May 1988 - Trap, Treasure Diver

Editor Notes talked about the results to the reader's survey: "Nearly 9 out of 10 readers program their computer". I wonder if that says more about the era or the hardware or just this one demographic.

Good quote about the Commodore's Future: Robert Jacob of Cinemaware saying "The golden age of Commodore software got started just a few months ago." A lot of that was the installed base it enjoyed at this time. (And while I value how these computers got me programming, I switched to Commodore because of all the fun piracy being had, it was a more vibrant game scene than for the Atari 800XL I had been using.)

This issue also has "Mob Maker", kind of an enhanced "Sprite Magic" that lets you see multiple sprites at once. ("Mob", Movable Object Blocks, were a Commodore term for Sprite.)

Trap - Eric Haines

At first I was worried this (admittedly graphically stylish) game was going to be the magazines second or third nod to Q*bert but it's a bit more focused... you control what's in effect a 4-square Snake... you're blocked by your own body segments, though they don't kill you (unless you trap yourself in a corner and have to wait for time to expire.) You have a short amount of time to sheepdog the bouncing ball into a corner, at which point you "tap its kinetic energy" and move to the next level. It's really tricky- the ball can't "choose" to jump onto a square of your tail, but if it's already in motion to one it can't bounce away either. I get the feeling there are some basic strategies one would soon learn, but I don't quite have the patience... anyway, neat idea, with great graphics and sound. Rating:3/5

Treasure Diver - Brian Casey

This game has some of the cutest sprites - only Q-Bird comes to mind as cuter. Anyway, this game is a bit simplistic, you control the little bubble, avoid sharks and picking up the treasures mysteriously crawling along the seafloor. Your air supply slowly depletes, and needs to be replenished at the ocean surface. Every chomp from a shark increases the rate your air goes down, though interestingly the indication of that is primarily auditory. Also you can hit the fire button for a turbo boost that really use your air quickly. Still, there's not enough to this game (despite the 4 speed levels, from ludicrously fast to annoyingly slow and jerky) Rating:2/5

September 1987 - Bee Zone, Sub Attack

Editor's Notes on the new tech of Laser Printers I'm sure The Onion's version of Tim Cook would approve- though seriously, this comes back to thinking about how weird a pre-WYSIWYG world must have been. (My favorite response to a reader's letter (in the "simple answers to common questions" article answers the metaquestion of what's their most common question? Random printer issues.)

Bee Zone - Kevin Black and Michael Wiens

Oof, fancy title screen, playing a version of flight of the bumblebee. (Press run/stop (capslock on my OSX VICE) to start) Like Q-Bird, this game feels a bit like a Q*bert clone, climb over each of the giant hexagon honeycombs to collect the honey. The 3 bees move in relatively interesting patterns (attacking if they see you) Rating:3/5

Sub Attack - Tai Bush

A 2-player only shoot-at-eachother game. In some ways, not dissimilar to last month's "Front Line's" one on one fight mode, but with subs in a minefield. And sometimes a destroyer floats across the screen dropping depth charges. Weirdly, this doesn't happen every game. I think with some inertia, with anything making this feel like subs (rather than a cigar vs cigar version of Atari 2600 Outlaw) and making avoiding the mines more of a challenge they might have had something here, but as it is: Tentative Rating:2/5

December 1986 - Q-Bird, Moon Rescue, Pegs (Bonus Review: The Animals Show)

Kind of a slow issue, news-wise... Maybe the Atari ST wasn't selling that much better than the Amiga, Commodore 64 games are getting better, and simulations are getting more popular, yadda yadda yadda.

The Games...

Q-Bird - Mike Sedore

Laughing at the name's winking acknowledgement of the game's inspiration "Q*bert". The cute and detailed sprites really make this game (and come to think of it, the programmer must be juggling the display order, making sure that creatures behind are drawn before the ones in front.) A little disappointed that the enemy's diversity is only in their movement: Coily- err, the cobra- chases, the purple lizards move randomly, a hawk soars left to right and a ball rolls straight top to bottom, touching anything is death, but the collision detection is forgiving. And there's a flashing egg that freezes all enemies and makes them harmless. Hope on each tile to change it's color, later boards requiring more hops, but as far as I can tell it never plays Q*berts "hopping again changes it back" games. Terrible looping music but the bird's hopping chirp sounds nice. I'm torn about the score here... 4 is a bit dangerous given how derivative it is and it lacks Q*berts variety of enemy threats (like changing tiles back) but it's so cute, and plays reasonably well. Rating:4/5

Moon Rescue - Edward E. Boughton

Sigh. On the one hand, I like the egalitarian and empowering nature of this bout of C=128 games in BASIC... and they ARE generally better than most of the C=64 BASIC games, with the silver lining that maybe people would be encouraged to hack them into better games... because man, there are some stinkers. I've never seen a Lunar Lander/Rescue game with control as bad as this... this whole game is strangely quantized so your lander's thrust is in odd spurts, and the collision detection is unforgiving... worse, collisions' effects are delayed, so you think you're safe then your ship expands in weird ways representing its demise. Endearingly, the program starts each game by asking you "MAKE NEW ROCKS (Y/N)"... but then it generates just one new shape which it repeats 4 times. (I wonder if originally all the rocks were supposed to be different, but the generation process was just taking too long...) Rating:2/5

Pegs - Jim and Deborah Chambers

The Commodore 64 was a brilliant game machine, capable of exciting arcade action and various strategic thrills. This game is barely fun when you're waiting for your food at Cracker Barrell. Rating:1/5

Bonus Review!

The Animals Show - Cullen O'Day

This 128 Toy is charming! You pick one of 5 animals (frogs, parrots, pigs, cats, mice) each with its own sound, and then the curtain opens on a stage with 8 of your choice, each tuned to a different note. You can save and load the tunes you then make. This would actually make a decent iOS toy, I think. There are some problems... it's weirdly slow to load, and it would be awesome to be able to mix-and-match the voice, but the presentation was really good, and it was just pleasant to fool around with. Bonus Rating: 4/5

December 1985 - Whirlybird, Quickchange, Dragon's Den

Another Editor's Notes kvetching about the lack of pre-release hardware etc for the Amiga.

The banner feature article on New Approaches to Game Design was pretty cool - making games in different forms and to reach different audiences is always a nice goal. (I think "Little Computer People" is the best-rememebred game the article goes over.) Also, a nice little thing on Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set, which has always seemed particularly technically impressive to me. (It mentions Bill Budge working on "Construction Set Construction Set" - wonder if anything ever came of that.)

This issue had "Banners" (kind of like "Print Shop", but lower-rez by the looks of it), "The Construction Site" which is a rather nice "draw-via-rubber-stamps" style art program (with different sets for houses, creatures, etc) and then "Speedcheck"... the spellcheck where you provide the dictionary.

Anyway, moving on...

Whirlybird - Philip Nelson

This game, kind of an upside-down "Breakout" variant, is a kind of tough to judge. It has mesmerizing sound and a central whirling animation that fascinated me as a kid, but the tuning of the game is poor... even the regular mode is super-difficult because they made control of the bird-paddle have a lot of inertia/momentum, and so the character by character animation of the ball is especially jarring.

But man did I love that animation! One cool thing about Sprite Magic is that it didn't clear memory when it loaded, so by stopping this game and loading the sprite editor I could see the individual frames and admire the 3D-ness of it. I loved it so much that I spent a happy hour or two making a program to extract it as an animated GIF:

So I'm going to give it nostalgic extra star, between my love of that graphic and the cool sound, and the fact that maybe if I had more patience to struggle with it it might be a more fun game than it seems. Rating:4/5

Quickchange - Kevin Mykytyn, Mark Tuttle

The Mykytyn/Tuttle duo strike again! These guys have some interesting ideas, but they tend to make difficult games even harder by adding arbitrary timers. I'd guess that it's a way of increasing the replayability, but it's frustrating. Also, I'm not sure if it's the crappy-ish gamepads I'm using (hm... after getting burned by these breaktastic Atari-style USB sticks I think I'm going to try an actual Atari to USB adapter, just for the sake of it) but sometimes their games would benefit from more precise control... they insist on block-accurate positioning, but it's very easy to overshoot.

Anyway, this game reminds me of the more advanced levels of Q*bert, where you hop on a square to change its color, but then it toggles back on repeated hops. Little cursor-y enemies patrol at irregular speeds, horizontally back and forth. There are 2 variants beyond the basic "Flip Flop" mode: "Missing Pieces" has parts of the board missing... enemies ignore the absence but it's deadly to you. "No Turning Back" kind of turns the tables... each square disappears once you leave it, blocking both you and the enemies. There's a satisfying sound when you trap an enemy and it dies, taking the square with it, but the whole thing is enormously difficult.

If these guys had balanced the difficulty a bit differently I might be handing out my first 5-stars, but for now: Rating:4/5 (Also, I wonder if the graphics could be a bit less minimalist... if each enemy was displayed as the inverse-colored > of the way it was going, that probably would have been an improvement.)

Dragon's Den - Clark Book

I really liked the character-graphic art of this game, but it suffers from synax and "illegal quantity" errors in the code, and a general kind of pointlessness. You're wondering around a dungeon, most of the rooms have traps that have a dragon, a sword, gold, or water (I guess the water is why you open the doors at all rather than just try to find the exit, or you're greedy for gold.) If it's a dragon, you have a split second to jam on the appropriate room-leaving key. Rating:2/5