8. Spitball
Spitball is a single-screen arcade action game by Creative Software for the Commodore 64/128 in the style of the classic "Snake" game, but with added dodgeball/pinball elements.
As an early 1983 cartridge-based effort crammed into an 8KB ROM chip, the game is a (small) step forward from the primitive presentation of VIC-20 games, but I dare not compare it to later floppy-based C64 software. In a past article, I observed that the cartridge games that I've played on the C64/128 thus far feel more like toys aimed at younger players than more elaborate game designs requiring sustained play and understanding of their mechanics, and Spitball follows the trend.
Compared to a floppy disk game (which can store a little under 170KB of data on a single side), a C64/128 cartridge supports a maximum 16K bank of ROM by default. However, larger cartridges can include multiple ROM banks by using additional memory-mapping circuitry to switch multiple ROM sections in and out. If pins 8 and/or 9 on the cartridge port are held to ground, the cartridge ROM is mapped into the computer's memory map at one of several possible regions in a process called bankswitching. Then, on startup, a portion of the boot routine on the part of the computer's kernel looks for the PETSCII text "CBM80" at the address range $8004–$8008 - if the data at this range is a match, the computer knows cartridge software is present and begins executing instructions beginning at at a "pointer" address of the developer's choice stored at memory location $8000–$8001 on the cartridge ROM.
On to the game! Each player is represented by a snake-line "tube" and moves around a maze with intersections and angled gates that can be "flipped" by shooting them with balls, allowing countless opportunities for elaborate bank-shots depending on how the gates are set up. The goal of the game is to shoot your ball through as many gates as possible before hitting your opponent, with point bonuses being added for each gate the ball passes through. Gameplay is spiced up by an added "bomb" ball that must initially be avoided, but can be later picked up and used against your adversary.
While the game's concept is novel, it does not work as well in practice, and I found it difficult to aim and account for gates on the fly. The action moves quickly and a lot of my shots were guesswork in the hope that I would luck into hitting the other player. The overall visual presentation is very simplistic and recalled the character-based graphics of past Commodore computers like the PET and VIC-20. Music (one of biggest selling points of the Commodore platform for game developers and players alike) was completely absent, save for a brief monophonic snippet of Stars and Stripes Forever at the start of each round. The sound effects were also weak and suited what gamers would expect out a weaker 2nd-generation video game console like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision.
The game supports multiplayer with the use of 2 joysticks, which (in the limited amount of time I could convince my brother Scoot to play) was much more enjoyable than the single-player mode and its hopelessly difficult AI. Though the game supports 8 difficulty levels, I was often beaten soundly on even the easiest difficulty setting, and I'm certain the higher difficulty would be sheer torture with multiple enemy tubes and partially-invisible balls. Who knows, maybe I'm just losing my skills with age.
Nothing about Spitball stands out as particularly infuriating, but I'd also be lying if I said I played it for any more than a few sessions. There unfortunately isn't enough of a fun factor here to warrant paying anything for this cartridge, and it's best left to its current status as a historical footnote in the Commodore game library.
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