me you miss a shot against a meteor. Using
keys J and L to rotate your launcher you release the missiles with I.

You have lives to try to rid the earth from deadly meteor storm by rotating your cannon and shooting them out of the sky, miss one and you lose a life, when all the lives are gone you are DEAD and the game ends.

Not too much to say really; again it looks like a type in listing, The
graphics and sounds are again minimal and as you shoot the animation of the meteor moving down the screen stops while the animation of your shot takes place, making the game feel even more type in listing than it needs to be. Definitely needs more work, and better graphics and sound. The game play needs to be built up. Maybe its needs restarting or scrapping and starting again.

Scores

Graphics: 3/10
Sounds: 3/10
Gameplay: 3/10
Overall: 3/10

Summary

Nice idea let down by sound and graphics and to some extent the gameplay.


*************************************
INTERVIEW WITH GHISLAIN DE BLOIS
VIC programmer and blogger
By Commodore Free
*************************************

Q. As is the Commodore Free custom; can you please introduce yourself to our readers, and could I ask on their behalf "what is so special about the VIC"
and when was your first computing experience, was the Vic your first machine?

I received my first VIC-20 computer in 1982 (I was 9 years old) after winning it in a Pepsi contest in Northern Ontario. For the contest, you had to collect bottle caps that spelled V I C 2 0, the letter that was hardest to find was
the letter "C" (the Commodore "chicken lips" logo) I found it because my grandmother owned a convenience store and had a bottle cap opener/drop case
and gave me several bottle caps that she collected every few weeks. I suppose
I had an unfair advantage over other people who participated in the contest at the time, but the "C" that I collected was discarded by the original purchaser of the Pepsi bottle.

The VIC-20 that I got came with a cartridge of Jupiter Lander and the original user's guide, and no datassette or disk drive. I got bored of Jupiter Lander fairly quickly and I wanted to learn how to write my own programs and games. After reading about half of the user's guide, I quickly learned the following commands: PRINT, GET A$, POKE, FOR...NEXT and GOTO. I did not know how to manipulate or display the values of variables until I was 10. I incorrectly assumed that video games were programmed with every single possibility/outcome displayed on the screen with PRINT statements. To be fair, the main portion of the VIC user's guide didn't get into variables, they were only really
discussed in the appendices.

I didn't really make good games when I was 9, but I did have fun and a lot of frustration typing in those games called KILLER COMET and ROCKET COMMAND (from the VIC user's guide). I didn't have any means of storing these programs, so I spent considerable time typing them in order that myself and my younger brothers could enjoy another game besides Jupiter Lander. We only got to enjoy them for a few minutes as my Dad would often kick us off the VIC-20 to watch television. I had no cassette drive to save my games and programs. I did eventually acquire more games on cartridge such as SERPENTINE, GORF, OMEGA RACE, etc.

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Q. Why do you still program the VIC what's the fascination with the machine apart from your nostalgia.

A. Well yes I suppose that growing up with the machine, there's a certain attachment to it. But I also appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a 22x23 character screen which gives it close to a perfect square when it comes to creating a display and playfield for games. And considering that the VIC-20
was soon eclipsed by its successor, the Commodore 64, there's a lot of games and game genres which were never programmed for it--especially in the case of computer fantasy role-playing games (which was the impetus for REALMS OF
QUEST) and tactical war games. The latter case is where THEATER OF WAR comes in.

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Q. Yes The limited resources in the machine can be a problem, yet you still released "Theatre of War" for the unexpanded machine, do you enjoy the challenge or are you just completely mental.

A. It's a little bit of both :) But 3.5KB of free memory on the stock machine is not as limiting as one might think. In fact, when designing a game within those parameters, you are forced to come up with the core engine and you don't deviate much by being tempted by feature creep. I read an anecdote where an
old school video game designer stated that the main game should be programmed within 1K and that everything else--graphics, music and sound are to fill out the rest of the unused memory.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. What options would you suggest to the would be VIC programmer, for example what software or programming applications exist for the Vic that you can recommend and what on line forums or blogs would you suggest our would be programmer subscribe to?

A. I would suggest a good PRG editor like BASEDIT and an ML 6502 compiler like ca65 to save a lot of time. I actually programmed the first Theatre of War
game entirely on the VIC-20 itself back in 2010 on a whim using Commodore
BASIC 2.0 and my own makeshift assembler. For Theatre of War II & III, I just used a laptop, an emulator and of course, ca65. You can see my makeshift assembler the latter in magiTOOL on the Theatre of War game disk.

Myself, I use websites like Denial (sleepingelephant.com/denial) and Lemon 64 (lemon64.com/forum). For everything else, I use Google to look things up. In fact, a lot of Commodore technical stuff is on the internet so it's actually more convenient to search for it rather than saunter over to a book shelf and pull out the old programmer's reference guide to look something up.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. You mentioned cross platform programming so Do you feel Programming the vic has become easier to program with cross platform applications, and is this why we are seeing more software appear that seems to make the Vic do things that would have been unthought-of of a few years ago, or are programmers becoming more adventurous and dare we says just more proficient at programming.

Cross platform development applications certainly helps a lot. It's much
easier to write an ML routine in a text file on a PC and then compile it from command line for quick testing (as in the case of ca65). There's impressive stuff for the VIC-20 lately like rhurst's Omega Fury and Kweepa's adaptation
of DOOM. I also like very much Jeff Daniels' (the owner of the VIC-20 Denial website) unexpanded VIC-20 games which remind me a lot of those COMPUTE!'s Gazette type-in games. Orion70 has created some impressive board games like VICtoria and The Great Adventure using Mike's graphical tools. (The names I mention here are from the Denial forum).

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. It seems Your software is written mainly in BASIC is this proving to be a limiting factor for what you can develop?

Most of my games written in BASIC actually have ML routines embedded in them. Consider the case of THEATER OF WAR where the entire playfield is stored in screen and colour RAM and in order to set flags for the individual units, this had to be done in machine language. Since most of my games are more like board games, it's not necessary to program the entire game in machine language and
so you can use BASIC for most of it. Though I did develop REALMS OF QUEST III entirely in assembly language, the main reason I did that was because I had intended it to be a cartridge game at first. I went back to using BASIC for my next project, REALMS OF QUEST IV (80% BASIC and 20% ML). Realms IV isn't as quick and responsive as its predecessor in certain parts, and in hindsight I probably should have made it 100% ML, but because I don't have as much free time as I used to, BASIC certainly makes it easier to develop games.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. All the Theatre of War games run on the une

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.01 (GNU/Linux-i386)
* Origin: Dragon's Lair (39:901/280)