Games That Push the Limits of the Commodore Vic 20

what's brown and rhymes with sick plenty it is of course Commodores Vic 20 the sickest illest dopest flyest home computer of 1981. the first computer to sell over 1 million units and with William Shatner fronting the marketing how could you expect anything else whilst the shirt may have been Keen or at least contractually obliged to point out that the vic-20 was about more than just gaming and personally not as thrilled about productivity apps as this family seemed to be so let's keep this about the games games that push this machine to its limits I'm struggling to find what titles the Vic actually launched with but radar rap race is definitely an early release and it's pretty typical of the sort of thing that populated the beginning of its life like many games from the early home computer years have slightly modified knockoff of an existing arcade game namco's rally X and Jupiter Lambda is another one a spin on Luna Lander but as the popularity of this machine increased unsurprisingly more interesting games started to flow mostly on cartridge and that was part of the appeal it's easy to use the friendly computer as a Commodore build it plug in again cartridge like a console but you can program it too and if it's Shatner's rug or nerved you well the price wouldn't because it was relatively cheap and it had color it had sound it had a non-terrible keyboard stuff that wasn't guaranteed back then a game like brother buns shoplifting shows a bit better what is possible a fast-paced arcadesdale game with some nice graphical touches that made it the equal at least of the original Apple II version maybe even better the vic-20 was definitely made with entertainment software in mind it wasn't absolutely ideal for gaming but it could do it it like Sprites and had limited scrolling capabilities something that set arcade Machines of the time and later games consoles apart but it could do a heck of a lot better than commodore's first personal computer the pet that system had fixed character-based Graphics It could only construct images from a predefined set of symbols letters and numbers something it shared with other early computers like the TRS-80 and zx81 the vic-20 though has a sort of souped-up version of this you can use predefined characters stored in the systems ROM which does have its advantages but you can also Define your own to allowing aliens spaceships or whatever to be drawn at fairly high resolution and all this in its in its colors in each character block though and there's three Channel sound two plus a noise Channel way better than the Beeper you'd find in the pet and many other Machines of the era it's made for blocky but respectable official conversions of many arcade games of the day the popularity of the vic-20 spread outside of its home territory in the USA to the UK and Europe including into the hands of none other than the yak himself Jeff Minter the now game industry Legend the vic-20 was where he coded some of his very first games and in fact he brought a whole string of them to the system including the incredible grid Runner not an official conversion of any arcade machine but way more than just a thinly disguised knockoff yes it seems to be inspired by Atari centipede but it really is its own thing the grid pert though is interesting because well everything in the game is aligned to the character a grid that makes up the display in some vic-20 games it's painfully obvious that everything in the game is jumping around in blocks with no smooth movement like this not amazing version of Frogger everything does the saying in Grid Runner but it all goes so fast you don't notice a game that plays brilliantly into the computer strengths in color and sound and works around its limitations and it runs from a cassette too on the original machine with no sort of memory expansion that is something that a lot of the lighter vic-20 games required particularly the ones that came from the European market on cassette in fact it's practically difficult to have both a cartridge and a memory expansion at the same time it's either one or the other usually they take up the same slot embodied by grid Runners sequel the cassette release of Matrix grid Runner 2 requires an 8 kilobyte Ram expansion the cartridge version though released in the USA doesn't the games are identical though apart from the title which was changed for some reason the same data either loaded from the tape into the extra memory or read directly from the cartridge and that extra gives us more nice graphical effects including this neat Parallax background fancy for a game from 1983. many home games in this era especially on home computers well they tended to be a bit generic Unforgettable commodore's own cartridge is often sounded pretty dreary but not this or any of Jeff's big vic-20 games and that's something you could also say about jet Park a conversion of the spectrum classic from Ultimate play the game the precursor to the console developer rare this is impressive because here we don't have everything aligning to a grid we have Sprites moving around very smoothly not in big jumps making this happen often requires it so much clever programming the way the vic-20s graphics work mean that this is more difficult to pull off than with some other machines and a big part of that is lack of memory you can simulate the bitmap display that the ZX Spectrum has where this game originates but that doesn't leave much room for other things the stock Vic has just five kilobytes of RAM and a bitmap display can eat up more than four kilobytes of that by itself that's not the only way you can get smooth graphics on the vic-20 there's other methods of doing it too but most games that used Advanced Techniques like these either required a memory expansion as jetpack does or run from a cartridge frustratingly there wasn't just one widely adopted memory expansion either but a few different ones compatible with different things which does add an element of confusion to the vic-20 scene games running from cartridge leave more free space in Ram you don't get as much as you do with the ram expansion but it does mean it's possible to have smooth moving objects as toot and calm proves it even adds some horizontal scrolling too but the number of moving objects on screen is a lot less than the chaos of Jetpack but a game like Capture the Flag sidesteps the whole thing by having a totally different sort of Graphics but still massively impressive for different reasons yes this is a sort of a very early 3D first person game it actually started life on the Atari 8-bit series but got converted to various machines including the vic-20 I can't tell if this uses some sort of bitmap display or if it's low resolution enough to rely on predefined character blocks for the walls but whatever it does it cleverly implements simple raycasting Graphics it's amazing that this works on such primitive Hardware yeah okay the service system where this originated was a massively powerful but it did have a processor nearly twice as fast and a lot more memory impressive looking is a game but it is promising maybe this is where the Vic really starts to shine surely it has great things in store later on in the decade right that's when all the best games on all the 8-Bit systems came out isn't it well sadly no even in 1983 when this was released the vic-20 didn't have a lot of commercial life left in it the Japanese edition of this machine was test marketed as early as 1980 but even counting that the vic-20 only clocked up five years in production for a while it was the budget option to the more expensive at Commodore 64 but by the mid-80s the c64 it had a less brown makeover and dropped in price to the point where it itself was the budget option to a new generation of 16-bit machines seeing in fact another nine years in production the vic-20 though was finished Commodore discontinued the system and Commercial official games quickly dried up magazines and user groups supported it a bit longer but eventually even they went to New pastures and everyone moved on well not everyone some computers slink off into the night forgotten and unloved but the vic-20 is one that's lucky enough to be remembered preserved and have new games lovingly created for it yes this isn't the end of the story the early 2000s saw the first emergence of a new generation of games as was the case for a lot of retro systems at the time Dragon Wing from 2002 is a great looking scrolling not shooter yes it's like a less annoying precursor to a Flappy Bird just avoid the walls but it looks really good though Astro now from 2004 is an 8-bit collectible for platform Style game of the Jet Set Willie school which somehow manages to fit into the 3.5 K available in the vix on expanded memory Quite a feat the sort of thing I'm sure Publishers would have loved if it came out 20 years earlier it didn't sadly but if you want to relive that experience you can buy this on cassette from chronosoft but now we get a really unexpected twist hopping forward to 2011 because Doom yes indeed killed it Steve McCree AKA creeper has made a very courageous attempt to put Doom to the vic-20 and I will say that this is probably the least powerful system that someone has ported a recognizable version of Doom 2 and it is a recognizable version of Doom just about whenever I cover something like this someone in the comments always says it's not Doom this is much more like Wolfenstein and then whenever I mention Wolfenstein someone always says that I'm pronouncing it wrong which I don't really mind because of any sort of Engagement does help a video but that is all immaterial in this case because whilst this is missing so if Doom's more advanced features it does actually try to stay true to the original it's based Loosely on the Linux Port of the Doom engine seriously it's even written partly in C plus simplified versions of the original levels are there the music is converted from the original MIDI files and it even has a cut down form of the original AI code and there's other features recreated as well this is not just a vaguely doomed Style game like you'll see on some other low-spec systems but an actual attempt at a port I do feel like if I didn't already know what Doom was supposed to look like I wouldn't be able to work out what was happening here at all like trying to navigate your bathroom with the lights out only really wise if you know what you're aiming for still though very impressive and unsurprisingly this does require the maximum 35 kilobytes Ram expansion the biggest that you can fit into the vic-20 and it needs to run from a disc too this isn't all that creeper has to offer Below on this machine because he's also brought us this incredible Port of manic Miner and wow it really is stunningly close to the ZX Spectrum original in fact given the music which is definitely better than what you'll hear on the Spectrum and how well it runs you might even say it's better it does require a 16 kilobyte Ram expansion but so did The Perils of wheelie which sounds like a banned public information film but it's actually a sort of stripped down manic minor Port created by official manic Miner publisher software projects presumably because they couldn't get the actual full-on Miner working on the vic-20 at the time it really wasn't such a good game so it's great to see the full strength original Edition works so well on the exact same Hardware and now let's move on to this all new version of Pitfall another really great poet from an entirely different system the Atari 2600 very authentic all over it makes really great use of the vic-20s color palette and it plays as good as it looks it's probably better than the actual official c64 version this is pal only though it'll only work on European machines and there is a reason for that because Coda Vic tragic used complex raster tricks to make the graphics work as they do tricks that rely on precise video timing a lot of the graphics are drawn by the inventive technique of switching the background color at precise moments things like the tree trunks and ladders as well as the gaping pits this is presumably inspired by the Atari original which needs to do a similarly complex hacks to draw its backgrounds as well there's also something funky going on with the player spray too more raster stuff and all this allows for a very colorful game at the vix maximum resolution that is one of the problems of the vic-20 it can do some impressive Graphics but it is pretty hard to get the best out of it though you perhaps wouldn't guess that from this effortless or that new version of another Activision classic Hero by Coda Jonas Fulton this is close to the original as Pitfall is and in fact taking these two games together they look like they're on a different machine from the one that produced those early games like radar rat race this again manages very colorful high resolution Graphics whilst still playing really smoothly proving that in the right hands the vic-20 can easily look as good as many of the other 8-bit machines that were around at the time better in some cases but using that power though isn't always easy and add to that the confusion over memory expansions it's no wonder people back then left the system behind and upgraded the 664 being the totally obvious successor more power more memory it's good it's quirks but overall a more straightforward design but that logic doesn't apply to Homebrew code as though does it for them it's about the thrill and the challenge of wrestling with these old beasts not which is the best machine for the job here is well another fine example of a modern Port it looks like the ZX Spectrum version but better and there's so many vic-20 games that have come out in the past few years well there's more than I can reasonably cover in this one video there is one particular game though that I'm definitely going to have to talk about and that is cheese and onion a release that has brought gladness to the hearts of many Old Vic fans it's a fabulous game and well it makes it look like another machine again somehow this time we're in at low resolution mode but the screen is expanded width wides we also have extremely silky four-way scrolling with Parallax backgrounds a bit like grid Runner but so much more impressive for being set in these huge levels the doubt ad is that the colors do have to be limited it couldn't really work any other way but it still looks great scrolling over any candies are pretty rare in vic-20 games and even if you have the memory to go all out with a bitmap setup the CPU still struggles to update the screen quickly enough for games like this to work usually I think this is the only game of its type so far on the vic-20 definitely a limit Pusher it's quite a flexible machine really is the vikits graphics setup can be coaxed into doing quite a few different things but it's short life meant that really no one ever got around to exploring the Advanced Techniques like the ones used in cheese and onion during its commercial life nice to see it pushed into doing the kind of thing that was very common in the later 8-bit era it's also good to see a truly original game here as well a lot of modern Vic games have been ports but this is a new IP if I can call it that's coded by The Talented and prolific misfit oh this is more of his handiwork pentagarat pentagorat I don't know how you say it but it's an isometric platform Adventure Style game a lot and I mean a lot of this type of game emerged from the UK especially back in the 80s but again this seems to be the only example of this that you'll find currently on the Vic something else the system missed out on in its classic years due to its curtailed life but hey Misfit has rated that wrong and it looks superb once again I knew when I started making this video that the vic-20 had a few interesting modern games but there's way way more than I imagined this is pulse another surprise a full-on scrolling shooter with actual shooting this time apparently Andrew Gwynn who you probably won't have heard of unless you're a really big UK politics fan but he's currently Shadow Minister for social care and he's it seems a fan of the vic-20 and in particular this game and if you wondering what a shadow minister is well it's it's way less interesting than it sounds but anyway there's more games that I could ever cover here there's at least five Realms of Quest games which look like they might be interesting but they also look like they might take a while to get into so I haven't really given them a try help budge is another one it looks really good I haven't really played it all that much but this is where I think I'm gonna have to end it for now I'm sure if you're a Vic fan you'll be able to suggest other games in the comments as well and finally though well the demo scene is one thing I haven't mentioned not games but well demos what a demos well they're demos and they really push the graphics and sound capabilities of a machine that's kind of the whole point a totally different thing from games but the vic-20 has a fairly big demo scene and over the past 20 years or so again it is as it is with the games more recently that coders have started to come to the system this is a robotic Warrior by pwp from 2002 with either the best or the worst speech synthesis ever one or the other I can't really decide but it does run somehow on the totally unexpanded machine foreign [Applause] ER may have called the vic-20 the Wonder computer of the 80s but no one really got the best out of it until another couple of decades later at least so thank you thank you thank you to my wonderful patreons as always and as ever if you do feel like joining them there is a link below it really does help me to make videos and I'll sign off and say goodbye for now thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 47,725

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Id: _nvl25RnXgs

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023