Space Vegetables
Alternative title: The Space Vegetable Corps
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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In this 2D action game player assumes the role of a maintenance engineer, who was deployed by mistake on the desolate planet on the outer rim of the universe. It is the year 2040 A.D. and humanity is turning the planets and moons into a series of huge hydroponic greenhouses. Because the protagonist is out of money, his only goal is to pay his way home by taking the worst job in the galaxy, enlisting himself into the ranks of the Space Vegetable Corps.

Players move the protagonist wearing a spacesuit on the moon surface, protecting the vegetables growing in domes, shooting the alien forms, and collecting certain vegetables to reach a quota set for a day on a moon. There are three moons (Phobos, Diemos and Riscos) to complete. The characters wears a jetpack that allows him to fly. Flying aliens sometimes want to steal a dome. These aliens have to be eliminated, but sometimes the dome breaks if the creature is killed too high above the surface. Certain creatures release oxygen after dying, and it can be collected to refill the spacesuit's reserve. Vegetables grow inside the dome in a cyclical manner and they need to be collected when they have a sufficient height. When the quota is reached, another day with a new quota begins until the character is transfered to the next moon. When all domes with vegetables are destroyed or when the oxygen is exhausted, the game is over. Top 10 galactic gardeners are stored in hi-scores table

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(From GTW64) :

Not the most original game here... a blatant clone of the classic "Star Paws", where you control a space man who has to protect his crop of vegetables from a mass of alien lifeform.

No space turkeys to chase, but plenty of action and some vastly superior graphics than the Software Projects original.

Now this game was quite a mystery really. It first really popped up on a special Commodore Scene free games disk, with no details about it at all. The only distinguishable thing about the game and its existance, is the Adam Gilmore music, which is a dead giveaway (The style is easy to match to him).

Searching through the game's code actually reveils from the music credits, that this was for Microvalue, which was Flair's budget label at the time.

So what happened?... this game never was heard of back in the days of Zzap and Commodore Format, and no-one can own up to owning an original. The game itself does not even have any credits or linkage to Microvalue in anyway.

This game has been sneaked out, after not being released for unknown reasons. We recently found out that the game was to be published as a favour to Peter Johnson from Colin Courtney, so that he would produce other games for them. David Mowbray produced all the graphics after being asked for a favour by Colin to do so. 

After David completed the graphics and sent them back, that was the last he heard. (Read Creator Speaks for more)

It seems maybe it was a little too late for Flair to release the game, maybe the C64 scene was starting to fade too much. Well, it has been found that the game was indeed released, but in a very very limited form! Andreas has kindly contributed a scan of a compilation box which Microvalue released towards the end of its life. This contains the Space Vegetables Corp game, and is where probably the game was sneaked out from. 

It seems that the compilation was done just before Microvalue left the C64 market, and sold the compilation to get a small bit of money back. As a result, the game never got a proper full release.. and is very rare to find. Check out the scans which Andreas has kindly sent in, and a port of the archive disk.

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David Mowbray speaks about work on Space Vegetable Corps...

"I personally did the graphics for that one as a favour to Colin Courtney, the owner of Flair and MicroValue, as far as I know, that game was about to be published as a personal favour to its coder, Colin wanted that guy to do some other work, and publishing Veg was part of the deal. I cannot remember the guy’s name, but it was the same bloke that did the ST version of Wizball….

 I really only got a telephone call asking if I would tart up some graphics for a game they had, I got the source graphics via the mail, spent a day or so re-drawing them, and shot them off back to Flair, that was the last I hear about the project. 

Although at the time I was a coder, I also did a lot of game art and animation so I used to get given graphics to do a lot as I had full knowledge of what would work and what was impossible etc."
