Apple II Games of Note

This list is an offshoot of video games of note which specifically lists games for that 6502-based home computer system, the Apple II. Or Apple ][. Or Apple ][+. Or Apple //e.

Russki Duck

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I have no words. It seemed very high-concept, at the time. Possibly because the enemy agents did things quite independently of what you were doing. Possibly because you have a crude inventory — when you pick up an item, you literally carry it along with you. Or possibly because the different locations were shown at different scale.

The epithet "Russki" seems pretty dated, not to say obsolete, now, but there was a Cold War on at the time, you know!

I like how the signs on the streets helpfully tell you that they are ONE WAY.

Beer Run

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I didn't know quite what to make of this game at the time, and I still don't. Knowing now that it was a tie-in with Olympia beer (which was apparently a real beer company) and that the Artesians were licensed characters makes it make a tiny bit more sense, I guess — but not a lot.

I mean, I guess the action takes place on the outside of a building? On ledges? Or just in a really really narrow building? Because the protagonist sidles left and right, always facing away from the player.

And catches beers that fall from the sky inexplicably. Were they launched out of the blimp that flies above the buildings that is revealed once the protagonist makes it to the top of the building?

Was this an attempt to package a bit of college humour in a video game?

Perhaps if I were to research Olympia beer and find out what their advertising with Artesians was like, I'd be able to answer that better. But to be honest, I'm not really motivated to.

Incidentally, Mark Turmell also created the game Turmoil, which IMO is a much better game than Beer Run.

Swashbuckler

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The weird contrast between the coloured background vs. the black-and-white (or green, as the case may have been, on the monochrome monitor on which I saw it) figures of the characters makes it stand out in my mind.

Star Maze

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Sort of "Asteroids with walls", but moreseo. The omnidirectional scrolling and physics made it seem very high-concept (to me, at the time.)

And considering that the Apple II did not have any sophisticated graphics hardware to support the omnidirectional scrolling, the software to implement it is probably pretty impressive. I imagine it computes what parts of the screen need to be updated (but I haven't researched it so this is just a guess, I don't really know).

Sabotage

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Something quite strange about being able to steer your shots.

If you are more familiar with IBM PC games, you might know of Paratrooper, which was a clone of this game.

Penny Arcade

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OK, so mainly this is notable because it was written as a machine-language routine "attached" to a BASIC program. So you loaded and ran it like a BASIC program, but all the BASIC part was doing was calling the machine-language part. And when you LISTed the BASIC program, all that was visible was the BASIC part.

To a kid like me at the time, that made it seem like an effing mystery.

But Penny Arcade is also notable for being one of the few games I remember having a copyright date in the 1970's — the other being Dart Room.

RIB*BIT

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This was a cute game which came on the "DOS Tool Kit" disk for the Apple II.

The sprite graphics are composed using HRCG (Hi-Res Character Generation). I think this was really more of a demo of using HRCG, than a dedicated game. Another demo written with this technique, featuring "Maxwell", is also on this disk. (Hey, I could write a list of "Apple II Demos of Note", and Maxwell and Applevision and Kill Sammy could all be on it!)

The player makes the frog hop with one paddle button and jump (and launch the frog tongue) with the other paddle button. I believe paddle motion causes the frog to turn around. The paddle emulation on the Internet Archive's emulator seems incomplete and it seems not possible to turn around or make any jump other than the highest kind of jump.

The gameplay is simplistic, but the graphics and sound effects (mainly the croaking) are actually quite good, all things considered.

The game is written in BASIC (using machine language routines for the HRCG and sound effects), but the listing gives no clues as to who the author(s) was(were).

The disk file is named RIBBIT but the in-game stylization of the name is RIB*BIT; this stylization also helps disambiguate this game from another, more dedicated game for the Apple II called "Ribbit", which was a clone of Frogger apparently co-authored by Lance Fortnow (and which, that page helpfully tells us, is no longer supported software).