Nuclear Reactor Simulator (C+)
April 1983
Co-author Chris Latham also wrote Donkey King, a clone of the similarly named coin-op many consider the best CoCo game ever. That alone merits a recommendation even if the programmers concede it's "not a state of the art masterpiece." The Rainbow hired Latham and John Erickson to write this as an example and promotion for the magazine's first simulation contest, and the result is a simple but pleasing diversion. The player uses simple keyboard commands to manipulate pumps, valves and other functions that control temperatures and other operations. Instructions are provided in the program, but the article does a far more thorough job explaining how a nuclear plant functions, and what had to be left out due to time and CoCo hardware limits. One important note, which should be kept in mind when searching for other files on virtual disks and cassettes: I found the program on the March 1983 Rainbow On Tape file, rather than the April issue. Presumably it's an archiving error and should be kept in mind if other files aren't where you expect them.

Rainbow Roach (C+)
June 1983
This Frogger derivative is what I consider the first quality arcade game in The Rainbow's history, although I know others vigorously disagree (see Advanced Star Trench Warfare, below). The player is a roach who must cross six conveyor belts of pastries before the baker finishes drinking his coffee and sprays the whole factory for bugs. Much as you might like to eat the pastries, jumping on one is fatal since they trigger an alarm that immediately gets the baker's attention. If this is unclear, just think of it as similar to the river stage of Frogger. Getting seven roaches to safety advances the game to a more difficult level. John Fraysee, who later co-authored the original CoCo's best flight simulator, presents this as an exhaustively detailed study of how to write a decent game in BASIC. Making it speed along (too fast, if you select the hardest of four starting skill levels) is 72 bytes of machine code that scrolls the playfield 25 times a second. Either you understand the impressiveness of that feat or you don't. Even though The Rainbow lasted another decade, there aren't many arcade games with that much BASIC comparable in quality.

Trailin' Tail (C-)
August 1983
Oh, good grief – I'm really including a snake game here? Yeah, in large part because this may be the only all-BASIC version I saw that's blazingly fast and a constantly evolving challenge. The "snake" in this case is a nuclear-powered land cruiser trying to collect power chips in a post-apocalyptic world. Your cruiser leaves behind a trail of nuclear waste, which of course is fatal. One novel touch is the trail doesn't entirely vanish – a few dots remain permanently scattered about. Collect enough power chips and you go to the next wave, getting a bonus based on time and the point value of the last chip collected. The program's speed-up is simple, but clever. Instead of moving one pixel at a time, you make increasingly large multi-pixel jumps. While this creates something of a grid-paper appearance in later waves, I never lost track of my vehicle or considered it a distraction. Also, radioactive barriers start appearing and increasing in number after wave nine. Programmer Mike Hall throws in all kinds of other welcome touches, including keyboard or joystick control (the latter offering eight-direction movement instead of four), and a Tempest-like option for starting at higher levels and receiving a corresponding point bonus.

Instrument Flight Simulator (C-)
August 1984
This probably gets bumped up or down a full grade depending on how you feel about the navigation portion of flight simulators. The display is just what the name says – an instrument panel with no window view – so the visual takeoffs and landings that make this genre so popular are absent. But William Franklin crams an impressive amount of realistic aviation into this 32K all-BASIC program, including the ability to create up to 26 stations with varying altitudes, runway headings and so on. Radio Shack punished CoCo gamers with fragile non-centering joysticks that rank among the worst controllers ever made, but they're a great fit for the yoke controls of a simulator like this.

Junkfood (D+)
November 1984
This port of Fast Food for the Atari 2600 (itself a relative of Kaboom) isn't great, but worth playing just to see one of the oddest graphics modes ever offered on any machine. The screen resolution is 64 horizontal by 192 vertical pixels, meaning each "dot" is an absurdly long and skinny horizontal line. The tradeoff was it offered eight colors instead of the two at the machine's highest resolution of 256X192. The goal is to eat fast foods as they zip across the screen, avoiding purple pickles. The player – a set of teeth – can also take refuge between the rows of food, but staying still for long will result in a fatal squirt from a mustard bottle. Programmer David Taylor does better than most with these quirky pixels visually, but in terms of gameplay it's a scaled-down effort with little long-term value.

Surface (C+)
April 1985
Maybe it was just my destiny to live in the North Pole (or at least in the town closest to it), since this simulation of a submarine expedition to the top of the world ate up far more hours than it probably should have. Part of the journey passes Spitsbergen, the island in the Norwegian Arctic I now call home, so of course its found its way onto my current-day playlist. A lot of the game, to be fair, is mundane in the way any flight or other navigation simulation is. You cruise north under the ice, using a few different screens to make sure you're going in the right direction and deep enough to avoid the underside of the bergs. The controls for ballast, steering, etc. are simple, but impressively realistic and responsive (aided by a few machine language routines to speed up the mostly BASIC program). If there's no ice above you can surface and take a look through the periscope, but until you're at the Pole all this does is give you a look at some severely pixilated icebergs. You have to be at exactly 90 degrees north and find an area clear of ice (you may have to circle around for a while and wait for it to shift) to surface and win the game. The whole thing takes maybe 30 minutes to an hour, which seems reasonable since presumably you're not playing this for a quick arcade fix. Charles Springer, the author and a frequent Rainbow contributor, won the magazine's second annual simulation contest for this entry.

Zonx (C-)
October 1985
Not particularly original or enduring, but a huge hit among CoCo fans for an unusual reason: the gotta-play-this-on-LSD soundtrack. The CoCo had some of the worst sound capabilities of any computer of the '80s, making anything beyond a few beeps and blips an accomplishment. The idea of continuous music was absurd and practically impossible since generating sound eats up the computer's entire processing cycle. But David Billen rises to the task, and not just with any music. The psychedelic rock crashes into the title screen like an anvil and builds itself up to some incredible (and incredibly high-pitched) tension during gameplay. Most people will find it interesting – or at least worthy of study – once. After that it's serious "love it or hate it" territory. The game? Oh, yes. The game. It's a simple three-stage vertical space scroller. You move a ship along the bottom of the screen during which you 1) try to catch Zonx's coming down rapidly at you for points, 2) avoid Zug's raining down that will destroy your ship and 3) face both at the same time. Strictly on those merits it's good for a couple of games. But if you play more than once then audio obviously hasn't driven you insane, so maybe it's worth a few more tries.

The CoCo Zone (B)
April 1986
I played dozens, if not hundreds, of adventures and this prison escape thriller is among maybe ten I finished without resorting to hints or cheating. You find yourself in a prison cell, framed for a murder you didn't commit, only to find yourself receiving a mysterious note from a guard one day. This fairly mundane setup develops into a compelling story, especially given the memory limits of early computers, and the graphics are first-rate commercial quality. The plot twists thrown at you feel like part of the narrative rather than pointless punishment to make things harder. Unlike a lot of adventures where you hope to avoid the grave, successful completion here means literally burying yourself alive. I don't remember typing in endless commands trying to guess the "right" word for a situation or feeling like I was unfairly killed merely for entering a room for the first time. Actually, there is one such situation - an arcade-like challenge in a room you must cross with lasers firing at random locations and intervals. The only way out is moving fast and hoping randomness doesn't coincide with where you are. One other flaw occurs toward the end, when the program takes a good 30 seconds or so to draw certain locations from scratch, presumably because there wasn't room for any more pre-rendered scenes. The first time it builds up tension, but if you have to leave and come back a few times it really gets irritating. But having come as far as I did, there was no way I was going to give up my final quest.

Advanced Star Trench Warfare (D-)
July 1986
Ugh. This 3D space shooter is not only highly acclaimed, but also sold for $18.95 as a commercial product during the early CoCo days. In some ways it's similar to Star Strike for the Intellivision – a crap game that gets a lot of love because it looks like the Death Star trench scene from Star Wars (note: the Intellivision game is vastly superior). Here's the ASTW gameplay: Spaceships appear at random on a 3X3 grid and the player must shoot them by aiming a laser with similarly limited movement. The alien "blips" to 10 different locations before killing the player. Thing is, it does so so fast the game is just a random crapshoot where you have to hope the alien pops up wherever your crosshairs happen to be. A minor bit of strategy is you can't just fire continuously hoping for a random hit, since you have a limited energy supply during each three-minute wave. I have played a large number of space shooters on a colorless, soundless 1K ZX81 more entertaining and complex than this. But hey, it's got that scrolling space trench. In fairness, this is actually an exceptionally impressive demonstration of how programmers could use the CoCo's quirky graphics capabilities to write decent hi-res programs in BASIC. The CoCo could store up to eight "quarter-slices" of the screen, four of which are displayed at any given time (the concept is similar to drawing pictures in a notebook and flipping the pages). Any of the "slices" ("pages" is the technical term) can be swapped with a simple command, so programmer Fred Scerbo drew two trench scenes and flips them continuously on the third section of the screen. I eventually found a great use for this technique, writing a very crude MacPaint-like program where page flipping allowed for scrolling and undo options (cursed be the like-minded programmer who beat me to The Rainbow with his submission). A simpler version of this was published in the November 1982 issue of The Rainbow.