ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the Vic-20
Moby ID: 48882
Description
This is a book of instructions for numerous type-in BASIC games:
- Monster Maze -- like a summarized Pac-Man, eating dots in a maze avoiding monsters, which can temporarily be eaten after eating cherries.
- Hyperspace Escape -- an Asteroids clone
- Gunfight -- "Outshoot the fastest draw in town, VIC". Three buttons regulate four functions: moving up and down, shooting and dodging.
- Scramble -- a game of aerial bombardment
- Alien Marauders -- likely a Space Invaders clone
- Airplane -- "Attempt to land your passengers safely on the runway at La Guardia Airport." A simulation of landing an airplane consulting only cockpit instrumentation. "Good luck. It may take practice to land correctly. I can't!"
- Marathon -- the player places bets on one of three athletes, then the computer simulates a foot race between and lets the player know how their financial speculation turned out. "The game continues until you are broke or you break the bank."
- Wizard (or Computer Wizard) -- a "Simon-says" iterative song-repeating game
- Tail Gunner -- a gunsights-aiming game (using the almost-standard WADX control keys)
- Astro Wars -- also sounds very Space Invaders-y. Only so many distinguishing characteristics can be gleaned by eyeballing the source code.
- Swarm -- a game about intercepting the trajectory of enemy spacecraft on a collision course
- 3-D Maze -- wherein the player attempts to set a speed record for plotting a course to maze cell #25, in an eerie textmode first-person perspective.
- Brands Hatch -- a topdown car racing simulation whose goal is primarily to avoid colliding with other vehicles or the sides of the road.
- Lightning Bolt -- a somewhat conceptually abstract game, the player here attempts to intercept the tip of a descending lightning bolt with a cursor-drawn wall without touching the bolt's sides.
- Space Birds -- a Space Invaders-y top-down space shooter with a backstory almost as long as the source code listing.
- Arkenstone -- an explicitly Tolkien-derived early text adventure game with an unusual text parser, accepting input of strings up to nine words long one[enter]word[enter]at[enter]a[enter]time[enter][enter].
- Gomoku -- the Asian parlour game whose goal is getting five stones in a row. "WARNING: This program takes a few minutes to make its move."
- Lunar Lander -- a simple conversion apparently unconstrained by fuel limitations.
- Earth Defense -- a Missile Command clone.
- Nightmare Castle -- the description is peculiarly abstract ("THE ROOM is a strange place. All sorts of weird things happen, but you'll have to find out what yourself") but the fundamentals seem straightforward enough: navigating a graphical maze, locating and retrieving a treasure, and avoiding being eaten by a monster.
- Checkers -- a conversion of the board game. Input is via board coordinates.
- Dambuster -- from the sounds of things, a Zaxxon-like challenge to line up the player's spaceship with a supposedly 3D environment and fire the player's weapon at the right moment.
- Smash -- a paddle-and-ball game.
- Dogfight -- a daredevil game of aerial duelling.
- Night Raid -- an aerial bombing simulation
- Tank Battle -- a top-down tank duelling game, spiced up with mines and fuel drums.
- Danger Star -- a simulation of Star Wars' Death Star trench-flying feat.
- Reversi -- a conversion of the board game ("You'll find the VIC plays slowly, but remarkably well." Great, the worst of both worlds!)
- Fruit Machine -- a slot-machine gambling simulator.
- Dr Watson -- a "guess what number the computer is thinking" game, giving "too high" and "too low" feedback.
- Dr Audio -- Dr Watson with proportional sound feedback to let the player know how close they are.
- Tight Squeeze -- a gambling game.
- Time Guardian -- the player navigates between the six sectors of each of six quadrants (sextants?) in search of the six parts of the key of Chronos.
- Long John Silver -- a "find the buried treasure" game of simplified Battleship with a one-cell treasure on a 10x10 cell map.
- Robot Nim -- A conversion of the parlour game Nim.
- Victim (or VICtim) -- another simulated race.
- Evolution -- Conway's Game of LIFE.
- Vic-et-un -- Blackjack with dice.
- Hangman -- a two-player-only version of the word-guessing game.
- Codebreaker -- a version of Mastermind.
- Fairway -- a golf simulator.
- Jelly Bean Space Swarm -- the player must navigate a space ship through some crudely rendered asteroids.
- Zauper Attack -- the player must zap the aliens before they are eaten by the Zaupers.
- Superbowl -- a 10-pin bowling simulator.
- Zombie Island -- wherein the player attempts to drown the zombies by situating zombie-drowning swamp patches between himself and them.
- Motorcycle Jump -- a daredevil motorcyclist game (playing as "Evil K."), calculating the speed at which to approach a ramp to clear an arbitrary number of double-decker buses... without overdriving and flipping upside-down!
- Traffic Jam -- a top-down simulation of piloting a car to a parking spot with moving obstacles (presumably, other vehicles on the road.)
- Hangman 11 -- a one-player version of the word-guessing game, which the computer stocks with a limited vocabulary.
- Antihang -- the computer plays Hangman and guesses the player's word.
- Treacle Balls -- a game of logic and deduction.
- Craps -- the dice gambling game.
- Caveman -- challenging the Cro-magnon player to survive in a treasure-and-trap-filled cave complex.
- Tranquility Base -- Lunar Lander again, this time tracking fuel use.
- Lodestar/3-D Maze -- attempt to locate a lodestar in a maze. (The 3-D aspect is left as an exercise for the reader. Really!)
- Monza -- the computer guesses a number the player is thinking of.
- Mento -- "another mathematical mind-reading wizard."
- Flip -- a geometrical puzzle played on a 3x3 grid.
- Colormind -- "This, as you've probably guessed, is a color version of Mastermind."
- Cannibal Charlie -- a delicious ecological simulation challenging players to achieve a high score by finding the most stable equilibrium between populations of cannibals and explorers.
- Noughts and Crosses -- or Tic-Tac-Toe to the non-Brits in the room.
- Speedway -- a top-down solo racing simulation played for longevity.
- Battle -- a new board game similar to Checkers.
- Reverse -- a thrilling "game" about setting numerical sequences in order.
- Space Fighter -- a space combat game.
- Engulf -- the player avoids as long as possible being surrounded by regularly-appearing colored blocks.
- Reaction -- a simple test of the player's reflexes.
- Spacetrek -- the player defends a 10x10 grid from aliens as long as their ship's energy levels hold out.
- Quack -- a target-shooting game.
- Magic Square -- filling in numbers to make every cross-section of the 3x3 grid add up to the same sum.
- Simon -- the player repeats computer-generated numerical sequences of increasing length.
- Roulette -- a simulation of the casino game.
Additionally, the book contains listings for the following, non-game programs:
- Night on a Wild Mountain -- a non-interactive light and sound demo, in the same vein as two Symphony for a Melancholic Computer programs included and one entitled Sepulcher Organ.
- Superpoet -- a non-interactive poetry generator.
- Vincent Van Vic -- a paint program.
- Monte Carlo Molecule -- this program randomly plots a course between points on a cube.
- Zodiac Fortune Teller -- lives up to its name.
- Biorhythms -- a calculator of physical, mental and emotional cycles.
- Billboard -- a program to display large text on the screen.
Credits (VIC-20 version)
13 People
Book by | |
We must pay tribute to the great programming contributions from | |
LIFE invented by | |
Mastermind devised by | |
Noughts and Crosses based on a version written by | |
Battle was written by | |
Zociac Fortune Teller written by |
Analytics
MobyPro Early Access
Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!
Identifiers +
Contribute
Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.
Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.
Game added March 24, 2011. Last modified April 4, 2024.