There’s confusion with this game before it even starts. The title screen calls the game Alien Raiders, but the next screen calls it Alien Invaders – a name also shown at the top of the screen during the game! For the purposes of this book, I’m going with Alien Raiders as that’s what was written on the cartridge, but either name is valid I suppose. If only video games had birth certificates.

The first thing Alien Raiders does is assault you with four seconds of random beeping, which is never a nice thing to experience. It then tells you the controls for left, right and fire, and away you go into possibly the most worthless single-screen shoot ‘em up ever made.

You control a classic Space Invaders-style ship that sits on a black line. Four green alien ships jerk down the screen extremely slowly. Occasionally two aliens will start in the same place, which leads to one of them disappearing and there only being three on screen for the rest of the game. They move straight down, one at a time from left to right, then sit still for a second before the movement wave starts again. Your ship moves much faster and can shoot straight up, with a single bullet on screen at any time. When you shoot an enemy ship it turns into a black waffle that blocks your shots until the next time the aliens move, although sometimes they remain on screen until an alien moves over them. When an alien is shot, it’s replaced with another from the top of the screen.

Soundwise, Alien Raiders makes only two noises after the initial random beeping. There’s a warble when you shoot and a sound like spit hitting a tom-tom drum when an alien is hit.

The game is written in BASIC, and both the aliens and your ship only move along the 8x8 character blocks of the VIC’s standard screen mode. The result is there are only 20 horizontal positions the aliens can be in, and your ship is restricted to the same columns they travel down. A combination of this restriction, the aliens’ inability to move sideways, and the speed of your ship means Alien Raiders is painfully easy. It’s a very simple task to line yourself up under the extraterrestrial idiots, and you have absolutely ages to do it. If one of the invading raiders reaches the bottom of the screen, it’s instantly game over, but that’s not going to happen unless you deliberately allow it.

This leads us into the game’s strangest design choice. When you shoot an alien, you receive 10 points. When you accumulate 100 points, you win and the game immediately ends. So all you have to do is shoot ten aliens, which takes approximately 36 seconds. It’s so easy that I managed to easily complete three versions of the game at once by simultaneously running multiple VIC-20 emulators.

The only chance of losing without it being on purpose is if you encounter a bug that makes the aliens invisible when you shoot them – they sometimes become impossible to shoot and will just progress down the screen unless you can get the score to 100 first. Otherwise, you effectively have to choose to lose. Also, when the game ends, it asks if you want to play again with a Y/N prompt – but entering Y ends the program; you have to enter the whole word YES. Not that anyone would likely want to play the game more than once, but it’s annoying anyway.

Alien Raiders is an absolute swindle. It’s 36 seconds of utterly tedious gameplay for what was almost certainly a premium price, as it was released on an expensive cartridge rather than a cassette tape.

The game is also a bit of an enigma. It consists of only 88 lines of BASIC code. Was it designed as a game for toddlers? Was it a magazine type-in that somehow got released commercially? And who was the publisher Micro-Spec? There’s no record of them releasing anything other than this game.

A look at the source code reveals an extra final line numbered 65000 that says “Harteveld Software” surrounded with asterisks. Harteveld were a Dutch developer who released the puzzle games Kolom Raden (Guess the Column) and Memory – both simple BASIC games and both of which have the same line 65000 in them. It therefore seems likely they made a game called Alien Invaders that they never released themselves, but that for some reason Micro-Spec published as Alien Raiders. What is the story behind the whole affair? We may never know… or care.

Space Invaders was a worldwide phenomenon, but five years after release it was getting a little stale. The time had come to put a new spin on a classic. And who better to do that than Mr Computer Products? The answer, tragically, is anybody.

It’s been said that the key to a good game is choice. Some games offer multiple ways to beat a challenge, but even the simplest examples need you to make the right choice at the right time to win. Do you move left or right? Do you fire one last time or retreat to the side? Or do you play Alien Sidestep, which effectively eliminates player choice and therefore any potential fun?

Rows of aliens appear on the screen from the top left. They move horizontally to the right, at which point they reappear at the left further down. If they reach the bottom of the screen, then it is officially a bad thing, because the game ends if it happens three times. Nothing revolutionary so far.

BUT! The aliens have mastered the dark art of the sidestep, a bit like the drivers in the fourth The Fast and the Furious movie. This means that when they are about to be hit by a bullet, they stop moving so it passes harmlessly to their right, which presents a massive problem. The bullets fired from your crude blue rocket crawl painfully slowly up the screen and you can only have 16 on the screen at once. This means the usual tactic of aiming at where the aliens will be is useless, as they just stop moving before they’re hit.

In fact, to actually progress in Alien Sidestep, there are only two effective battle plans. I shall refer to them as Strategy Alpha and Strategy Omega, and both rely on shooting a bullet directly to the left of the previous bullet.

Strategy Alpha:

1. Move from the left of the screen to the right, hammering the fire button so there isn’t a gap in your bullets for the aliens to slip through.
2. Move your ship back to the left as your bullets crawl up the screen.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 forever.

Strategy Omega:

1. Move your ship slightly to the left,
then slightly to the right, firing constantly.

2. Repeat step 1 forever.

And that’s it! Any divergence from either strategy will result in not shooting anything, and ultimately game over. And Strategy Alpha is far more effective than Strategy Omega, so you can’t even mix it up by swapping between them without risking failure. There is no room for deviation, improvisation or fun.

The depressingly repetitive gameplay is further reinforced by a total lack of variety in the game’s levels. Shoot enough of the Space Invader rip-off aliens on level 1 and you will get to shoot identically-acting aliens that look slightly different on levels 2 and 3. And if you complete level 3, then the words “POINTS DOUBLE” appear on screen and the charge fanfare that Scrappy-Doo loved so much plays. Then everything starts all over again. And because it never gets more difficult, it’s pretty much impossible to lose if you follow Strategy Alpha. You could actually play Alien Sidestep forever – the only real obstacle is maintaining interest through the mind-crushing tedium.

There is only one unpredictable feature in the entire game – sometimes, if you hit an alien (usually on the top row) you get 50 points and the little “you’ve picked up an item or jumped a barrel!” tune from Donkey Kong plays. It seems to happen at random and is not even 0.001% enough to save the game from being a boring, monotonous chore.

Alien Sidestep was released by Mr Computer Products (also known as O.E.M. Inc.), who may well rank as one of the worst game publishers in history. They released about eight games, all in 1983, and they’re all rubbish at best. Alien Sidestep wasn’t even their worst effort – that accolade goes to Close Encounters of the Worst Kind, an astonishingly honest title for a game that is simply a shrieking, pulsating mess of sprites that seems specifically designed to induce a headache.

And so Human Kind went out of Earth and, like locust, spread and devoured the Galaxy. The Earth was contaminated but out of the contamination there evolved a new life form which regenerated the land, sea and air until once again greedy Human Kind attempted to return.

That’s the text from the back of Battle Probe’s disk case. The usual idea for a case is to write an exciting description of the game to entice browsers to buy it. But publisher Crysys decided to provide what seems to be a Russian poem automatically translated into English by faulty software. I don’t know if it helped sales, but I suspect not.

A simple, vertically-scrolling shoot ‘em up, Battle Probe has you controlling a spaceship, flying over space stations of some kind as enemy ships attack you. The only slight deviation from the basic template is that your ship has an ever- diminishing fuel supply you need to replenish, although it never came close to running out when I was playing.

Battle Probe is an amazingly orange game. The status area is orange. Your ship is orange. Most enemies are orange. The backgrounds are orange. Your bullets are orange. Even the stars are orange. This game is more orange than a clownfish addicted to fake tanning lotion.

The graphics themselves are generally well defined, but it can be hard to discern what’s going on as so many things are the same colour. There are also a lot of eyes featured. Some enemy ships are eyes, gun turrets spew eyes at you, and different coloured eyes in the backgrounds confer extra lives, fuel and bonus points. If I had to create a single image to sum up this game, it would be an orange eye.

When I first loaded Battle Probe, I was impressed with how smooth the scrolling and the ship’s movements were. My positive impressions ended there, sadly.

As soon as a few enemies appear on screen, the whole game slows to a crawl. Your ship moves so slowly anyway that it’s almost impossible to dodge things fired at you. The collision detection – one of the most important parts of a shoot ‘em up – is absolutely atrocious, with bullets frequently passing through your ship. Sometimes after losing a life, you restart on a bullet or background obstacle and die again immediately. It’s difficult to tell which background objects can be passed over and which will kill you. All the enemy ships have identical attack patterns, appearing in threes and waving left and right. The upshot is that Battle Probe is no fun to play whatsoever.

Interestingly for the time, the sound consists entirely of sampled audio. The title screen constantly plays a scratchy three second music loop which grates on the nerves after a few plays. The vast majority of the game is silent, punctuated by an explosion effect when an enemy is killed or your ship is destroyed. There are also three different snippets of speech reserved for when you pick up items, although they’re almost unintelligible – more due to their odd intonation than the low sample quality.

Battle Probe is a depressingly fun-free experience. The whole package feels painfully cheap, especially considering the substantial £15 asking price. There isn’t even a game over message – it just cuts abruptly back to the title screen and the three second music loop.

The developers, Capital Software, produced only Battle Probe before forming a new company called New Dimensions. They then made two very weak games before finding their strength in application software – they went on to re-lease the immensely successful Technosound Turbo audio sampler for the Amiga, which dance group The Prodigy used in their early work.

Publisher Crysys only released Battle Probe and three dull sports management games that all used the same game engine. By 1989 they’d disappeared, which was probably for the best.