LOAD "SPACE TAXI",8,1

Space Taxi is easily one of the most memorable games on the Commodore 64. Virtually everyone had it, virtually everyone loved it. Space Taxi combines great controls with simple gameplay and inventive level design to make one of the best games for the Commodore.

The concept of the game is simple. Fly around the level in your taxi, pick up fares and drop them off at their destinations, all the while fighting gravity, navigating tight spaces, managing your fuel and dealing with the unique challenges each level presents. The faster you get your fares to their destination, the more points you get.

There are two real attractions to the game. First, moving the space taxi is fun. Using the thrusters to control your taxi has a very organic feel as opposed to the rigid, robotic movements of other games. The one and only thing you do throughout the entire game is fun on its own, but the level design pushes it over the cliff.

Space Taxi features top notch level design. Only the first few levels in the game are static, the remaining levels have shifting platforms, projectiles that can kill you, black holes and magnets that suck you in, wind, and even a level that randomly reassigns your controls. Playing the game on random mode (the levels you play are chosen at random) means you'll never know what to expect.

Space Taxi takes skill and practice. Not only do you need to learn how to delicately control the space taxi, but also learn the 24 levels in the game. While there is no 2-player mode, there is a multiplayer hot seat mode that will allow you to compete for the highest score.

The following video is about 7 minutes of gameplay. Three levels are shown:

• Turbo-charged Taxi. Your taxi is much faster than normal. Fine control movements are difficult, you have to use very short bursts of your thrusters. You also burn through your fuel extra-fast.
• Electroids. You have to navigate your way through electric fields. Match speed with the gaps and try to wait until they line up.
• Shift-o-Rama. Make your way through a screen full of moving shapes. I actually found this one most difficult because even though the shapes move predictably, they only move once every second or so, making it difficult to remember where you are and which way the shapes are going to move.

And of course you can't forget the speech in this game. Speech was something special on the Commodore. It was pretty difficult to do, especially since the sound chip couldn't do samples at all. Hearing the tiny speaker in your ancient TV spew "Pad four please!" was great. But listened to now it just sounds like someone scraping a microphone across the carpet.



If you want to play this awesome game for yourself, grab a copy of Vice and the disk image.

On the technical side, I switched from xvidcap and avidemux to just recordmydesktop. I wrote a little script to grab the position of the Vice window and record only that part. It only outputs Ogg Theora, but Youtube can import that just fine. It doesn't really work with any video editors I know of though, I'm working on that.

On that topic, if you know of any good video editors on Linux, I'd like your input. I have Cinelerra working, but the captures and encodings it makes are blurry and the sound is choppy. I'd really like to be able to make compilation videos, and I don't want to have to install Windows to do it.