Zapped to the Past podcast (C64)

[squirtle]

[Unofficial Who]

I may as well quickly cover MicroLeague Wrestling, a turn based wrestling game.

 

I can see the logic. Most fighting games are essentially games of rock, paper scissors and why not have a turn based game that tries to capture the drama of a WWF match? And in the magazines (and probably the back of the box) this looked pretty amazing for a home computer game in the days before affordable optical storage.

 

 

You can see the problem here already right? Being the C64 this is what you got.

 

 

And what you can't see from the screenshots is the raster line flickering at points, slow speed and the hiss of the crowd.

 

 

This is one of those games that should not have been down ported to the C64. Slow data transfer rates, muddy digitised graphics and what must be the result of a sloppy PAL to NTSC conversion makes for a poor experience. I think the medium score in Zzap is probably due to the novelty of digitised graphics at the time although Gordon Houghton saw right through that.

 

Now it's just a completely dated mess. Avoid.

[Unofficial Who]

Some things that should work just don't sometimes in practice. Take for instance racing games. The problem with overhead racing games on the C64 is the horizontal aspect of the monitor makes it difficult for racing games not to feel crowded.

 

Something like the excellent Le Mans by HAL get around it by creating a border keeping the vertical aspect.

 

 

Something that should work but doesn't is flipping the game on it's side like Grand Prix on the 2600.

 

 

There's just something about this viewpoint for car racing that doesn't sit well. Which makes little sense given for other genres like sideways scrolling shooters like R-Type this format is fine.

 

Road Warrior takes a leaf out of Activision's book and attempts to make a sideways scrolling Mad Max style racing and shooting game.

 

 

And it doesn't work. It feels pedestrian and dull and unlike Grand Prix all the cars and bikes come in from behind you on your left. Which makes sense from a plot perspective (you're being chased) but is pretty annoying from a gameplay point of view. For a car combat game it's a bit...pedestrian.

 

Take the advice of Lord Humongous if given the chance to play this.

 

[squirtle]

Both of those examples are bad because the cars are too big. Make them smaller and it can work fine.

[Unofficial Who]

On 26/01/2023 at 03:04, squirtle said:

Both of those examples are bad because the cars are too big. Make them smaller and it can work fine.

 

I'm struggling to think of a good example though. Anyone?

 

Anyway onto G.U.T.Z. This seems to be the curse of arcade conversions on the C64 where around the same time they're released they'll be a game released that's obviously inspired by said conversion, be technically better but end up losing the simple design that made the original so compelling. (Unless we're talking Druid, a game that took note from Gauntlet and made a much better game.)

 

G.U.T.Z. is surely inspired in part by Alien Syndrome. Being set inside a large creature they go straight for the biomechanical horror angle.

 

https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/956116-gutz-commodore-64-loading-screen.png

 

Meaty.

 

I first came across this in early 1991 when I found my first issue of Commodore Format (no 3) at random in a newsagent. This had a fantastic cover tape and I soon scoured the city and found issues 1 and 2 to add to my collection. For the next few years being dirt poor this magazine and Zzap pretty much saw me through until I had enough of an income to buy budget Playstation games.

 

You can read about the contents of the cover tape here https://commodoreformatarchive.com/power-pack-3-december-1990/

But you can imagine being skint and suddenly having this to play along with Split Personalities and demos of Badlands, Spider-Man and Midnight Resistance...it was a good month.

 

However the other games and demos got a lot more play than this. I mean it's technically impressive.

 

 

Big bold sprites, decent (if repetitive) backdrop and super smooth. And that music. Actually not that music. The two pieces in the game loop very quickly and if you make the mistake of playing with music instead of sound effects you will be punished. On the CF page they describe it like so

 

Quote

but most people remember it for the looped, thumping and some might say utterly irritating soundtrack.

 

It looks better than Alien Syndrome. It's smoother. It's about as hard. But it's not better, it's a case of more is less. It's sprawling with much larger maps than Alien Syndrome. But it feels too sprawling and as with the case of a lot of C64 games the respawn rate is too high. Even with almost infinite free time when I got it I put it aside quickly. I do wonder what a C64 version of Alien Syndrome would have been like using this code. But as it is it suffers as many a C64 game did at the time. I get the feeling if playtesting using people unfamiliar with the game and a bit more development time would have led to something special but back in those days they were luxuries extended to few developers.

 

If you play this you might want to play it with infinite lives, you definitely want to play it with music off.

 

Oh and be warned, cheekily if you get to the end instead of the usual "Congrats" text message instead 

Spoiler

you're given a text box to input your own end of game congrats text.

 

[Unofficial Who]

I always had a suspicion that Mask 3 Venom Strikes Back got a good score because it was half decent compared to Mask 2, a disaster of a game.

 

But I've always been drawn to wanting to play it because of the big bold colourful graphics that looked distinctly un C64 like.

 

 

Again this suffers the same issues as many C64 games from this era. You are absolutely beset by bad guys, they literally fall like rain. It's not fun and I gave up after failing a jump again and again and falling into the ocean.

 

 

I knew I must of been missing something and so I looked up a longplay and the only longplays I could find were six minutes long. Curiousity getting the better of me I watched one and...yes. There's literally six minutes of content in this game which would explain why the difficulty is ramped up to 11. I know a lot of C64 games are short, Antiriad can be solved in less than ten minutes once you know the critical path but at least Antiriad feels fair and is fun. It's rather telling in the longplay I viewed of Mask 3 the winning strategy appeared to be racing through and just taking the hits, pausing only to deal with larger enemies. It's a pity, this feels like another game that could have been great had more time been spent on level design.

 

It also doesn't feel like Mask, I reckon this was originally a Future Knight game that had been repurposed.

 

 

[squirtle]

1 hour ago, Unofficial Who said:

 

I'm struggling to think of a good example though. Anyone?

 

It's not all sidescrolling, but Micro Machines spring to mind.

 

[squirtle]

Excitebike as well, although not top down and therefore BMX Kidz.

[Unofficial Who]

On 27/01/2023 at 01:55, squirtle said:

Excitebike as well, although not top down and therefore BMX Kidz.

 

That's a good example. The perspective change shouldn't make a difference but it does!

 

[squirtle]

3 minutes ago, Unofficial Who said:

 

That's a good example. The perspective change shouldn't make a difference but it does!

 

Exactly. 

[Unofficial Who]

Another also ran Gothik is yet another Gauntlet clone which purports to be a sequel to Druid.

 

In terms of look and feel it reminds me of Ranarama although not as good. Yet again a case of the field being so competitive by 1988 that you really need to be special if you're cloning something. This isn't bad, it just feels dull and derivative.

 

 

Worth booting up once though to witness some of the cleanest speech sampling on the C64. How did they get "Welcome to Gothik!" to sound so crisp?

[Unofficial Who]

It's weird the assumptions one makes due to screenshots and descriptions. With Northstar I'd always assumed that this Gremlin game involving a super soldier with a grappling hook arm would play a bit like Bionic Commando.

 

But it doesn't. The arm allows you to poke to the left, right and above you. In practice this feels like Green Beret reskinned to look like Exolon. And you have a Mario Bros style inertial skid. I found it way too hard and again it just made me want to play Green Beret instead. Another game that's ultra hard hiding that it's only five minutes long. I guess the challenge is becoming good enough to make the five minute run. Again this feels like an also ran and one that Zzap was incredibly kind in it's review.

[Unofficial Who]

Last but certainly not least is the not arcade conversion Target Renegade.

 

I've always wondered about these home only pseudo sequels. Did Taito get any credit or royalties for this game? Or was it a weird sort of trading on the previous licence loophole? Retro Gamer has the answer.

 

https://www.retrogamer.net/retro_games80/the-making-of-target-renegade/

 

Quote

Mike was a fan of Technos’ arcade half-sequel to Renegade, and drew on its prowess when updating his original conversion. “Rather cleverly, Ocean had written the rights to make a sequel to Renegade into the original licensing contract. Renegade had been very well received and Ocean wanted to cash in. It got a copy of the arcade Double Dragon game and we all got to work."

 

So while the game licence was derived from Renegade the inspiration was drawn from Double Dragon, the licence that Ocean missed out on. (Ocean would eventually release a cart only version that was so obscure I missed out on buying it cheap several times thinking it was the Melbourne House version.)

 

Anyway talking of inspiration check out the cover blurb from the back cover also used in ad copy at the time.

 

 

Is this the only C64 game with a connection to Sting?

 

I bought this back in the day and played it again recently and my thoughts are somewhat divided. So I'm going to split them S E Hinton style.

 

That Was Then.

 

Double Dragon was in 1988 one of the hottest games in the arcade. However the C64 version would be so bad that the manual actually contained a sort of apology by the developers. At the time (and arguably for the life of the system) Target Renegade was the best Double Dragon style game for the C64. While missing out on a Sizzler the review in Zzap was positive and I bought it at full price. I wasn't disappointed although the loading screen did give me pause.

 

 

The game itself was fantastic. A spartan title screen with some moody music I started the game in the parking garage and....well have a look. I think the sprite work holds up well.

 

 

You take on wave after wave of bikers in this level and when you kick them off their bikes they hit the dirt as the bike tumbles off screen. The "angry eyes" status window predates Wolfenstein by a good few years. (Is this the first example?) While only two enemies can be on screen at once letting them flank you can result in one holding you while the other pummels you. You can grab a baseball bat here and if you have sound effects on you get a satisfying metallic ping.

 

 

The second level has you fighting "ladies of the night" who can if unguarded kick you in the balls while the pimps are armed with both a gun for long range and a cane for close range.

 

 

The third level set in a moody park has you fighting skinheads, with the smaller ones proving to be a problem as your normal punches can swing over their head leaving you open to a retaliatory headbutt.

 

 

After a quick load the forth level sees you fighting against the "Beasty" (sic from manual) boys and their dogs that are as much mouth as body.

 

 

And the last level sees you fighting bouncers through an English pub. At the end you face off against Mr Big before a quick load takes you to an animated end sequence.

 

Back in the day I loved this. I really wanted a Double Dragon style game to play at home and this delivered. Brilliant sprite work with loads of character, a choice of meaty (if sparse) sound effects or moody music. It took a great deal of practice to get good enough to finish the game but once I was good enough I finished it over and over. Sure, it was one player only but I didn't have many friends at the time and this just meant this was a game balanced for one person to complete. Probably the best example of this genre on the C64 and my pick of the podcast! I'm with @squirtle on this. Cracking stuff.

 

But what's this. Storm clouds on the horizon?

 

This is now.

 

Of course what I found fantastic back when I was a teen is not so now. And time has not been kind to this game.

 

Graham, the other host of the podcast wasn't so keen on this and it's hard to argue his points.

 

The game by modern standards is very repetitive. Part of this is down to technical issues, with the sprite overlays used to give the sprites extra definition you can only have two enemies on screen at once. (And only one when you're facing off against someone on a bike.) The background scale is off as well being a little too tall. This is especially apparent in the park with the massive park benches.

 

And Graham is also right when he says the levels lack variety and go on for far too long. Every level you are attacked by one or two characters from a roster of up to two a level.

 

@Swainywould probably never forgive me if I didn't mention the Spectrum version that allowed two players and had more enemies on screen. Although for me that's a little academic. The Spectrum here was an import only machine so going to a mates house to play a superior version of the game was a non starter.

 

 

A lot of these games from the 80's have dated poorly in other ways, a lot of them being about a white dude hitting the bad end of town and punching a lot of stereotypes. Target Renegade is a little novel in that all the characters are white (or a ruddy shade of pink) again probably due to palette restrictions. Having said that the "ladies of the night" are less the dominatrixes that you find in these games and look more like average women on a night out on the town so punching them until they sink to their knees is...well....it looks a lot less entertaining to me in adulthood.

 

And while this might be the best example of this genre on the C64 it doesn't hold up to the best on other formats. And it loses a lot of what made Double Dragon special. You only have weapons that you can pick up on level one. You lose throwable objects and environmental hazards. Part of the fun of Double Dragon isn't the fighting, it's moving into a space to take advantage of the environment so you can quickly kick someone down a hole or onto a conveyor belt. The levels here are pretty but they're also very flat.

 

I think this is the best that could be done on the C64. It's worth revisiting to marvel at the animation and appreciate the chip tunes. But any fan of the genre won't find anything here that hasn't been done and better on other systems.

 

I loved this game back in the day. But like a friend once said to me, that was then, this is now.

[merman]

On 26/01/2023 at 17:02, Unofficial Who said:

Another also ran Gothik is yet another Gauntlet clone which purports to be a sequel to Druid.

 

In terms of look and feel it reminds me of Ranarama although not as good. Yet again a case of the field being so competitive by 1988 that you really need to be special if you're cloning something. This isn't bad, it just feels dull and derivative.

 

 

Worth booting up once though to witness some of the cleanest speech sampling on the C64. How did they get "Welcome to Gothik!" to sound so crisp?

 

In Gothik you are trying to find the bones of Hasrinaax, the player character from Druid/Druid II: Enlightenment. The original Druid was then remade/reworked as Warlock: The Avenger.

As for samples, it’s down to the sample rate and playback routine. There are some amazing demos using more complex techniques, but this one in Gothik definitely sounds like an 8-bit sample where many are 4-bit.

[Monkeyspill]

12 hours ago, Unofficial Who said:

 

 

After a quick load the forth level sees you fighting against the "Beasty" (sic from manual) boys and their dogs that are as much mouth as body.

 I never got past this level. At the time, I was convinced the time limit was too short like that level with the stairs on Robocop.

[Unofficial Who]

17 minutes ago, Monkeyspill said:

 I never got past this level. At the time, I was convinced the time limit was too short like that level with the stairs on Robocop.

 

It was doable, I managed it on a store bought copy without using pokes but you had to be ultra aggressive in moving forward. Mind you I played this a lot before I got good enough to do it.

[squirtle]

3 hours ago, Monkeyspill said:

 I never got past this level. At the time, I was convinced the time limit was too short like that level with the stairs on Robocop.

Yeah, I could complete it back in the day without cheats.

[squirtle]

14 hours ago, merman said:

 

In Gothik you are trying to find the bones of Hasrinaax, the player character from Druid/Druid II: Enlightenment. The original Druid was then remade/reworked as Warlock: The Avenger.

As for samples, it’s down to the sample rate and playback routine. There are some amazing demos using more complex techniques, but this one in Gothik definitely sounds like an 8-bit sample where many are 4-bit.

I tweeted at Dene Carter about this and he was pretty vociferous in tone about having nothing to do with this.

[Unofficial Who]

A new episode has dropped and this covers one of the greats.

 

https://zappedtothepast.com/

 

-The Great Giana Sisters

 

Oh yeah right. These were also covered.

 

-Trigger Happy

-Wizard Warz

-Deluxe Monopoly

-Tangent

-Skate Crazy

-Thrust II

-Roadwars

[Unofficial Who]

The Great Giana Sisters

 

So this game is...look, let's not beat around the bush. This is a clone of Super Mario Brothers. The developers were given a NES by their boss and a copy of Super Mario Brothers and asked to make a home computer version and that's what they did. They made changes in order to try and avoid the ire of Nintendo and it went unnoticed for a few months. But in the end there's two things you just don't do when making games.

 

You don't copy a Nintendo game.

 

And you certainly don't then advertise it with taglines like "The Brothers are History!"

 

I've always suspected that Nintendo were leading Ocean on a bit "hey, licence some of our old games and we might let you convert the crown jewel." (Given Ocean's version of Mario Bros everyone might have dodged a bullet there.)

 

At the time this came out I really wanted to play a Super Mario Bros style game. But I was never going to buy a NES (too expensive and too primitive compared to the Amiga I wanted to buy.) I'd sort of hoped in vain that Nintendo would let someone port it to home computers but they knew what they had. If you wanted Mario from now on you needed a NES.

 

And of course this was removed from store shelves right after release in the UK. Australian release? Not a chance.

 

However this was all over the place "on the scene" and by 1989 I had a copy. And I loved it.

 

 

This was as close to Mario as I would get for almost a decade. It had character with the sisters looking sort of like chibi Cyndi Laupers. It had fantastic SID tunes that I still love to this very day. Is it as good as Mario? Not at all. It's way too floaty and it has far less variety across the 32 levels included. But it bought back to the C64 that careful Nintendo style design. This felt like it had been playtested and balanced perfectly. Well at least compared to platforming peers like Northstar and Mask 3.

 

It even had "secret hidden" bonus levels.

 

 

This isn't an original game in the slightest. It's the videogame version of McDowell's from Coming to America.

 

But almost as good is still pretty amazing when the original is out of reach. This is still one of my favourite games on the C64, in a way it spoiled me when I got around to playing the actual Super Mario Brothers. I just found Mario's movement different. I never finished it but I spent hours trying and I still fire it up every now and then.

 

In the years since there's been a few new versions of the game on other platforms the notable ones being the quite pretty Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams on PC

 

 

and believe it or not Giana Sisters DS. As in Nintendo DS.

 

 

These have had the level design and structure changed quite a bit, although the DS one still feels like a Mario knockoff but I guess there are so many around that Nintendo decided not to hold a grudge. Both of them have remixed versions of Chris Hülsbeck's original music.

 

It goes without saying this is my pick of this week's selection.

[merman]

On 28/01/2023 at 10:24, squirtle said:

I tweeted at Dene Carter about this and he was pretty vociferous in tone about having nothing to do with this.

 

He didn’t - this was Firebird doing its own thing, programmed by Gavin Raeburn.

[squirtle]

1 hour ago, merman said:

 

He didn’t - this was Firebird doing its own thing, programmed by Gavin Raeburn.

Well, the weird thing is it's a conversion from the Amstrad version which was made by the guy who converted Druid to the Amstrad. It's all very strange.

[Unofficial Who]

I've forgotten a lot of reviews of crap games over the decades but the one for Trigger Happy stuck out at the time. Having played this...everything is wrong with this game.

 

 

The perspective is weird. You are side on, the level appears to be viewed from above. You can't move and shoot at the same time. You're just a massive target. This is bad.

 

I guess the reason this stuck out was that CRL used to make good games. I've posited this before but I'm sure what happened here was that they were stick in a death spiral, with every new release selling less they had less time to come out with the next game. This would have made a poor budget game let alone one going for full price.

 

Avoid.

 

Also as a side note Commodore User gave this 7/10! That had to be a misprint. But it's a reason I started to follow CU less and less (until they started doing cover mounts and some pretty attractive Amiga coverage.)

[Unofficial Who]

May as well cover Wizard Warz while I'm here. I didn't play it for this episode as I'd already suffered played it back in 1991 when it was given away on a Zzap cover tape. It was even more confusing with condensed instructions and even with infinite time I found it confusing and poorly designed.

 

 

If I remember rightly doesn't the sphere of your vision shrink as you lose energy? Great music though by Ben Daglish.

 

Weirdly enough I think of this game every time I play the not crap HyperRogue due to the circular play space.

 

 

 

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I'm skipping Deluxe Monopoly like I did back in the day.

 

I loathe the game and a bare bones computer variant doesn't interest me at all.

 

[squirtle]

You shall not pass go then, and no £200 for you!

[Unofficial Who]

10 minutes ago, squirtle said:

You shall not pass go then, and no £200 for you!

 

If not passing GO means skipping the upcoming Laser Tag I'm good with that.

[squirtle]

Someone just pointed this out on Twitter.

 

 

Double N...

[Unofficial Who]

On 01/02/2023 at 09:39, squirtle said:

Someone just pointed this out on Twitter.

 

 

Double N...

 

I bet not many noticed back in the day because who had a boxed copy of it?

 

Anyway, to go off on a Tangent, the next game was so average that the reviews made no impact on me at all and I forgot it existed seconds after reading the reviews.

 

 

It's a two way scrolling shooter and you can tell it was made by demo coders. There is a lot of smooth parallax scrolling backgrounds and aliens moving in smooth sine waves.

 

But it's very average, the bullets seem to make no impact until suddenly you're dead. With some tweeking this could have been special but it's very average.

 

There is one thing to be said though, as a budget release this was loads better than Trigger Happy at full price, head and shoulders above.

[Unofficial Who]

I always wanted to play Skate Crazy but it never crossed my path and it never ended up cover mounted unlike many (worse) Gremlin games. Why? I think because the main character sprite looked so good, someone at Gremlin had sussed out what Ocean was doing to give their sprites extra definition.

 

 

Playing it now, it's ok. In a way this is proto Tony Hawk's with you needing to gain points to succeed. The addition of random obstacles as mentioned in the podcast is annoying, and it speaks to a lack of confidence maybe that the game could stand on it's own. I am hopeless at this and can't get off the first level. Maybe some of you will do better?

 

But that's not all. On side two there's a separate game which I just couldn't get into at all. It's like Kikstart but with waggling.

 

 

I can understand why the reviewers like the first part. It's a neat (if ultra hard) take on 720. I didn't stick with this long but I think that's more down to it not being my thing than it not being good.