your imagination.

Maybe it’s because the Vic 20 version was my first encounter of a text adventure, or maybe there is something just magical about it, but Adventureland is the only text adventure I have returned to time and time again.  If you’ve never played it before … now is a good time to try it out.  See the video below for tips on how to play it in the VICE emulator and if you get stuck I have placed a copy of the solution under the extras section of this site.

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