Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour with ZAP! POW! BOOM! can be surprisingly addictive because it lets you choose your own kind of diversion. You might start with the immediate arcade pull of Monster Maze, Hyperspace Escape, Earth Defense, or a paddle-and-ball round of Smash. Then curiosity takes over. There is always another program promising a different little challenge, from tank duels and bombing runs to number games and board-game conversions.

The catch is that this is a type-in collection. Entering the BASIC listings is part of the deal, and the reward is as much in getting a program running on your own VIC-20 as in mastering what follows. That makes the short, direct games a good fit: shoot, dodge, land, race, guess, bet, or solve a grid. The familiar arcade-inspired entries are especially easy to approach because you already understand the broad goal before you begin.

Not every listing has equal staying power. Several are deliberately slight, built around a single test of reaction, deduction, or luck, while casino simulations and simple guessing games will depend heavily on your tolerance for repetition. Still, the collection earns its size by covering a huge spread of moods. Airplane and Tranquility Base ask for patient control and calculation; Gomoku, Checkers, Reversi, and Codebreaker slow things down; Arkenstone, Caveman, and Nightmare Castle offer more exploratory goals.

There are useful oddities among the obvious crowd-pleasers. Lightning Bolt turns survival into the tense job of drawing a wall in the right place without touching the bolt. Zombie Island makes you think about positioning swamp patches rather than merely outrunning enemies. Cannibal Charlie is stranger still, asking you to manage an equilibrium between cannibals and explorers. These are the listings worth sampling after the familiar invader and maze formulas begin to blur together.

Graphics

The book’s games range from graphical mazes, top-down races, tanks, spaceships, and crude asteroid fields to text-driven adventures and grid-based board games. 3-D Maze stands out for its eerie text-mode first-person maze view, while Brands Hatch, Tank Battle, and Traffic Jam take a top-down view that suits their vehicle movement.

Expect simple VIC-20-era pictures built to communicate a game’s immediate problem: where the maze routes go, where vehicles are headed, or where a target sits. The non-game listings broaden the visual side with a paint program, large-text display program, and light-and-sound demos.

Story

Most of these games barely pause for story, and that is usually the right choice. A maze, a missile-defense scenario, or a quick dice game needs a clear objective more than a pile of lore. The collection instead uses small premises to give otherwise basic programs a bit of flavor: defend against aliens, make a landing, survive a cave, retrieve treasure, or take a reckless jump over buses.

When it does lean into a premise, the results are charmingly specific. Arkenstone brings Tolkien-derived adventure material and an unusual parser that accepts a command one word at a time. Time Guardian sends you through sectors and quadrants searching for parts of the key of Chronos. Danger Star frames its challenge around a Death Star trench run, while Space Birds apparently gives its shooter an unusually lengthy backstory.

That mixture of earnest science fiction, fantasy treasure hunting, and knowingly silly high-concept setups gives the book personality. You are not coming here for a single narrative with a grand payoff. You are coming for dozens of tiny excuses to see what another BASIC listing has in store.

Overall Experience

ZAP! POW! BOOM! is a generous, messy, deeply period-specific compilation. It has the energy of a book that wants its VIC-20 to do everything: imitate the popular arcade games of the day, run tabletop classics, simulate flight and racing, host gambling nights, tell fortunes, paint pictures, and generate poems. That ambition is more memorable than the quality of any one entry.

You will get the most from it if typing in BASIC is a pleasure rather than a barrier. The act of entering, running, and revisiting these programs turns even modest games into personal projects. A player who only wants polished, immediate arcade action will find many entries too basic and too brief, and the book openly warns that some computer moves can take minutes. Patience is part of the intended rhythm.

For VIC-20 enthusiasts, though, the payoff is substantial. This is a big grab bag with enough shooters, mazes, racers, puzzles, simulations, and curios to keep you trying “just one more” listing. Its best quality is not refinement; it is the sense that a small home computer can become a new toy every time you finish typing.

Retro Replay Score

7.5/10