Gorf

The Good
It was very advanced for it time and much like games in the Arcades, and Motorway Service Station Games areas. I spent many hours of my childhood playing it on my 3.5 kByte RAM VIC 20 Computer. It actually came as an 8 kByte ROM Plug-in VIC 20 Cartridge [Code: Vic-1923] so loaded instantly. No waiting for ages for the tape cassette drive to load it.

Gorf was one of the first video games to have more than 1 level. There are 4 different levels in this classic space shooter. Play was controlled with a center mounted joystick ("flight stick") type controller that plugged into a 9-way D-type connector (UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, FIRE, and COMMON GROUND lines). It was fun controlling the game this way. PC's seem to have lost Joystick attachments for some reason. Perhaps the PC designers regarded them as too Nerdy.

The Bad
It got a bit repetitive after a while repeating the same 4 levels over and over again.

It you took the Cartridge out while the Computer was still on it blow it up!!!!!! This happened with my Galaxian Cartridge and my VIC NEVER worked again :-( I even ordered an expensive chip to fix it, but that didn't help.

The Commodore VIC 20 originally cost £300 [GBP]. A lot of money in 1982. The Commodore 64 came out 6 months later for the SAME price with a whopping 64 kByte of RAM as opposed to the VIC's 3.5 kByte! It was largely based on the Colour VIC but also had 40 chars./line instead of 22. Luckily the Cartridge added 8 kbyte of extra ROM. Both used TV's as monitors.

The Bottom Line
Produced by: Commodore Electrics Ltd. Year of Release: 1982

Gorf had the following four levels:

ASTRO-BATTLES: The first level was a Space Invaders clone with a few minor differences. You had a full curving force field instead of the four shields used in classic Space Invaders. You can also move all around the lower half of the screen, instead of being confined to the very bottom.

LASER ATTACK: You are up against 2 ships armed with deadly lasers, which are defended by several Galaxian style escort ships. This is a quick and easy level, although you may find yourself zapped if you aren't careful. The laser ships regenerate every few seconds as long as other ships remain on screen. But there are so few ships that a good player can beat this level in seconds.

SPACE WARP: A whirlpool like vortex fills the center of the screen. Enemy ships spiral out from the middle growing larger as the get closer. They only attack one at a time. So this level isn't very difficult (at least not the first time around).

FLAG SHIP: Avoid the rockets of the Mothership while you try and score a hit on its only weak spot (the internal power reactor vent). Once that is hit the ship explodes and you start the game over at a higher difficulty setting.

From the manual: MESSAGE FROM INTERSTELLAR SPACE FORCE COMMAND. “Space Cadet: By the time you read this communiqué, we of the Interstellar Space Force Command will have been destroyed. The evil Gorfian Empire has launched an all-out attack. You are Earth's last hope! Your assignment is to repel the invasion and launch a counterattack. You will engage various hostile spacecraft as you journey toward a dramatic confrontation with the enemy Flag Ship! You will be rewarded for your success with promotions in rank and praise from a grateful planet. But you must act quickly, Space Cadet! Brief yourself on the Gorfian Robot Armada and then attack before it's...TOO LATE!!”

The Good
When I was a child growing up in the late '70s, shoot-em-ups were quite popular in the arcades. Almost everyone got home from school or work to go to their favorite arcade and insert a quarter into the likes of any popular shoot-em-up that was available there. They were so popular, in fact, that Jamie Fenton, a Bally/Midway employee, took it upon herself to combine all these shoot-em-ups into one big game. The result was Gorf, a game that is overlooked to this day.

The main objective of Gorf is to shoot down enough aliens to proceed to the next level, but what's unique about this game is that each level is different. One minute you shoot down aliens that attack Space Invaders style, the next you're trying to kill a “flag ship”. Each level has a unique name, and you advance to a new rank after completing the final level.

Fenton's work was popular enough to warrant several home ports, including the VIC-20, which was done by Midway themselves, and just like the arcade version, it features an attract mode that shows you what to expect in each level. Due to the VIC's resolution (176x184), each sprite is slightly bigger, and they always stand out against the black background. The flag ship is just huge. The animations are quite nice, with the little explosion that occurs when you are hit by an alien being one of my favorites.

The VIC-20 version omits level three of the arcade version, and understandably so, The VIC only has 3K of memory in its unexpanded form, which is not enough to get all the action in. Also omitted is the ability of the game to mimic the excellent speech synthesis of the Votrax SC-01 chip built (through the use of a chip installed inside the cartridge).

The Bad
If you try to play Gorf on a PAL machine (ie: use a VIC-20 outside the US), the game doesn't make use of the VIC's entire screen. If this annoys you, you can adjust its position during the attract mode, but even then, you can't move this window into the center.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, Gorf for the VIC-20 is a very faithful port of the arcade game, with large sprites and great animations. There are four levels in the game, each of which you are doing the same thing. Once you have completed all four, you advance to the next rank available and wrap around to level one with a much higher difficulty. The only drawbacks are the limited screen and the lack of a “Galaxians” level, but this fact alone should not stop you from getting yourself a VIC-20 so that you can buy this game and start zapping those aliens.