ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the Vic-20

This is a book of instructions for numerous type-in BASIC games:

• Monster Maze -- like a summarized Pac-Man, eating dots in a maze avoiding monsters, which can temporarily be eaten after eating cherries.
• Hyperspace Escape -- an Asteroids clone
• Gunfight -- "Outshoot the fastest draw in town, VIC". Three buttons regulate four functions: moving up and down, shooting and dodging.
• Scramble -- a game of aerial bombardment
• Alien Marauders -- likely a Space Invaders clone
• Airplane -- "Attempt to land your passengers safely on the runway at La Guardia Airport." A simulation of landing an airplane consulting only cockpit instrumentation. "Good luck. It may take practice to land correctly. I can't!"
• Marathon -- the player places bets on one of three athletes, then the computer simulates a foot race between and lets the player know how their financial speculation turned out. "The game continues until you are broke or you break the bank."
• Wizard (or Computer Wizard) -- a "Simon-says" iterative song-repeating game
• Tail Gunner -- a gunsights-aiming game (using the almost-standard WADX control keys)
• Astro Wars -- also sounds very Space Invaders-y. Only so many distinguishing characteristics can be gleaned by eyeballing the source code.
• Swarm -- a game about intercepting the trajectory of enemy spacecraft on a collision course
• 3-D Maze -- wherein the player attempts to set a speed record for plotting a course to maze cell #25, in an eerie textmode first-person perspective.
• Brands Hatch -- a topdown car racing simulation whose goal is primarily to avoid colliding with other vehicles or the sides of the road.
• Lightning Bolt -- a somewhat conceptually abstract game, the player here attempts to intercept the tip of a descending lightning bolt with a cursor-drawn wall without touching the bolt's sides.
• Space Birds -- a Space Invaders-y top-down space shooter with a backstory almost as long as the source code listing.
• Arkenstone -- an explicitly Tolkien-derived early text adventure game with an unusual text parser, accepting input of strings up to nine words long one[enter]word[enter]at[enter]a[enter]time[enter][enter].
• Gomoku -- the Asian parlour game whose goal is getting five stones in a row. "WARNING: This program takes a few minutes to make its move."
• Lunar Lander -- a simple conversion apparently unconstrained by fuel limitations.
• Earth Defense -- a Missile Command clone.
• Nightmare Castle -- the description is peculiarly abstract ("THE ROOM is a strange place. All sorts of weird things happen, but you'll have to find out what yourself") but the fundamentals seem straightforward enough: navigating a graphical maze, locating and retrieving a treasure, and avoiding being eaten by a monster.
• Checkers -- a conversion of the board game. Input is via board coordinates.
• Dambuster -- from the sounds of things, a Zaxxon-like challenge to line up the player's spaceship with a supposedly 3D environment and fire the player's weapon at the right moment.
• Smash -- a paddle-and-ball game.
• Dogfight -- a daredevil game of aerial duelling.
• Night Raid -- an aerial bombing simulation
• Tank Battle -- a top-down tank duelling game, spiced up with mines and fuel drums.
• Danger Star -- a simulation of Star Wars' Death Star trench-flying feat.
• Reversi -- a conversion of the board game ("You'll find the VIC plays slowly, but remarkably well." Great, the worst of both worlds!)
• Fruit Machine -- a slot-machine gambling simulator.
• Dr Watson -- a "guess what number the computer is thinking" game, giving "too high" and "too low" feedback.
• Dr Audio -- Dr Watson with proportional sound feedback to let the player know how close they are.
• Tight Squeeze -- a gambling game.
• Time Guardian -- the player navigates between the six sectors of each of six quadrants (sextants?) in search of the six parts of the key of Chronos.
• Long John Silver -- a "find the buried treasure" game of simplified Battleship with a one-cell treasure on a 10x10 cell map.
• Robot Nim -- A conversion of the parlour game Nim.
• Victim (or VICtim) -- another simulated race.
• Evolution -- Conway's Game of LIFE.
• Vic-et-un -- Blackjack with dice.
• Hangman -- a two-player-only version of the word-guessing game.
• Codebreaker -- a version of Mastermind.
• Fairway -- a golf simulator.
• Jelly Bean Space Swarm -- the player must navigate a space ship through some crudely rendered asteroids.
• Zauper Attack -- the player must zap the aliens before they are eaten by the Zaupers.
• Superbowl -- a 10-pin bowling simulator.
• Zombie Island -- wherein the player attempts to drown the zombies by situating zombie-drowning swamp patches between himself and them.
• Motorcycle Jump -- a daredevil motorcyclist game (playing as "Evil K."), calculating the speed at which to approach a ramp to clear an arbitrary number of double-decker buses... without overdriving and flipping upside-down!
• Traffic Jam -- a top-down simulation of piloting a car to a parking spot with moving obstacles (presumably, other vehicles on the road.)
• Hangman 11 -- a one-player version of the word-guessing game, which the computer stocks with a limited vocabulary.
• Antihang -- the computer plays Hangman and guesses the player's word.
• Treacle Balls -- a game of logic and deduction.
• Craps -- the dice gambling game.
• Caveman -- challenging the Cro-magnon player to survive in a treasure-and-trap-filled cave complex.
• Tranquility Base -- Lunar Lander again, this time tracking fuel use.
• Lodestar/3-D Maze -- attempt to locate a lodestar in a maze. (The 3-D aspect is left as an exercise for the reader. Really!)
• Monza -- the computer guesses a number the player is thinking of.
• Mento -- "another mathematical mind-reading wizard."
• Flip -- a geometrical puzzle played on a 3x3 grid.
• Colormind -- "This, as you've probably guessed, is a color version of Mastermind."
• Cannibal Charlie -- a delicious ecological simulation challenging players to achieve a high score by finding the most stable equilibrium between populations of cannibals and explorers.
• Noughts and Crosses -- or Tic-Tac-Toe to the non-Brits in the room.
• Speedway -- a top-down solo racing simulation played for longevity.
• Battle -- a new board game similar to Checkers.
• Reverse -- a thrilling "game" about setting numerical sequences in order.
• Space Fighter -- a space combat game.
• Engulf -- the player avoids as long as possible being surrounded by regularly-appearing colored blocks.
• Reaction -- a simple test of the player's reflexes.
• Spacetrek -- the player defends a 10x10 grid from aliens as long as their ship's energy levels hold out.
• Quack -- a target-shooting game.
• Magic Square -- filling in numbers to make every cross-section of the 3x3 grid add up to the same sum.
• Simon -- the player repeats computer-generated numerical sequences of increasing length.
• Roulette -- a simulation of the casino game.

Additionally, the book contains listings for the following, non-game programs:

• Night on a Wild Mountain -- a non-interactive light and sound demo, in the same vein as two Symphony for a Melancholic Computer programs included and one entitled Sepulcher Organ.
• Superpoet -- a non-interactive poetry generator.
• Vincent Van Vic -- a paint program.
• Monte Carlo Molecule -- this program randomly plots a course between points on a cube.
• Zodiac Fortune Teller -- lives up to its name.
• Biorhythms -- a calculator of physical, mental and emotional cycles.
• Billboard -- a program to display large text on the screen.