Game Review: Innovative Cassette 1 (Vic 20, Melbourne House)

While they’re more well known for their games, Melbourne House firmly established themselves as a publisher of programming books covering almost every 8-bit platform in the early 1980s. Covering BASIC and machine code, most computer users with even a vague interest in programming had at least one of their titles in their collection. But as well as the tutorial titles, they also published books containing complete games listings across a range of games including Vic Innovative Computing for the Vic 20 by Clifford Ramshaw. The games from this were released as a three-tape series, Innovative Cassette, so what’s the first one like?

Innovative Cassette 1 – What’s On It?

The original Vic Innovative Computing book featured a total of 30 type-in games, all written in BASIC by Clifford Ramshaw. While essentially this was a games compilation, there were notes accompanying each listing for those wanting to understand how each game worked helping you develop your own coding skills.

For this particular tape, seven of the thirty games were included, some in slightly modified forms to save you the trouble of typing them out – Battleship, City Bomber, Duck Shoot, Dumper, Ganymede, Nuclear Attack, and Space Fight. So are these any good? Let’s take a look and find out…

Something In Common

Before looking at each of the games in turn, there are a few things that are the same across all of the games on the tape. First, they have all been developed to run on an unexpanded Vic 20. The book was written in 1982 and while memory expansions were available back then not only were they still quite expensive but imagine sitting there typing in that much code only to find out that you’d got one or two lines wrong! It also made it more practical when it came to the physical cassette release so more games could be included.

Secondly, every title is keyboard only, and for those where you have to move a vehicle or something similar it uses the same keyboard configuration. This did seem quite strange as there’s no difference in performance between reading inputs from the keyboard or joystick. Strangely though, for games that only use left/right movement it uses different keys to ones defined for games using four-way movement! The only reason I can think for keyboard only is to ensure that the games will run on every Vic 20 and require no further hardware or accessories beyond a cassette deck.

Battleship

Based on the classic pen and paper game, this is a single player game played against the Vic 20 using a 10×10 grid. You start off by positioning your five ships and once you’ve done that the CPU does the same then you take it in turns to select locations to find each other’s battleship.

It’s a surprisingly good version of the game, although a couple of minor sacrifices have been made to fit it into such a small basic listing. All of the visuals have been created using the standard Vic 20 character set, the ships all take up just a single space on the grid rather than differing sizes in the original so it’s more luck than anything if you find anything, and both you and the CPU share the same playfield rather than having your own. Despite this, it’s still a fun game and worth a few plays.

City Bomber

If you haven’t managed to figure out this one from the title, City Bomber is a variant of the ever popular Blitz game. You’re in control of a plane that has run out of fuel and is heading downwards towards a city. In order to save the plane and avoid crashing you have to flatten all of the buildings by bombing them through a series of strafing runs. Clear the city and you can land to complete the game but with each pass your plane gets lower and lower…

Unlike other variations on this concept, City Bomber allows you to drop more than one bomb at a time up to a maximum of four which is quite a novel twist and does make it slightly easier. The trade-off for this is significant slowdown however, which makes timing much harder, especially as the game will speed up suddenly once bombs hit and clear their targets.

It’s fairly playable despite running at a slower pace than its machine code counterparts like Commodore’s Blitz and Mastertronic’s own New York Blitz and is one of the highlights of the tape. The only real downside is the fact that it’s played over a single stage and once you’ve cleared all the buildings you have to wait for the plane to land and this can take some time.

Duck Shoot

No connection to Mastertronic’s Duck Shoot, but like its namesake this one is a single screen shoot-em-up. At the top of the screen you see a row of ducks continually scrolling past and you have to shoot them with your crossbow. You only have a limited number of arrows so you have to make every shot count. The ducks can only be taken out by shooting them in the blue section of their body so timing of your shots are critical.

You can move your crossbow left and right using the Z and C keys, with M to fire so it’s pretty straightforward to control and play. But this is horrendously slow, making it borderline unplayable. All of the graphics have been put together using the Vic 20’s internal character set to save memory but by using so many characters for both the crossbow and each duck it’s moving as many as 28 characters on screen at a time just for the ducks so it’s no wonder why it’s so sluggish.

This also leaves the game incredibly unresponsive. While movement isn’t too bad, I found the fire control erratic with it barely registering or often needing to be held down to shoot rather than needing a single key press. It’s obvious that Clifford Ramshaw wanted to show how it was possible to move large objects around the screen, but he sacrificed gameplay in the process.

Dumper

Going by the storyline, Dumpster is one of the stranger ideas on Innovative Cassette 1, but it’s a game that some of you will probably be familiar with. Aliens are trying to bomb your city which is protected by a defensive wall. You have to take control of a truck that you can use to drop bricks(!) to fill in the gaps in the wall. I’ve seen variants of this over the years on other platforms and it’s a fairly simple idea but it’s been executed quite well here.

Everything moves quickly and most importantly your dumpster is responsive to the controls (Z and C to move left and right with M to drop bricks into place). You can only fill holes in that are next to you, but you can drive over them to reach further across the screen. You can only fill holes below your level so you can’t build ground upwards and with the alien craft constantly on the move it’s quite a fast paced game.

Even though all of the visuals are made using the standard character set, it’s been done well enough with good use of colour, and there’s even a nice addition of some animation to the truck each time you drop a brick making this one of the better looking games on the cassette. Easily one of the most fun and entertaining games on the tape.

Ganymede

Moving away from the action games is Ganymede. In this futuristic strategy game, you take charge of a mining colony and have to organise and manage mining operations to Jupiter, making decisions about ship building, selling ore that you’re recovered, while still making sure the population of your colony are safe and don’t run out of oxygen.

In theory this should have been an entertaining diversion, but there are too many random elements to the game that make no sense (rate of population growth which affects your oxygen use/recycling), the need to use fuel for travelling but not indication of how much you have available or what it costs etc. Being left in the dark over vital information you need to be able to play the game properly really doesn’t help at all and a few minor tweaks could have made it worth playing but as it stands it’s not worth the time loading this one up.

Nuclear Attack

Oh dear… where do I start with this one? Another arcade clone and this time it’s based on Missile Command. I’ve always been wary of ports of arcade games that use unique controllers at the best of times as they struggle to come close to the arcade originals. In this case, Clifford Ramshaw has swapped the trackball controller for keyboard control and written the game in BASIC. Frankly it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

And to be honest, that’s exactly what it is. While it moves at a quite a healthy speed considering the amount that’s going on (helped by using the Vic’s characters rather than trying to draw the missile trails on screen), the controls are abysmal – using a block for movement with fire in the middle of in makes it uncomfortable to play. But the biggest issue are your shots themselves…

In the original, each time you fire a shot at the missiles it starts as a small explosion which grows, taking out missiles in it’s blast radius. Here wherever you position your crosshair is the only place you can attack so you have to destroy the missiles with pinpoint accuracy. Combining that with the keyboard controls and it just leads to frustration from start to finish.

Space Fight

Another futuristic game and yet another single screen shooter. This time you’re under attack from a giant alien fortress that is sending forth a never ending swarm of fighters after you. Using your craft you have to destroy as many as you can with your laser. As with all the other single screen shooters on the cassette, it’s simple to control using Z and C to move your craft left and right and M to fire.

Instead of a single bullet, your ship fires a long beam which makes a refreshing change to the visuals and while the mothership again uses the built-in graphics, it’s quite bold and colourful to look at. However, the only things you can destroy are the single-character sized alien fighters.

This is one of those games on the tape that could have been fun but is let down by it’s sluggish controls and its repetitive gameplay.

Overall

Whenever you year about tapes filled with games written in BASIC it brings back memories of the abysmal Cassette 50 from Cascade Software. In the case of Innovative Cassette 1, it offers an interesting mix of games but they’re definitely hit and miss in terms of quality and playability. It’s certainly easier than typing them in yourself from the book, but if you want to learn more about coding, then the book is certainly the better option for the added explanatory notes.

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