HAPPY CANADA DAY! I hope that everyone reading this is having a happy and healthy summer, and my Canadian visitors have a safe long weekend.

My next favorite typed-in games that I've spent a lot of my spare time playing is the game, Spiders, by Joe Rocke and Tim Victor. This game appeared in Compute! magazine, issue #54, back in 1984 and was originally written for the VIC-20, but had versions developed for the C64, Apple II and PC.

It's difficult for me to recall, but from the date of publication, I would say that Spiders was my first machine language typed-in game. Actually, the game has two parts (which was common for VIC-20 games of the time); the first part was in ML and the second was a short BASIC program to get the game going. You first load in the ML portion, using ,8,1, then NEW, and then follow up by loading the second BASIC program and RUN that to launch the game.

Spiders is a pretty good Galaxian-style game, in which you have to blast the “space spiders” hovering above you, as “fighter” drones dive bomb you. Once all the fighters are defeated, the two “officer” squadrons hovering above descend upon you. Blast them for bonus points.

The thing about this game is that, if your “robot” fighter ship gets destroyed (of which you have three), a full formation of fighters appear and you have to take all of out again before moving on to the next level (a.k.a. “web”, as the game calls it). When one of your ships get taken out, there's a cool swarming routine in which all of the remaining fighters descend down to the bottom of the screen. Then the level starts over again. I thought it was nice touch to the game. The sound effects are not so bad, either.

For a typed-in game from a magazine, I thought Spiders was a pretty good space shoot-em-up. It's also not all that long of a listing to type in. I probably did it in one sitting, back in the day, using the MLX editor.

Spiders.d64

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