Zapped to the Past podcast (C64)

[Unofficial Who]

I've spoken before about how jealous I was of Spectrum owners having access to the amazing looking Knight Lore. But reading C&VG back in the day also made me jealous of Amstrad owners who had access to some amazing looking French titles. And the one that really stuck out at the time was Get Dexter!

 

 

OK, it looks a bit rubbish now but in 1986 this looked amazing.

 

I did get my hands on Head Over Heels for the C64 eventually which seemed like an acceptable stand in for Knight Lore (I found out years later it was better.) And when I saw the reviews for Inside Outing for the C64 I assumed that this would be a good stand in for Get Dexter! Sadly as mentioned before I didn't see hint of it in the stores or through friends so tonight was the first time I got to play it.

 

 

And....well I can tell it's a title I would have poured hours into in 1988. Probably with some cheat codes. But now....there are so many better options.

 

 

Don't get me wrong, this is really impressive for the C64. It moves along at a fair pace. As mentioned in the podcast the fly in the ointment is the then mandatory pests that just hassle you and stop you from the joy of exploring. (Which weirdly reminded me of some of the issues I had with both Control and Tunic last year until I used options to turn down that annoyance.) I think Paul Woake's Mercenary in this respect in comparison was quite forward thinking at the time removing (mostly) the combat and leaving you to explore in peace. This however is influenced by David Crane's "shark factor" design philosophy. It's death by bird or rodent and being in Australia if I want that I can just leave the front door open.

 

I really wanted to like it and in a way games like this offered a glimpse into the future of games where the environment itself could be interesting and tell a story. It's a pity they didn't have the confidence to add a rodent/budgie free mode. (The US version apparently gave you three lives at least.) 

 

In a way this feels like a demake of something like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. I'm sure those who played this at the time found it compelling. I think anyone new to it will find it garish and frustrating.

[Unofficial Who]

I've talked about dithering before and how it looks crap on modern screens because of the rendering method. But with the aptly titled Bad Cat it's just bad. We're going to see a bit of this with 16 bit digitised images poorly downported.

 

 

So. Let's go through the events.

 

First up is a walk in the park which is anything but. Jump over some water. Some walls. And then get on a ball.

 

 

Then...actually no. This game can go do one. It's awful. And after trying and failing over and over I decided not to play it anymore. Good if out of place music. Some of the ugliest graphics on the C64. And...no. Nope. It's reviewed on the same page as MASK Two (Two Two Two Two) and it's just as good. 

 

Nope. No.

[Unofficial Who]

I had some very fond memories of the C64 version of Flying Shark or at least I should say Flying Shark Playable Demo Slightly Difficult Version that was published on the second cover mounted tape I ever got, the "Cool Spool" on the cover of Commodore Format.

 

It struck me as a solid and chunky 1942 style vertical shooter with decent graphics and sound. Not sure why I never bought it back in the day. I mean it even had animated water? So what was the deal?

 

 

This is the deal. Bullets. You can't see them. They blend in completely with the backdrop. Add to that the design which has every bullet coming right at you the only way to survive is to make huge sweeping motions with your plane. And there isn't a lot of space to move. It's too hard. Way too hard.

 

I tried again using cheats just to see what level 2 looked like.

 

 

Nope. Even with cheats it's just too hard to play. You need to know where every single enemy is to appear and take them out before they inch onto the screen. Otherwise...

 

 

This is a shame. But wait. There is another. In the US "Sky Shark" was released. A completely different version with a soundtrack by Tim Follin!

 

 

It doesn't look as good but there's more room to move. You even get continues which....you guessed it are needed because it has the same design issue. Fast, accurate and plentiful enemy bullets. But at least you can see the bullets here.

 

I suspect the issue might be the game they were trying to convert, rock hard might be good for coin fall at the arcade but someone who's paid a tenner for a home game is going to want more of a fighting chance than someone who's dropped in 20 pence in the arcade. In this case the demo version I played was a fair representation of what I would have ever seen in the full version.

 

 

[squirtle]

I really should have tried Sky Shark for the podcast. It's way better! You can hold the fire button down for one thing and the wave have the right amount of planes and the bullets are visible. So much better!

[Unofficial Who]

4 hours ago, squirtle said:

I really should have tried Sky Shark for the podcast. It's way better! You can hold the fire button down for one thing and the wave have the right amount of planes and the bullets are visible. So much better!

 

I got really good with the Flying Shark demo and assumed that the bullet visibility issue thing was going to be fixed in the final version. In the end the frosty reception from Zzap was the deciding factor and on playing it now I'm glad I didn't spent my hard earned on it then.

[Unofficial Who]

Last is the ugly looking Vengeance which reminded me a lot in look of other also ran vertical shooters like Hades Nebula. This isn't for me, there are so many other great vertical shooters on the C64 that this didn't get a look in back then and had no hope now.

 

 

Having said that it's interesting comparing this with Flying Shark which looks better and was better reviewed. Vengeance is the better game in that it doesn't instantly try to kill you. Still ugly though. Maybe I was put off by the light source being from the bottom left although flying away from rather into the sun makes more sense. Roll on next week!

 

[merman]

On 17/09/2022 at 02:53, Unofficial Who said:

Last is the ugly looking Vengeance which reminded me a lot in look of other also ran vertical shooters like Hades Nebula. This isn't for me, there are so many other great vertical shooters on the C64 that this didn't get a look in back then and had no hope now.

 

 

Having said that it's interesting comparing this with Flying Shark which looks better and was better reviewed. Vengeance is the better game in that it doesn't instantly try to kill you. Still ugly though. Maybe I was put off by the light source being from the bottom left although flying away from rather into the sun makes more sense. Roll on next week!

 

 

The intriguing feature with Vengeance is beaming aboard the enemy ships and searching for components.

[Unofficial Who]

14 hours ago, merman said:

 

The intriguing feature with Vengeance is beaming aboard the enemy ships and searching for components.

 

I have to admit I just didn't get that far. It felt like CRL was trying to innovate in this area but their main games had a certain feel for them when John Twiddy left that I just didn't get on with.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

This week on the podcast the games covered are

 

-Matchday 2

-Eye

-Bone Cruncher

-Out Run

-Firetrap

-Freddy Hardest

-Through the Trap Door

-Gary Lineker’s Superstar Soccer

 

Available at https://zappedtothepast.com/

 

One surprisingly solid game there, an inevitable disappointment and a bit of a mix otherwise.

[Unofficial Who]

I'm led to believe that Matchday 2 was a bit of a big deal on the Spectrum and the Amstrad, those platforms needing something to match the mighty International Soccer on the C64. International Soccer was a pretty early killer app for the C64 and for a long time if you were a soccer fan you had to get a C64. I've never played those versions and I've never played this but I've always been interested due to the Ritman / Drummond duo responsible for Head Over Heels.

 

And the weird option screen is immediately recognisable as the same UI design as Head Over Heels.

 

 

I'm kind of partial to the sprite work here, I love me a chunky sprite.

 

 

But for me this just runs too....slowly. It reminds me of running a Gameboy emulator on the Amiga back in the day. Sure, technically the program was running it it felt like treacle and this does as well. I wonder if it's because the systems in the game were originally designed for the Z80 and the C64 just can't keep up. I can't see the appeal of this at all but it's probably worth noting that I have played International Soccer to death and for me it's one of two kick abouts I rate on the C64. Not for me but I'm not a football purist.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I remember elements of the press being pretty snarky about Eye back in the day, snapped up by Prism who were probably worried they'd miss out on the next Trivial Pursuit or Rubik's Cube.

 

 

I mean this looks good right?

 

 

Oh. Images from Board Game Geek which is where I went to try get some illumination on how this game was to be played. https://boardgamegeek.com/image/157915/eye

 

The rules summary.

 

Quote

Players attempt to capture colors on a board by having their pieces occupy matching colored spaces on the board. The board is made up of two rotating overlays over a six colored board layout. There are always four spaces of each color showing. The player gains movement points according to how many spaces of one type they occupy; each movement point may be used to move a piece one place, or rotate an overlay one step. Players may be eliminated by having their chosen color occupied by another player. Winner is either last man standing, or the player who occupies a set number of spaces, depending on starting number of players.

 

Spoiler, I couldn't get my head around it and the lack of a one player mode put me off fiddling with it for too long.

 

 

It did take me back to a time in the late 80's and early 90's where I felt somewhat lucky to be short of cash. There were loads of board games which in retrospect seem to have been all packaging and not much game and have long since faded into obscurity.

[squirtle]

No, it does not look good. It looks like an idea cooked up on copious amounts of weed.

[squirtle]

I enjoyed Match Day 2. Once you get used to the speed, it feels more like a football game than International Soccer, and therefore more satisfying when you put good moves together.

[Unofficial Who]

Just now, squirtle said:

No, it does not look good. It looks like an idea cooked up on copious amounts of weed.

 

There were loads of these games back in the day that were reliant on really complicated moving pieces and rulesets. Ignoring that the most successful games and toys at the time were simple at their heart. Trivial Pursuit is trivia crossed with Ludo. A Rubik's cube might look complex but the rules (match all the colours) and the movement of the pieces were easy.

 

Eye is very much of it's time.

[merman]

Match Day II’s slowness is partly down to how it was coded. Jon Ritman had an incredibly long phone call with programmer John Darnell, who was tasked with converting it to C64. Much of the central logic was directly translated, and because of the C64’s slower processor and the complexities of scrolling the screen and handling sprite priorities, it ended up running very slow - particularly the calculations for the “Diamond Deflection System” designed to make the ball bounce around more realistically. Ritman would go on to spend a lot of time working with another programmer, Colin Porch, on how to convert Head over Heels from Z80 to 6510 code.

[Unofficial Who]

30 minutes ago, merman said:

Match Day II’s slowness is partly down to how it was coded. Jon Ritman had an incredibly long phone call with programmer John Darnell, who was tasked with converting it to C64. Much of the central logic was directly translated, and because of the C64’s slower processor and the complexities of scrolling the screen and handling sprite priorities, it ended up running very slow - particularly the calculations for the “Diamond Deflection System” designed to make the ball bounce around more realistically. Ritman would go on to spend a lot of time working with another programmer, Colin Porch, on how to convert Head over Heels from Z80 to 6510 code.

 

I think Colin Porch went on to port Head Over Heels to other 6502 and 68000 formats as a result.

[Unofficial Who]

Bone Cruncher. Another BBC style Boulderdash clone. I ignored it in 1988. And I tried it once when it was on a cover mount of Commodore Format in 1994 at a stage where I was buying it more out of habit than anything. I played it once. Ugly looking thing. And then never again.

 

 

But I thought I should give it a fair shake before dismissing it so I loaded it up tonight and to my surprise spent a good half hour with it! After reading the guide over at https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BoneCruncher and listening to the podcast I found it a lot easier to understand. It's not as zoomed in as Repton, not as obscure as Xor and while not as good as Boulderdash it has some things going for it.

 

 

30 years later I found the main sprite rather charming in a Fungus the Bogeyman sort of way. And it has a neat password feature so you don't need to keep returning to the first level every time. This didn't have a chance in 1994 when I only had room for one computer being out at a time (and that was going to be the Amiga.) It's a pity though and I think I might even return to this one and make a serious effort at trying to complete this down the track. Not a bad little game at all.

 

Although the victory screen whenever you get soap to a goblin can look a bit dodge.

 

 

 

[merman]

22 hours ago, Unofficial Who said:

 

I think Colin Porch went on to port Head Over Heels to other 6502 and 68000 formats as a result.

 

Indeed, he did the Atari ST version.

[Unofficial Who]

OutRun is timeless for those of us between the ages of 40-50 and it's a digital distillation of what endless summers in the 80's seemed to promise to kids and teens at the time who were too young to be exposed to real life pressures. Surely being an adult was all about spending the weekend cruising  in a red sportscar with your partner while listening to some electronic music. This Sega coin-op was a cultural tour-de-force, raising the bar for other racing games at the time and setting Sega up as the kings of he arcade. It's cultural force is still felt now with the look and sound arguably creating a resurgence decades later in regards to look and sound.

 

And it really did pop in the arcade. When you played this you could pretend for a few minutes that you were driving a sports car.

 

 

The C64 version got some mixed reviews at the time with Zzap being the most generous but I remember being really disappointed with what I saw in the magazines. And the push by US Gold (they put the soundtrack to OutRun and 720 on a cassette on the cover of C&VG) had the effect of actually putting me off getting the game despite loving the arcade game.

 

Months later a friend loaned me her pirate copy of Skate Rock. And as one did with pirate tapes I loaded again after the game to see if there were any other surprises on there. And this appeared.

 

 

I wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth and I loaded it up and played it on and off for weeks.

 

 

Sure the sports car looked like a bath. Sure the hair of the blonde was now brunette. Sure it wasn't as good as Pitstop or Buggy Boy. And sure it wasn't good enough to fill in being able to pretend for a few minutes that you were driving a sports car. But it was good enough to pretend you were playing the game that allowed you to pretend for a few minutes that you were driving a sports car. If you know what I mean.

 

And for the time it pulled off some neat tricks like this tunnel effect.

 

 

I guess I didn't have to deal with the disappointment some of my peers had buying this and expecting a scaled down but near perfect version of the arcade game. Around this time it felt like programmers were starting to hit the walls of the C64s limits. Some of my friends had issues with this, I'd been here before and was starting to eye off the Amiga. I mean I was a little miffed that it lost the forks but....how many C64 racing games were able to implement that? I can't think of one that did it without switching to a map screen. (The Great American Cross Country Road Race is the only one that comes to mind.)

 

From what I've seen this was the best version out there of this game until Sega started porting it to their own consoles. I mean even the Amiga version was rough.

 

 

Given the constraints of time, lack of resources and well...I've mentioned this before but that this conversion rested on the shoulders of two people, one of whom was 17 at the time this is about as good as you could get. The C64 would see far far worse conversions down the track.

 

And for those who haven't read the story of the making of the C64 version check out the Eurogamer article here at https://www.eurogamer.net/the-boy-behind-the-biggest-coin-op-conversion-of-the-80s

 

I'm still amazed just how exploitative the UK scene seemed to be compared to the US and Japanese (and even Australian) scene was.

 

In the podcast it's mentioned that there was a US version released and with two extra programmers on board and disk access as standard some of the graphics were tidied up and extra features added.

 

 

 

 

 

Weirdly enough I don't think I like this version as much. The raster line road appears at times to move at a different rate to the roadside objects and while the woman has her hair restored it's at the expense of both of them looking a little jaundiced.

 

Would I play either of these versions now? Not when a great enhanced port of the arcade game is available on the Switch, it makes these and all the other home ports redundant.

 

Still I reckon it's a decent port and I think only two other people on the C64 could have done a better job.

[Unofficial Who]

Back in 1990 I was desperate to get my hands on Spindizzy. The upside, a friend of mine was willing to sell it. The downside, he was only willing to sell it in with a bundle with Comic Bakery and FireTrap. Back catalogues and digital downloads were non existent back then, if you missed out on a title at retail you missed out or had to find a pirate copy or someone that would be willing to part company with their copy.

 

Eventually one Sunday afternoon out of boredom I fired it up.

 

 

The title screen looked ok. But the game itself looked a little rubbish. But I played a little and a little turned into a lot. It's a pretty solid arcade game.

 

FireTrap appears to be inspired by an earlier coin op called Crazy Climber, a climbing game which involved using two joysticks (one for each hand). It's a challenging game mainly due to the odd novel control method.

 

 

The arcade game uses a similar control scheme, changes the viewpoint so you can see and access two faces of the building and allows you to shoot at objects. Again it has the one stick for each hand control scheme and this might be partly why it was so rare back in the day. I never saw either of these in the local arcade.

 

 

The C64 version does away with the control scheme. Everything is mapped to one stick so you can climb in four directions just by moving the stick. This changes the game making it less clumsy but more accessible from the start. Due to the screen being horizontal you can see all of the building at once. The aim is simple, reach the top of the building without being burned or hit by falling objects to rescue the important woman at the top. You can also collect items and rescue other women and good doggos on the way.

 

 

There are some tricks to how the game plays. Hitting falling objects with your water cannon will always push them to the outside of the building which means that if the object is big like a car or a piano and you're on their outside it might be wise to avoid shooting at them. Jetpacks are useful at the lower end of the building but grab one too close to the top and you'll overshoot the top of the building (and be called a Wally.)

 

And once you make it to the top to rescue the damsel in distress you jetpack your way down earning bonus points for shooting flames.

 

 

And that's it. Rinse and repeat with each building having more gaps and obstacles.

 

This is a great conversion, in my opinion it plays better than the arcade game it was based on. It's the very definition of a solid 7/10 game for the time. It's simple but somewhat compulsive until you get tired of the gameplay loop. Unlike Crazy Climber it's never been converted to anything other than the C64, Amstrad and Spectrum. While it was obviously influenced by disaster movies from the 70's like Towering Inferno post 2001 it's unlikely to get ported again as it might be seen as tasteless now.

 

It's my pick of the episode though, better than the arcade and long forgotten, it's worth checking out if only to rescue those little doggos!

 

[squirtle]

Yeah, had no idea what to expect with this and was very pleasantly surprised with it. It is annoying that fires can spawn where you are, but aside from that, this is a fun and solid conversion.

[merman]

I didn’t discover Fire Trap till years later, I prefer the C64 to the arcade because of the simpler controls. It’s fun but not the greatest game.

[Unofficial Who]

Just returning to Lifeforce for a moment, while doing some research on Freddy Hardest I discovered I had played and own Lifeforce courtesy of the November 1993 issue of Commodore Format. That I couldn't even remember playing the game let alone owning it probably says a lot about the impact it had on me.

 

As for Freddy Hardest, a game described here https://commodoreformatarchive.com/issue-review-cf-38-november-1993/ as "dreadful" like Army Moves and Game Over it looks great but it's just hateful to play. The first screen looks great with a neat animated sequence showing you crashing into the planet.

 

 

But I defy anyone to get more than a screen or two past this point.

 

 

It's just a game that hates you, every time I tried jumping over a pit or onto a floating platform odds on an enemy would spawn where I was about to land. This isn't Dark Souls hard. This is difficulty where you need luck on your side. Avoid.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

Mind you if you're skilled enough it can be completed in 12 minutes!

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I always liked the idea behind The Trap Door, at least in the reviews it looked like a neat idea. Through the Trap Door in the magazine reviews looked like a rather poor sequel turning into the same sort of exploratory arcade adventure that had been done to death. Playing it today showed me the reviews were right on the money. It's slow, gloomy and clumsy. With so many other games of this type on the C64 this just can't compete. It also retains the same issue as previous Don Priestley games on the C64, it's just too slow. These large characters work on the Z80 machines in part due to how they address the screen and again while they've managed to make it work here it's in expense to speed.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I'm not going to cover Gary Lineker’s Superstar Soccer, didn't play it back in the day and it sounds like it's not really my sort of football game now. Anyone else play this and have anything to add?

 

[Unofficial Who]

There's four games that aren't covered in this months podcast, all text adventures. I've had experience with three of them.

 

Deja Vu was ground breaking back in the day for it's use of icons in a text adventure  with items being their own "folders" or windows you can open and close. The C64 version is a technical marvel but that slow disk drive, the use of a joystick instead of a mouse and a lot of use of "Commodore Brown" makes this a version to avoid given the many other options available.

 

 

There is a version on Steam which has ports of the Mac version (which I played back in the day)

 

 

and the Apple 2GS version.

 

 

Either of these are better alternatives than the C64 version now.

[Unofficial Who]

I bought Rigel's Revenge on release. A text adventure where you play as a war correspondent in a future civil war.

 

 

I can't find too many screenshots unfortunately. There were limited but well drawn high res graphics, usually used to draw clues when you examined objects (like a door handle with a trip wire tied around it.) It had a rather unique atmosphere with the player being tasked to survive a ruined city dealing with everything from booby traps to slef aware bombs that needed to be talked out of exploding. I never finished it (like with most text adventures) but I gave it a red hot try.

[Unofficial Who]

Jack the Ripper was seen as being a bit in bad taste at the time and I think time hasn't lessened that. CRL were pushing for their horror text adventures to get an 18 certificate and this is the one that got it.

 

My flatmate had this along with the other games in the series and I only played this one the once. The player accidently kills a woman and must somehow prove that they aren't Jack the Ripper. Written by the mysterious St Bride's reform school for adults (that's a whole other story) the selling point is digitised photos of Jack's victims you come across.

 

[Unofficial Who]

And the last, not one I played but worth noting Jeffrey Archer: Not a Penny More, not a Penny Less - The Computer Game

 

A game for Tories?

 

 

Thrilling stuff! This subject matter would be handled a lot better years later in the port of Corruption from the Amiga.

 

Just an odd choice for a game all round.

 

edit. Bloody hell, the ad copy on the back of the box!