Best/Worst of the 64 -- your list?

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 7:55 pm

game that belongs on the "best of C64" list:
Marble Madness

game that belongs on the "worst arcade ports" list:
Marble Madness

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:19 pm

Flack wrote:Sounds vaguely familiar, but I can place it -- I'll have to put it on my trial list.

Two other "bad" ones I'm writing up are Transformers and Aztec.

Is Aztec the same for the 64, as it was for the Apple II? I remember being fascinated with it for the Apple. A neighbor had a copy of it and while I didn't have an Apple, all the schools did, and so did computer camp during the summer.

So I asked him for a copy. It was the first time I ever asked someone to WAREZ something for me. I had to give him the blank disk.

It took weeks and he didn't get round to doing it. He finally claimed to have done so, and gave me the disk. It did not run Aztec. I asked, "huh?" and he said, "Oh." He showed me a section of the 5.25" disk, near the label, where the glue was not completely holding a flap down. It was, I should say, nowhere near the magnetic media contained in the floppy disk itself.

"That's why it didn't copy," he said. We were like 10 or so, and it would be like the last stretch of time in my life where average people knew more about computers than I did. Now I know that he either didn't bother to copy it, or fucked it up somehow.

Anyway! I was fascinated with Aztec because it had animation, and looked like the bomb to a small child with no computer of his own. I'll post a vid and try to find the C64 version. Note! Even if it is a direct port, I can see how shitty it is. I was only consumed with it because it was literally the best-lookign computer game I'd ever played before, in my life.

[youtube][/youtube]

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:22 pm

OK, I just found a video for something called "Aztec Challenge" for the Commodore, and yes, it looked terrible.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:26 pm

ALSO! I was always jealous that I had nothing that would play Little Computer People.

Maybe it wasn't that good?

[youtube][/youtube]

Look, this - this changes everything. GATO was a good C64 game, right? Right?! As was Wasteland? Kinda freaking out over here!

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 9:44 pm

Little computer people was pretty good, probably not as good as the hype.

I'm still trying to find this one C64 game I had nicked from my father. It was set in space and you flew around to different space stations and there was SOMETHING in the game that was "adult" and so my dad didn't want me playing it. Of course, for this reason alone I thought it was the best game ever. I know this could be a million different games and isn't very descriptive, and it's entirely possible that the game actually sucked and the only reason I liked it was that it was taboo and off limits. Maybe I should just look through a list of titles for C64 and maybe one will ring a bell.

Same with Police Quest, I started playing it at my aunt and uncle's house in Poughkeepsie (on an IBM, though) and got it snatched away from me so quick because THIS GAME IS FOR ADULTS ONLY!!!!!! I think I was actually punished for playing it. So of course I thought it was the coolest thing ever, until I was old enough to play it for real and found out it kind of sucks.

Can't mess with Leisure Suit Larry, though.

Other great C64 games: The ninja one. Karateka maybe? muthafuckin ARCHON!!!!!!

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 9:54 pm

There's one thing I didn't mention in my Transformers review that the video reminded me of. Your Autobots start out behind specific garag... er, defensa-pods, so when you pick a character the game scrolls to that spot. It's no big deal in the video, but in the game you can fly for fucking miles and then when you die and pick another character, the game scrolls back (in real time) to that character's starting point. Earlier it took like 30 seconds for the game to get back. Also, I don't know why that guy on YouTube didn't have any sound. Mine has lots of sound. It has some music, and some lasers, but mostly the sound of me exploding. So sad.

Aztec Challenge was a shithole of a game too, but I was actually referring to Aztec, the one you played on the Apple. I first played it on the Apple as well and it was pretty fun, but I remember it using a lot of keys. I dug up the instructions and this is what I found:

W Walk in direction
R Run in direction
J Jump in direction (must be walking / running already)
C Climb. eg. climb stairs
S Stand still / stand up from crouch, or
spin around if in fight mode.
A Move left (in walking, running, etc mode)
D Move right (in walking, running, etc mode)
O Open Chest, search piles of rubbish
L Look in chest
G Crouch down, pressing G multiple times makes you crawl in
direction.
T Get items from chest
Z Inventory
P Place dynamite (P doesn't work - how ??)
F Fight Mode (press W, R, etc to get out of fight mode)
Machette is automatically drawn (if you have it)
G Draw gun (when in fight mode) if you have one.
M Point gun / machette down.
Space Bar Shoot gun
L Lunge with Machette / shoot with gun
(ESC) Help screen
(also allows)
(R) Return to play
(S) Save this game
(Q) Quit

So to walk left, you hit A (for left) and then W to walk. To start running, you'll hit R. This makes it sound like a text adventure but if you watched the video, it's not. You're having to do this real time in an action game. If the people who wrote Aztec wrote Donkey Kong, this could be the controls.

A - Face Left
D - Face Right
W - Walk the direction you are facing.
R - Run the direction you are facing.
U - Face Up
D - Face Down
C - Climb a ladder the direction you are facing.
J - Jump the direction you are facing
H - Use hammer
S - Stop using hammer

Sheesh.

Little Computer People is the shit. It's like The Sims, but not lame. Every single LCP was randomly generated and had a unique name and color combination. Mine was named Ogden. Every now and then at work I will throw LCP up in full screen and use it as a screen saver.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 9:57 pm

Richard Petty's Talladega was as good as a racing game could be at the time.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 10:04 pm

Jack Straw wrote: I'm still trying to find this one C64 game I had nicked from my father. It was set in space and you flew around to different space stations and there was SOMETHING in the game that was "adult" and so my dad didn't want me playing it. Of course, for this reason alone I thought it was the best game ever.

Found it.

The game in question is ... PARALLAX!!!!!!!

and it's going on the "good" list until I can fire up an emulator and check it out again. Of course I'll update you if it in fact sucks but just looking at the screens makes me all tingly inside so I doubt it.

Friday the 13th kinda really sucked for C64. Boring, long, slow, not scary at all.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 10:16 pm

Hahah, for some reason I thought Aztec was controlled with a joystick, but yeah... thinking back, I don't think I ever played an Apple II game with a joystick, since schools would have considered them... not so good.

There was a thread on the other forum I run that was initially a request for games that could be played with one hand, as the original poster just had a baby, and would game it at night with his kid on him. (Awww!) It quickly became a game where people posted unsuitable suggestions. I think mine were Ultima 3 and Police 911 (I think that's the game you play in the motion-sensing cage?).

But Aztec is clearly another one. I can't believe there's a specific key to put a weapon down in a video game. I'm gonna go back through my old text games and make sure they don't have that functionality. Video games are about murdering people, people! If you can EVEN call Aztecs "people."

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 10:25 pm

Jack Straw wrote:
Jack Straw wrote: I'm still trying to find this one C64 game I had nicked from my father. It was set in space and you flew around to different space stations and there was SOMETHING in the game that was "adult" and so my dad didn't want me playing it. Of course, for this reason alone I thought it was the best game ever.
Found it.

The game in question is ... PARALLAX!!!!!!!

What was the "adult" part of it? I'm gonna guess that flying a futuristic space jet and committing homicide against thousands of enemy combatants in cold blood wasn't the adult part. More likely it's a single nippixel after, like, board 33?

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 10:40 pm

Hah, likely not.

It might have been a drug reference in game (and we all know just how well shielding me from drugs has worked, I'm the poster child for D.A.R.E.)

but more likely it was simply profanity in the demo/intro sequence that the guys who cracked it put in. It doesn't really get any more ironic than that.

My pops was part of a C64 warez group. Every week or two they'd get together, hook all their c64's together and frantically (as frantically as a 1541 drive can copy) warez the shit out of each other's disk boxes. Almost every game I ever played for the c64 had a crack group's intro that loaded first before the game. I only made a distinction that games weren't supposed to be like that till later, when I got my NES. I just thought it was a flashy intro like you see before movies, the video game version of the MGM lion.

LOAD *,8,1 BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 8:53 am

Jack, have you read my book? It's almost 200 pages of stories about pirating Commodore games. If nothing else you should buy a copy for your dad and then read it before you give it to him for Christmas.

For your space game I was thinking either PSI-5 Trading Company, Elite or Starflight. I never would have come up with Parallax, which of course was named for parallax scrolling (two layers scrolling at different rates to give a 3D effect).

I really want to include Friday the 13th because I love that game so much in a sick, twisted way. I really don't know whether to put it on the good list or the bad list.

(Digging ... digging ... here it is. I posted it on review-o-matic.com a while back.)

Friday the 13th
C64, Dormark (1985)

I can still remember the night I got Friday the 13th for my Commodore 64. My friends and I were big fans of all the big 80s horror icons such as Jason (Friday the 13th), Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street), and Michael Myers (Halloween). The thought of playing a videogame based off of one of those movies at that time was both exciting and a little scary for us younginâ€™s. Fortunately for our young minds, the scariest thing about Friday the 13th for the Commodore 64 was the actual gameplay.

Players begin the game as one of ten kids stuck at Camp Crystal Lake, Jasonâ€™s stomping grounds. Unfortunately for you, one of the kids isnâ€™t a kid at all; itâ€™s Jason in disguise (gasp). Your mission is always the same â€” find Jason and kill him before he kills all your friends and comes after you. To do this youâ€™ll need a weapon. Fortunately for you someone has littered a dozen or so weapons including chainsaws, daggers, pitchforks and axes around the Crystal Lake campgrounds for the children to use.

The gameâ€™s screen is divided into halves. The top half shows the area youâ€™re in. The bottom shows you useful information. Of course your score and current weapon are listed, but there are a few other items of use to you here. On the left is your â€œScare-O-Meterâ€. The more scared you are, the higher your hair stands up on your head (seriously). Next to that is your health meter, measured graphically with a barbell. To the right of that is the creepy Jason Face-O-Meter. (I donâ€™t know if these things really have names or not; these are simply what I call them.) Jasonâ€™s Face-O-Meter slowly fills in each time he kills. Iâ€™m pretty sure this represents how close he is to winning. On the right is your roster of friends. Those who have taken an axe to the face or a chainsaw to the gut are replaced with cute little tombstones.

What a great place to drop your kids off for the summer!

The game field consists of about a five by five matrix of screens. Youâ€™ll pass the church, a field, the cottage, another field or two, and then the church, field, and cottage again. There are three buildings you can enter: the church, the barn, and the cabin. Logically, the game plays a lot like Superman for the Atari 2600, except the playing field is much smaller. Thereâ€™s no way to actually get lost in this game â€” not that youâ€™re going anywhere specific, mind you. Your goal is to wander around, looking for Jason who is disguised as one of the other kids.

So, how do you find Jason? The easiest way is to start attacking the other kids. When Jason is hit, the graphic will change from the kidâ€™s disguise to Jason (who looks like a regular person wearing a black jumpsuit). Many of the other children are so are wimpy that once youâ€™ve hit them in the head two or three times with your weapon of choice, YOU kill them instead of Jason! Oh well. The game ends when either Jason kills all the other kids, or you. The round ends when you kill Jason. Each round is basically identical, except you alternate between two different playable kids which look different but play the same.

To throw some shock value into the game, occasionally when you stumble across a corpse the game will randomly flash a gruesome picture on the screen for about 2-3 seconds, along with a (badly) digitized scream. It seems to happen about once every ten to twenty corpses. The first time you see them they can catch you off guard, but after that they just kind of make you laugh. I spend more time trying to get these come up than anything else in the game.

Friday the 13th includes some fun musical tunes. Depending on where you are in the game, the songs will change from Teddy Bearâ€™s Picnic to Old Macdonald to other classics. They all relate to where you are, and are funny if you get the jokes. For example, the lyrics to Teddy Bear Picnic go, â€œIf you go out in the woods today/Youâ€™re sure of a big surprise/If you go out in the woods today/Youâ€™d better go in disguise.â€ Of course the songs donâ€™t have lyrics in the game, so you kind of have to know them to get the jokes. In general the songs are so upbeat and happy you would never know you are playing a horror game. Thereâ€™s something weird about stabbing a dude while Old Macdonald plays in the background.

Every time I pull out my old Commodore, this is one of the games I play. Itâ€™s got fun music, fun graphics, and allows you to throw hatchets at small children. Friday the 13th isnâ€™t hard to learn how to play or master, but itâ€™s mindless fun and always reminds me of the good olâ€™ days. For such a silly game, youâ€™ll yourself playing Friday the 13th longer and more often than you probably should.

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 3:02 pm

I know this is starting to sound like 'name that C64 game but there was a pretty GOOD game. I'll be darned if I can remember the name of it. There was a cardboard keyboard layover because there were so many keys you needed to use.

It was a first person perspective spaceship/ airplane flying game.

Jonsey, it was in that pile of manuals I sent you a while back.

You could plug in two joysticks and use the second one for additional controls or you could use the headset. It was basically just a sound activated switch. The earpiece was just a cushion. You could fire the ships guns by saying any loud word or even by puffing air into the mike. It was advanced enough for me to play it for a week or two. Then I was bored.

now I must search.

Found it...

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 6:12 pm

The voice-activated fire button was called a Lipstik. I have one sitting out in the garage, if you want one.

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 6:59 pm

Oh, god no. I tossed out all my C64 stuff a year after I got my first PC. Right around the time I downloaded an emulator and all the games I could stand.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 2:20 pm

Flack wrote:Jack, have you read my book? It's almost 200 pages of stories about pirating Commodore games. If nothing else you should buy a copy for your dad and then read it before you give it to him for Christmas.

link please, will buy

Flack · Post by **Flack** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 7:46 pm

http://www.robohara.com/Commodork

(Didn't mean to turn this thread into a book plug ... it just came out. Sorry.)

Kids are going to bed in about fifteen minutes ... I think I'm going to bust out a review of Aztec tonight.

AArdvark · Post by **AArdvark** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 8:16 pm

Look for my check. Anyone that can make me regret that I bagged and tagged all my C64 hardware (salvation army) Can have my money anyday.

THE
FIVE DISK DRIVES
AND TWO CONSOLES
PLUS HUNDREDS OF GAMES
AND A LIPSTIK
AARDVARK

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 11:07 pm

EXCELLENT! I hope all you guys feel free to plug your projects as much as humanly possible. I love it.

Jack Straw · Post by **Jack Straw** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 4:30 am

Flack wrote:http://www.robohara.com/Commodork

I'll grab it in 2 weeks give or take, when Microsoft live/bing cashback deposits my RWARDS@@!! in my paypal account. I can't think of a better use for it.