The Undisked Part II: December 1983 - April 1984

With the 1990 Gazette taking a hiatus, before being reabsorbed into the newly purchased COMPUTE, I thought I'd go finishing going back to issues 1-10 and plucking out the screenshots (of the games I'll probably never type in) and generally looking for interesting cultural bits of the era.

All games are for both C64 and VIC-20 unless otherwise noted.

December 1983

John Doering, Programmer

Spike (C64) - Eric Brandon 

Roam around a diagonal grid, using "sonar" to help encircle the one containing a C64 icon, and avoiding spikes.

Space Duel - Andy Hayes

A rare paddle-based game (which makes up for the VIC-20 only having one joystick port.) Players shoot lasers at each other.

Bowling Champ - Joseph Ganci

Looks a bit like bowling for the Atari 2600. 

Saucer Shooter (VIC-20) - Ron Watts

The description reads a lot like November 1984's Jump!, with a flying craft doing damage to the terrain your land-based gun is traveling over, except there's no jumping.

January 1984

Cave-In (VIC-20) - Paul L. Bupp and Stephen P. Drop

Get out of the 3D maze, fire button for map. Wonder why they didn't port it.

Hardhat Climber - Chris Lesher

Girders, ladders. rolling and falling barrels? Huh.

Tetracrystals of Veluria - Todd Heimarck

"Nonviolent, noncompetitive"- seems a bit like a fractal/A-life growing kit.

Canyon Cruiser - Thomas Catsburg

Descend through a narrowing tunnel.   

February 1984 

Steve Punter, Programmer

Haunted Mansion - Calvin Overhulser

Cat rescue! Looks rather kid friendly, you only lose points for running into the ghosts and bats.

Astro-PANIC! (C64) - Charles Brannon

C-64 only UFO shootin', but the VIC-20 Port in April 1985 was pretty good.

React - Don Whitaker

Collect the prizes, avoid your own tail and the leering smiley guards. Not sure if the smilies move.

Checkers - Fred Hambrecht

March 1984

CUT-OFF! - Tom R. Halfhill

Again we see that adding an exclamation point to the name of a lame game doesn't help. 2 Person surround. "This concept dates back to the early days of videogames" says the article- no kidding?

Trenchfire - Don Gibson

Suspiciously similar to Intellivision's Star Strike, but even more Star Wars looking.

Poker - August J. Kwitowski

   April 1984

The final pre-disk Editor's Notes glosses over Tramiel's resignation and talks about the pricing of the disks (the disks have been the topic of the previous two Notes) viz a viz copy protection and piracy.

Random Ad Snippet:

Nevets - Steven R. McCloskey

I think this game might be less interesting than it looks - move your gun mount up/down/left/right and stop the marauders.

Bingo 64 (C64) - Richard L. Witkover

Bingo. Ugh.