"Your spacecraft is ready, laser cannons fully armed and your sealed orders are handed to you by Peter Berrecloth, who wrote this great game for the VIC-20, plus a joystick"
Vangard
was my first attempt at a game programmed purely in BASIC. Consequently it was a
bit slow and jerky, but still managed to grace the pages of HCW. Vangard was
based on the arcade game 'Vanguard' and the change of name was purely for
copyright reasons. It was a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up and here's what I
had to say about it back in 1983...
"You are the commander of the Vangard spaceship which is able to move in any of eight directions. Your mission is to travel as far into the Vangard system as you can, destroying aliens and their cities, meteors and fuel dumps with you laser cannon. This two part program runs in an unexpanded VIC-20 with joystick to fire in three directions. It uses user-defined graphics extensively and leaves very little room in the memory, so don't leave spaces when typing in.
There are various screens to battle through. These are...
and if you travel too far, you will reach very large walls to battle through.
The screen scrolls from bottom to top and your fuel and lives are constantly displayed at the bottom. Your score and high score and shown when either all you four lives are gone or you run out of fuel. You get en extra man at 5,000 points. My best is 10,150 points (not easy). You are awarded one fuel point for a fuel dump and a full tank for docking (watch out for the wall). There is no point in keeping to the far side as you don't score anything.
Important: SAVE the first part before running it because of the SYS 64820. If NEW were used instead of SYS 64820 the second part would not fit in memory. The SYS command may be changed to POKE 198,10: POKE 631,131: SYS 64824 to enable the second program to load and run automatically if required."
Designed and Programmed by Pete Berrecloth
VIC 20 3.5K Published by HCW 21 (July 21st - August 1st 1983)