Be Excellent To Each Other

A few more fondly remembered:

BC's Quest for Tires
B.C. II: Grog's Revenge
Crazy Comets
Dino Eggs
Frantic Freddie
Gunship
Hideous Bill and the Gi-Gants
High Noon
Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory
Paratroopers
P.O.D.
Raid on Bungeling Bay
Save New York
Space Taxi
Split Personalities
The Way of the Exploding Fist (IK+ is a better game, but this has so much charm)

And another set of decent arcade conversions:

Burger Time
Burnin' Rubber
Frogger
Mario Bros
Popeye
Qbert

Edit: Oops, I see P.O.D. was already mentioned up there in Craig Grannell's list. Oh well, it deserves to be mentioned twice.

Okay - for all this 64-love right now - would anyone be up for a "C64 challenge" season - about 5 or 6 weeks (since any longer and no-one other than me and Chinny play) - 5 or 6 'arcade style' games chosen from the various lists on here with a download bundled so anyone interested (who's running windows) could play ?

I'd be up for that.

Indeed. Especially since I've not had any time to organise anything proper of late.

I'd give it a pop. I loved my C64...

Fist was one of the last properly designed classic block-and-parry fighters. If only they'd made the leg sweep less realistic (and therefore less powerful). I still prefer the game to IK, though, if not IK+.

In. Except it must be played on a real C64

It should be a condition that if you own a C64 and the game in question, you must play it on the real machine.

To date I think I am the only person who has played any challenge game on the original hardware. And I think it was indeed a 64 game.

I never really got on with International Karate. IK+, though, and especially the Amiga version, is just a glorious game.

I'll mention Robocop, Last Ninja and Zamzara as games worth playing. That last one isn't easy to find online though

http://gamebase64.hardabasht.com/games/ ... 842_02.zip

From http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=8842&d=18&h=0

New thread is up viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7452

We had Bruce Lee in the 8 Bit Challenge vote once, possibly twice. Was surprised it never made the final cut.

One of the problems I think with Bruce Lee is that it only has 2 difficulty levels , the first time round everything is at one speed , the 2nd time round it speeds up , but it never changes after this.

It does mean if your good enough to go round twice its more an endurance test for how many times you go round (there are also the 5 extra lives you can pick up on your first time round).

My brother and I used to play it 2 player with the first time around Player 2 helping Bruce , and then the 2nd time battling to try and stop him (2nd time around the Green Yamo was twice as fast as Bruce).

It is a real classic though and if you've never played it then you should grab it and it definitely belongs in a thread like this for best C64 games.

I loved Bruce Lee, but I had it on the Atari 800XL. I think they were pretty much identical though

Now there's a remake waiting to happen. Bruce fights off the lawyers, software pirates and "snakes with tits".

Cept the Atari one was better :-)

I had the Atari first , although I did eventually get a 64 , and the 64 got so many more games / had better conversions of a lot of arcade titles there were a few games every so often which really stood out on the Atari.

Unfortunately this was not the norm and we did have to put up with a lot of shoddy stuff - the absolute worst was the Atari conversion of Green Beret which I remember buying brand new for about £10 on cassette from John Menzies on Argyle street and wondering if i could take it back afterwards :-(

We had a Speccy and I was never really interested in the C64, and have no nostalgic feelings towards it. However, thanks for this thread, MrC!

Al-fail-bet.

Huh?

Wait. MrD?!

HUH!?

Don't we have a MrC? What's going on?! ARGH!"

edit: I'm a proper belm.

We had a C64 back in the day and this is some of the stuff we liked / can remember from back then.

Pacmania
Terrys Big Adventure
Cuddly Cubert.
Jack The Nipper 2
Herberts Dummy run.
Kickstart 2 Especially the Construction editor.
Manic Miner.

It wasn't exactly smooth, and the input lag was stunningly horrible - but I still played it and played it and played it.

On the tracks with the worst slowdown you had to move the joystick about 3 hours before you actually wanted the car to turn.

When I played the Amiga version I nearly came in my pants.

It sounded like a dead chipmunk farting through a hedgehog. Even passed to a decent speaker system it had no bass, no decent drum effects, no synth effects, it was bloody horrible compared to the C64.



Well it couldn't do much in 16 colour mode IIRC, it certainly couldn't handle fast scrolling and lots of sprites in that mode, or if it could, no one seemed to code like that for it.

Single screen games like Dr Destructo looked really good though, I'll give it that.

Maybe it just suffered from dodgy Speccy ports since it had the same CPU, a lot of games I remember ran in crappy 4-colour mode and were clearly just using Spectrum sprites and stuff.

I'd like to mention;

The Last Ninja
The Last Ninja 2
The Last Ninja 3

And, um:

Myth
Tusker
Vengence

And, er, Hammerfist. Truth be told though Vengence was gash.

(FYI to the fella on the 2nd page - I'm sure Monty on the Run was squashed by a boot when you lost all your lives. Brilliant music too. One of my favourite C64 tunes.

Assuming you mean me, it wasn't a Monty game. I had a spectrum at the time and I'm fairly sure it wasn't something that was on the spectrum as well. Of course, I was probably about 8 or so at the time, so take everything I say with a pinch of salt (I'm not even sure it was a C64).

I remember it as being a single screen platformer that was like Manic Miner (that's the 8 year old me saying it was like Manic Miner, I can't really remember enough about it). All I remember was that one of the levels (for some reason I think it was the 4th one) had one of those plunger type things that killed you and it took up almost the whole of the right hand side of the screen, but you had to get past it, from the top to the bottom (or at least we thought you did, this kind of implies that you didn't die from falling from a great height and possibly that you could move while falling), but couldn't work out if you were supposed to fall under the plunger while it was above you, or fall alongside it.

I think it's hard to overstate just how stunning these were back in the day, there are extensive videos of all of them on YouTube and even now the soundtrack gives me goosebumps (and I can still remember the paths to jump over the horrible stepping stones bits ).

I recall a chum of mine getting an Atari ST very early on in its life when I still had a C64 (probably 1987/88 I would think), and whilst the games certainly looked very pretty we were like, 'Why is the music so shit?' - yeah they could cheat with samples to an extent, but there was no getting away from that fucking abysmal YM sound chip.

Defender of the Crown on the C64 had higher fidelity music than the Atari ST version.

I stuck with my C64 for quite some time and then went to an Amiga, because it too had epic sounds and music, indeed the best Amiga music absolutely stands up today in its own right.

As for Myth, bit of a dodgy game in some regards but you could almost forgive it because it looked and sounded so gorgeous.

Honourable mention must go to 'Dominator' - by System3 of The Last Ninja fame.

A four stage shooter which alternated between vertically and horizontally scrolling stages, with a multi-load for each stage.

Looked and sounded absolutely wonderful, and was a fantastic game too, but fuck me it was brutally, relentlessly difficult, and when you lost all your lives you just went back to the start, as was the fashion of the time. You simply had to learn every single stage, it was almost 'Delta-esque' in that regard.

I got a proper boxed copy from a market down in Chelmsford, (I spent a few years living with my mum down in Essex when I was a teenager), for what I thought was an incredible price of £2.99 (it was £9.99 in the shops).

After weeks of play I finally got to the end of the third stage, and I realised he must have got a job-lot of reject tapes on the cheap, because the fourth stage wouldn't load! I took it back and he gave me another copy, exactly the same problem, went back the next week (he was only at the market on Saturdays), he gave me another copy, same bastard problem. Fair does he let me keep the tape and gave me £2.99 off another game, but I never did get to see the fourth stage

To appreciate the majesty of the C64's SID chip, just listen to this from the 3 minute mark, and this was playing whilst it was loading the fucking game. Amazing stuff.



And the game itself:

You can add Sabre Wulf to the ever growing list. Loved that game.

Manchester United the game - first sports game I ever played. The sequel was better in many respects but bug ridden.

Also, Rockstar ate my Hamster, for no other reason that it was the one game that was as technically excellent as the Amiga version. And my mum tried to stop me playing it.

Swoon.



Cybernoid 1 and 2 were actually really good games on the Speccy too, but the C64 version brought an extra slickness and smoothness to the proceedings, and by golly, that soundtrack.

This was definitely one of the games that sounded better on the old C64 rather than the later C64C, apparently there was a physical difference between earlier and later SID chips. I noticed this back in the day, when my old Commodore 64 broke and it was replaced with a Commodore 64C, and I was horrified to find that quite a lot of music and sound was worse on the newer computer.

The dudes were actually using a manufacturing defect in the chip to squeeze out a 'free' extra channel and effects!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID

Huelsbeck's version of the R-Type soundtrack often sounds better than the arcade stuff. Love the st6 and st7 themes.

While you guys have been gallivanting through your memories, I've been familiarising myself with Word Wobbler.




I can't wait! Shift run-stop aaaaand PLAY!

26 seconds later.


The tape is working.


Doot de doot. Solid blue screen. No crazy loading lines. No sound whatsoever.

2 minutes and 30 seconds later.


Hm? It's loaded. Um... RUN?


The tapes started up again, so it's still loading. Or it didn't load correctly at all and it's just messing about now.

Four minutes later.


Still loading. The tape stops, the caption goes up about 20, then the tape starts again.

Two minutes later.


I was expecting it to be a percentage... it's still going. It's at 500 now.

Five minutes and ten seconds later.


1500 now.

One minute later.


That's reassuring.

Three minutes and fifteen seconds later.


Great. It's finished loading, and now it's... loading.

AND THEN!


"Do you want to see the instructions?"

HOORAY! It took eighteen minutes and seven seconds from the time I pressed Play to the time it asked me if I wanted instructions. I filmed it. Is that some kind of record?

My name is 'idiot' and I want 'Pretty easy' words. It's time to see what my patience has wrought.



You control the white silhouette with the C=, Shift, F3 and F7 keys and have to collect all the letters of the word in order. You're only shown the word at the beginning of the round and you have to remember it. You can show the word on screen, but it costs you points. The conveyor belts constantly move and can shift you and the snowman faces about. If you end up next to a snowman face or collect the wrong letter, you get booted down to the bottom of the screen and lose a life. Collect all the letters to win the round.

Sounds a bit like Jumping Jack, amarite? Could be pretty good...?

Jumping Jack is fun and amazing because everything is constantly moving! Evern getting knocked out isn't frustrating because it's too silly! Word Wobbler is not Jumping Jack.

In Word Wobbler, the game takes turns moving the player and the conveyors. It takes a couple of seconds to take a turn and you have to hold the button down during the transition in order to move. To collect the 'moustache', I'd have to go up (wait) left (wait) left (wait) left (wait) left (wait) and up. Assuming I'm not shoved about during the conveyors' turn, that'd take around a minute. In silence. (Well, it goes PINGPINGPINGPINGPING when I pick up a letter. Like 3D Hypermaths.) To collect the entire word takes several very, very long minutes.

Well done, Idiot! Next word coming up!

I tried it on the hardest difficulty, but I didn't notice any changes. It sure as hell didn't get any faster and I think 'moustache' is a pretty difficult word for difficulty 2/5.

Who made this game? How did they sit through all that loading while testing it? Did they show it to anyone? The only reasonable explanation is that the programmer had three hours to write a word game OR DIE, so he bashed it out in BASIC in two hours, typed in the word list for half an hour, saved it, and then leapt out the window, flew down the street and slam dunked the cassette in the postbox. And then he cried because he had to write a maths game as well. OR DIE.

Speaking of which, I don't have BMX Number Jump. OH NO.

This is what I'm playing while you're playing CRAP like Paradroid and Drelbs. Jealous?

Look at what your missing out on !



If you want to try your magic thingy the .TAP file is here : http://gamebase64.hardabasht.com/games/ ... 549_01.zip

I was looking forward to "Bathtime

Dirty Girl

Hogwash—and I say this as someone who played several versions of the game a few months ago for a Retro Gamer article. The C64 version was a triumph of programming, fast, pretty responsive and didn't have much obvious slowdown throughout the entire game (which I managed to complete through to division 2 on the superleague. The Amiga version was smoother and a little faster, but the C64 game was very good too.


These days, I prefer the C64 stuff to Amiga tunes. The C64 was essentially a (limited) synth, and you got sounds that didn't exist elsewhere. Tracks like Delta's in-game theme remain brilliant minimal takes on long-form synth music of the era. Amiga music was mostly a bunch of samples. Sometimes the author managed to transcend that 'limitation', by way of brilliant composition (Richard Joseph being my personal favourite composer of that time), but too much of it today to me sounds like terrible cut-together samples.


See: almost everything by System 3 and Thalamus. Lots of shiny. Lots less playability.

Which is pretty much what you see now - because the shiny is no longer the buzz it once was the games dont stand up anywhere near as well as others which had much more basic graphics but concentrated more on gameplay.

Games like TLN are still enjoyable now to someone who is looking at them fondly , however playing it last night you can see more of the flaws which you didnt notice the first time around because you were in awe of the shiny stuff (and although the music still amazes me i wonder if thats just because i remember being amazed by it the first time)

I remember playing the C64 stunt car racer but have not gone back to it (or the amiga one) as I think it would ruin the memories I have - I'm also struggling for examples but there were other games I enjoyed more on the C64 than the Amiga (the 'gold' box D&D games for one which played quicker on the C64 since it didnt have all the graphics overhead that you got on the Amiga - better game simply because of the limited graphics)

There must be a hi-def remake of Stunt Car Racer by now, surely?

TO THE GOOGLETRON!

If you have an ST emulator (SainT or such like), then download The Big Demo. Which is a basically a couple of hundred C64 soundtracks, selectable for you.

Chinny also linked a free C64 sid player a while back for the iphone

viewtopic.php?p=539995#p539995

Just load it up and search on any of the games mentioned in here

I did also have a quick rummage last night to find a free / small SID player and will chuck that in the download pack (although the only 2 SID files i grabbed yesterday were The Last Ninja and The Last V8)

The music is still great, and some of the graphic design remains fantastic, especially (for me) the second game. But I always considered the gameplay suspect. The fights were tedious and the platforming aspects didn't work terribly well in 3D. It was almost a proto-Tomb Raider, in terms of flaws, but at the time reminded me of the worst aspects of Jet Set Willy smashed into a fighter with only a fraction of the quality of Fist (or, later, IK+).


When writing the Retro Gamer piece, I still found Stunt Car Racer (Amiga) hugely enjoyable. The physics in the game is great—it feels 'solid', but there's a clear arcade sensibility to everything—and some of the track design is brilliant. I wouldn't return to the C64 version, despite its technical achievements, but only because a better version exists.


Most of the games converted from the former to the latter were superior, a classic example being Wizball. That was atrocious on the 16-bit platforms, but it still plays well on the C64.


If you find one that's not shit, let me know. I've never managed to source one, and most of the SCR-type games are nothing compared to the original.

Another vote for the classic-ness of SCR on the Amiga. I completed it, and the only flaw was one of the tracks on the last level (a bridge that raised/lowered automatically - which was totally out of keeping with the rest of the game. Some of the higher tracks really did induce a feeling of immense height that many other games have failed to do.

Amazed no-one has done a modern day SCR, although maybe Trackmania is similar in spirit if not execution.

Better on C64 than Amiga: Wizball*, Paradroid, Impossible Mission.



*They put fucking inertia on the ball. Idiots!

The real pity is that the SCR update for PC that Crammond himself was creating was canned. He describes it as the best game he never got to release.

I always keep hoping someone will rip off SCR and shove it on to iOS (or that the iAmiga guys will find who owns the rights and release the original as a standalone). There've been a couple of half-hearted attempts, but they've all been awful so far.

Agreed. It was closer to playing chess than racing a car, but it was bloody enjoyable all the same. I can actually remember the sense of vertigo, going off some of the jumps!

how's iamiga doing?

Defender of the Crown's imminent. I'm unsure how well it'll work (you use the iOS screen like a trackpad), but I'm somewhat hopeful. Proper iOS ports would be better though.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like the magic tape can load it. It's got a limit of about a minute before it gives up.

I could use Vice, but it's not the same!

Today, we meet the WARRIORS OF RAS (click images to make 'em big). Or is that Warriors of Ra's?

I've set up my camera to take pictures of the telly because it's fun!


Warrior of Ras, Volume One: DUNZHIN

Just the one Warrior in this game.


JYRYQ isn't a word. It's not even a made up word.


It's... a roguelike!

Took me a while before I could figure out how to move. Thankfully the game responds to HELP and shows a list of all the commands. Then I had to work out that it was MOVE EAST, not MOVE LEFT. M E works as well. Fancy.


When the room didn't appear, I assumed I'd somehow broken out of the confines of the dungeon.

1 ELF. I can't talk to it, I can't run from it, I have to attack it (HIT). I miss.


Uh oh.


Ow.



I tried again and the exact same thing happened with a zombie. I couldn't hit any part of it and it killed me.

Here's the manual that I don't have.

Time for the second of the Warriors of Ras. Flip the tape, let's go!


Looking kinda exactly the same as the first game there.

Oh... KAIV. Like 'cave'. Which would make... DUNZHIN... 'dungeon'.

Unlike DUNZHIN, you can buy provisions and equipment before entering the KAIV.


It's all academic because the first thing I saw was a glowing circle which I assumed was a magic ring to pick up. I walked on top of it, it hit me for 22 POINT(S) of damage and instantly killed me.

Smashing.

Luckily, I don't have to deal with this kind of crap. BEHOLD!



Write Your Own Fantasy Games For Your Microcomputer!



There's nothing quite like Usborne books. They gave me three of 'em!

I don't think I've ever seen scans of these books on the internet. I'd like to scan them, but I've yet to figure out a way to do that without tearing them apart. Does anybody know if these books have been scanned before?

Oh, that is a wonderful looking book.

I had that book!

I shudder to think what your "Fantasy Games" involved.