Zapped to the Past podcast (C64)

[Unofficial Who]

Star Wars:the Empire Strikes Back was the first Star Wars movie translated to a video game. Guess which part it covered? The Battle of Hoth of course which makes sense, it's the most video gamey part of the movie. I quite liked this game on the old 2600. I think it's fair to say Jeff minter was a fan as well.

 

 

In 1985 Atari released their vector follow up the the highly successful vector game Star Wars. And here three years after that we have the C64 port. Like the arcade game it's made up of four sections.

 

1: Probe Droids

 

 

In this section you have to take out as many probe droids as possible with your snowspeeder's lasers before they make their transmissions. You can shoot the transmissions out of the sky somehow but when four transmissions are successfully made it's on to the next section.

 

2:Battle of Hoth

 

 

AT-STs and AT-ATs are now walking towards the base. You have to take them out by shooting the red port to kill the crew. You can also use a limited supply of tow cables to take down AT-ATs. And if you're feeling like showing off you can earn bonus points by flying between the legs of the AT-ATs. Once too many get past you the order is made to evacuate.

 

3:Space Battle

 

 

Here you take your place in the gunner's chair of the Millennium Falcon and take out TIE fighters with a Star Destroyer lurking nearby. After taking down some TIE fighters you escape to the...

 

4. Asteroid Field.

 

 

Here you need to dodge some asteroids and....hang on....that's it?

 

I had access to this back in the day and despite loving a lot of 3D vector games at the time I didn't spend much time with this. For a start the C64 just isn't fast enough for the job. Here in level one the C64 struggles to show two scout droids at once without losing frames. The second stage is so taxing that they resort to only showing one walker on the screen at once. The third level moves at a decent pace but it's just a reskin of the first level in Star Wars and the last level is not only hit and miss it's also a really dull ending to the game.

 

Part of this is just down to the technology. Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back work in the arcade because of the speed but also because of the musical stings and voice clips. Here's a video of it in action to compare it to. (Beware, there's a lot of flickering in this video.)

 

 

I think the other issue to be honest is it's nowhere near as good as a game as the original Star Wars game. There's one extra stage but most of the good action is in level 2 after which the game drops off. In a way history would repeat itself later with Shadows of the Empire on the N64 where again the latter part of the game just couldn't live up to the Battle of Hoth.

 

 

So would I recommend this? No, it's a hamstrung port of an average game. But if I might bring things full circle may I recommend Star Wars:the Empire Strikes Back on the C64? The 2022 version?

 

 

In 2022 Megastyle released a port of the 2600 game for the C64. And it's not an ordinary port. No, this has more variety in your enemies and in level settings.

 

 

An excellent alternative.

[squirtle]

It surprises me that with 4 of us  having views on this, none of us mentioned the 2600 version, which I remember very fondly having had it on the 2600. I've yet to play the new version, but I'm sure if we go beyond the end of Zzap, we will look at it at some point.

[Unofficial Who]

Netherworld was another one that passed me by, I suspect that a lot of the late release Hewson games didn't make it to where I lived unless it was via covertape.

 

And it looked the business, the sprite and character work is tidy and the scrolling is super smooth. The music on the title screen is also pretty impressive using clean (for the C64) samples.

 

 

It doesn't feel like a Hewson game either, just like Octapolis, Jukka Tapanimäki's previous game it almost feels like a Thalamus title.

 

And it's just not for me. I've come to this way too late, back in 1988 I loved exploring 2D mazes, now 35 years later I need something more than just seeking diamonds in a claustrophobic maze, even with the draw of guiding around a floating martyred man on a spinning cross. Highly recommended though as the second best game of the episode.

[Unofficial Who]

If I had known Beach Buggy Simulator was actually more like Moon Patrol I would have been tempted to buy it back in the day.

 

And it is Moon Patrol crossed with Kikstart and it's....awful. Just awful. I has the issues that a lot of bad Moon Patrol clones have where it feels like some combinations of obstacles when approached with speed spells certain doom. Gordon in Zzap compared it to Ninja Scooter Simulator in that it's a bad clone of a good arcade game. Avoid this one.

 

 

[squirtle]

1 hour ago, Unofficial Who said:

If I had known Beach Buggy Simulator was actually more like Moon Patrol I would have been tempted to buy it back in the day.

 

And it is Moon Patrol crossed with Kikstart and it's....awful. Just awful. I has the issues that a lot of bad Moon Patrol clones have where it feels like some combinations of obstacles when approached with speed spells certain doom. Gordon in Zzap compared it to Ninja Scooter Simulator in that it's a bad clone of a good arcade game. Avoid this one.

 

 

You're not even in a beach buggy!

[carleton]

Congratulations on making it to 100 episodes! I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately so actually managed to listen to the episode. Quite liked the guest reviewer idea but as ever I’m confused about how few of the games I’ve actually played/heard of.

[Unofficial Who]

By the late 80's Atari's coin-op division had a house style. Bright attractive graphics, built in tutorials, synth sound and selectable difficulty levels. The brief for RoadBlasters appeared to be "do Spy Hunter in the style of Pole Position" and the market was wide open because Spy Hunter 2 looked like this...

 

 

Compare that to this.

 

Compared that to Atari's effort.

 

 

I really liked RoadBlasters in the arcade. It was loud and super smooth. But it was also pretty shallow and I gave up long before getting good enough to win that free t-shirt.

 

 

I avoided the home conversion back in the day. I had doubts that it would be any good given that it was a fairly shallow game. Without the speed, the futuristic steering handles, the sampled sound, the ultra high resolution monitors that Atari used would it be as compelling?

 

 

Short answer? No.

 

I think this was a good attempt. This would have been a task that would have been difficult for some of the best most experienced C64 coders and duties here fell to Dennis and Martin Webb, the father and son team. There's issues here. There's no engine sound which makes more of a difference than one might think (is it an electric car perhaps?) The speed appears to be rather slow and the horizontal colour bars move at a different rate to the roadside objects. The steering feels twitchy but the arcade machine felt a little twitchy and over sensitive too.

 

At the time Martin and Dennis were criticised for "ruining" what should of been a good conversion, the same way they'd "ruined" Outrun on the C64 (in retrospect, a decent conversion.) I don't think that's entirely fair, I think they did their best, the brief was too much for the C64 to handle. Sure, you could do a great version of Spy Hunter on the C64 and great racing games. But both combined together? I don't think that's as easy as it might seem and as we'll see in the next year or so others will try to do the same thing with a similar or worse result. I think apart from some improvement to the road routine this is about as good as you'd be able to achieve on the C64. This was the last game by Martin and Dennis with Martin leaving the industry behind after this. 

 

A good stab at a conversion that just was pushing the 8 bit machines too much with the only great version being the one on the 8/16 bit hybrid Atari Lynx.

 

 

 

 

 

[Eighthours]

On 07/03/2023 at 10:41, Unofficial Who said:

Last Ninja 2: Back With A Vengeance was a bit of an event. The original sold 750,000 copies on the C64. The sequel? According to Mark Cale  5.5 million copies were sold for the Commodore 64 version alone; at that time, the user base of the C64 was estimated at 20 million, meaning that one in four C64 owners bought the game.

 

I was one of those that bought the game.

 

 

The extra features for the standard edition was a little lame. An instruction book and a 3D "map".

 

 

Still this was the sequel to one of the finest arcade adventures on the C64 and like many movies at the time it took place in modern day times placing it among popular movies like He-Man and Highlander.

 

Rather than angry eyes for each loading screen each level had it's own little diorama in pixel form and a tune by Matt Grey.

 

 

And the tunes here are a departure from the original with a gritty driven harsh sound. (There are no sound effects.)

 

The opening is an interesting puzzle, You're trapped in a bandstand having transported from feudal Japan. How do you escape?

 

 

Setting fantasy movies in a modern urban setting was a bit of a way for movie companies to do things on the cheap as you didn't need to build things like furniture and other props from scratch. It's the opposite here though. With the Last Ninja you could get away with every screen having a couple of props. A rock. A bamboo glade. Some vases. Here though they've had to deal with object density while keeping the screens readable. At the time I thought they'd done incredibly well. Even in the first level there's loads of puzzles to solve and lots opportunities to miss objects. How do you open the gates to the gardens? Is there a point to going to the toilets and combining what you find within? How do you cross the river? Bees? Not the bees?

 

Everyone is hostile. Thugs obviously but policemen too wield swords and throw stars. And then there's the jugglers...

 

 

There's a fair few improvements over the original game. For a start there's only one length of jump now. Characters look better defined. I think the screen building is faster? And I loved this back in the day and I would happily spend a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon completing this. It was at the time a technical marvel.

 

What about now though? Well obviously it's dated badly. It's more obvious the sacrifices made to get the game to run (a large status border and it being a flick screen game.) Combat feels sticky as does movement, many was the time I found it difficult to turn around without dropping to my death. And don't get me started on picking things up. It maintains the weird "crouch like you've done your back and your trying to pick up your car keys" method. And the big difference this time, I attempted this in a way I didn't back in the day. Without a guide or FAQ at hand. And without that it really is trial and error. Some key objects blink when you enter a screen but not all will. Leaps of faith are required. And because of the odd way of interacting with objects you can do the right thing but be a couple of pixels off and think "well that obviously wasn't the solution" when all you need to do is crouch a little to the left. Or right.

 

Some of the screens are stunning for the C64 and in terms of mechanics this is the better game than The first Last Ninja. But it loses something in terms of the atmosphere of the original and long after I stopped playing this one I still go back and play the first every once in a while to soak in the surrounds and the Ben Daglish and Anthony Lees tunes.

 

It's worth messing around with faq in hand if you haven't played it before and loved the first and it's my pick of the bunch this week. But time has not been kind to this one.

It also originally came with a plastic shuriken star which had suckers on each point to stick it where you threw it! IIRC this quickly attracted the ire of parents in the likes of WHSmith, though, and the shurikens were quickly removed from copies of the game… which is probably why in your screenshot of the box there’s a hastily affixed alternative contents list. Peel that sticker off and you’d probably see the original list of the haul you got with the game, which included the shuriken. I managed to get one, luckily, as I was so hyped for the game (beyond anything that had ever come out previously!) that my Mum bought it for me on release day, before the outrage had taken hold.

[Unofficial Who]

For some reason despite having this issue of Zzap Knight Thyme (nice pun) passed me by with me convinced this didn't get a C64 port. After all it was originally released on the Spectrum 128K only. (A stripped down version was later released for the 48K Spectrum  and I assume the C64 version is a port of that.)

 

But despite admiring the cleverness of the interface at the time after playing both Spellbound and Stormbringer I felt that this series wasn't for me. So yesterday was the first time I'd try to play it.

 

 

Yes. That is colour clash on a C64.

 

I've never quite got the love the Magic Knight series has on the Spectrum in much the same way I never got into the Dizzy series. This one left me quite cold as well. Swing and a miss from my point of view.

[Unofficial Who]

15 hours ago, Eighthours said:

It also originally came with a plastic shuriken star which had suckers on each point to stick it where you threw it! IIRC this quickly attracted the ire of parents in the likes of WHSmith, though, and the shurikens were quickly removed from copies of the game… which is probably why in your screenshot of the box there’s a hastily affixed alternative contents list. Peel that sticker off and you’d probably see the original list of the haul you got with the game, which included the shuriken. I managed to get one, luckily, as I was so hyped for the game (beyond anything that had ever come out previously!) that my Mum bought it for me on release day, before the outrage had taken hold.

 

And what did you think of it? Did it live up to expectations?

[Unofficial Who]

There is an important game that was covered in this issue that didn't make the podcast. (I've got a preview into next week's offering.) Partly because it was hiding in the strategy section. But in part I suspect because it's so vast you could do a podcast just on this game alone. And it's a bit of a tough hang now requiring swapping of disks, a save disk and looking up a physical manual that contained text excerpts that could not fit onto the disks.

 

But it shouldn't be forgotten because it still exerts an influence on modern day RPG's. I speak of course of Wasteland.

 

 

I still remember this cover. I found a copy once in a store. Just once. By the time I got the $15AU together to buy it....it was gone. And I was gutted because this looked to be a combination of Ultima

 

 

with the combat system of The Bard's Tale

 

 

This was a stone cold classic. If you were there. I've tried to play this via emulators over the years and it was painful.

 

There are other ways to play this now if you're determined. The closest you can come to the original experience you can purchase the DOS version on modern platforms for cheap (mere cents during the current Steam sale.) It's not the way I'd recommend playing it but it's an option.

 

 

But if you want to play the original Wasteland with a more modern interface for a few dollars more you can buy Wasteland: Remastered. This has all the text included in game (even if you have to click on the journal entries) and a modern interface. It's probably the easiest way to play the old game even if some might not like the remastered graphics.

 

 

Why is this game so important? Well it's the spiritual predecessor to the Fallout series. And it's also in the last decade spawned Wasteland 2 and 3 which is almost an alternate computer game timeline where the move to first person gameplay never happened.

 

 

One could argue that Wasteland was more an important Apple 2 game with the C64 version being a port. It's still worth noting though, such an important title hiding in one of the more niche corners of the magazine.

 

Bonus, I suspect no-one here (including myself) is aware of the pseudo sequel Fountain of Dreams set in post apocalyptic Florida.

 

[Unofficial Who]

New episode is up https://zappedtothepast.com/

 

Games covered this week

 

-Slimey’s Mine

-European 5-A-Side

-Mickey Mouse

-Fernandez Must Die

-Battle Ships

-Kane II

-Sword Slayer

-Professional Snooker Simulator

-19 Part 1 : Boot Camp

 

My usual summaries might be delayed this week for a couple of days or until the end of the week since I'm in the early throes of my first run in with COVID.

[squirtle]

Get well soon, @Unofficial Who!

[Unofficial Who]

Thanks to some pretty strong anti-virals I'm somewhat feeling alive again. Alive enough to play some old C64 games. Slimey's Mine was one C64 game that passed me by at the time. I really wanted to get it due to the Zzap review but I just couldn't find it anywhere.

 

Well I gave it a quick go, or meant to since I'm a bit behind and, well two hours passed pretty quickly!

 

For reasons you have three frogs at your disposal.

 

 

You spawn on an asteroid field. It's like a game board where you can move in four directions.

 

 

Your goal is to get to mines, the asteroids with the black squares on them.

 

 

In the mines you have to shoot bad bubbles and other enemies and collect enough green gems for a red gem to drop. From there you can leave the room. You want to make your way to the yellow room on the map to grab some frogs to help you with your goal.

 

And that's it. Except it's brilliant, as mentioned on the podcast it plays out like a predecessor to later action rogue likes like The Binding of Isaac. The only thing I'd change is some of the keybindings, you need to use F1 to "transfer" (warp around the space) and F3 to fire off your banana bomb. Easy on a traditional C64 keyboard. A bit trickier with a PC keyboard.

 

I haven't played most of the games from this podcast but any of the other games here would need to be very good to beat this as my pick of the podcast. It's a little noisy for my COVID brain but I found it quite compulsive and I can see myself returning to this one. Brilliant stuff and a bargain back in the day.

 

This isn't the last we'll see of Simon Pick on the C64, it's a pity he's probably too busy doing important work elsewhere to do a modern remake of this.

 

Anyway it's my (Simon) Pick of the podcast. I'm gutted I never found a copy back in the day, I would have loved it! But now? I still love it.

[Unofficial Who]

Given the bad reviews and how I'm not really into sports games I'm going to skip European 5-A-Side except to mention that back in the day average soccer football games just didn't have a look in because everyone I knew got International Soccer as a pack in with their C64. On cartridge.

 

I mean this was an overhead game but later on we'll be getting a truly great overhead football game on the C64.

 

[squirtle]

Yeah, Slimey's Mine is very good. Like you, I'd never played it but found it pretty compulsive when I started, and it was very reminiscent of a rogue-lite twin stick shooter I started to make some time ago. It's almost compelling me to go back to it.

[Unofficial Who]

1 hour ago, squirtle said:

Yeah, Slimey's Mine is very good. Like you, I'd never played it but found it pretty compulsive when I started, and it was very reminiscent of a rogue-lite twin stick shooter I started to make some time ago. It's almost compelling me to go back to it.

 

Do it!

[squirtle]

1 hour ago, Unofficial Who said:

 

Do it!

If most of my free time wasn't taken up with some bloody podcast, I would 😉

[Unofficial Who]

Mickey Mouse! Everyone loves Mickey Mouse!

 

I'm going to reveal something. I don't. I never had apart from The Sorcerer's Apprentice (because let's face it, we've all had a day go that bad at some point.) He used to have an edge decades before I was born but by the time I was a kid he just felt bland. He was the Mario of his day, the blank everyman avatar and I'd played a lot of Mickey games by this point and wasn't really interested so despite the above average reviews back in the day I skipped this. Having played it now I'm glad I did. Don't get me wrong, it looks lovely.

 

Although Mickey is surprisingly chunky.

 

 

But it's just so dull. Climb a boring featureless brown tower when I coupld be playing the more dynamic Nebulous instead?

 

And those mazes. 

 

 

Dull compared to something like the maze section in Oink!

 

This is the problem with a lot of Mickey games of the time. They have to play it so safe! Although safe needn't be boring. Seeing this compared with another 8 bit platform two years later...

 

 

I know which one I'd rather be playing. 

 

It's competently made, it's just so dull and pedestrian. Am I being harsh? Maybe, but it just feels so slow compared to something like...say...Slimey's Mine?

 

Your mileage may vary, after all I'm a miserable git who doesn't like Mickey Mouse and was glad when he pissed off in the first act of Kingdom Hearts. Not one for me.

[Unofficial Who]

Skipped Fernandez Must Die back in the day. I mean I already had Commando and if I wanted to play something like this again I wanted something with more depth. With average reviews and graphics that looked awful on the page this was never going to get a look in. Especially given that this was a Tony Crowther game. No doubt the man can code but his C64 games never really gelled with me.

 

 

Well 35 years on I'd like to report a robbery. Because Crowther was robbed. 51% in Zzap? It deserves much more. Because underneath it's garish exterior this is a fantastic forward thinking open world Commando game.

 

After a very demo scene like title screen you're dropped into the middle of a large compound and what damage you do is up to you. Free prisoners? Destroy targets of interest? (Highlighted on your map.) It's all up to you.

 

The action never lets up and if you just keep shooting your way up the map you'll be blacked by an impenetrable wall. At this point most will give up. But if you explore around a bit you'll see doors on the side of the map. Doors that look like standard decorative game doors. Doors that can be blown open. And then you can explore the parts of the game in-between the vertical play areas.

 

 

Here you can move between areas of the map and free prisoners.

 

So what else do you need? You can destroy barriers, doors, trees and parts of buildings with grenades. You can goad soldiers into shooting each other. You can commandeer jeeps! If you have a friend you can drive and they can man the gun like this was some sort of Halo demake. You can run soldiers over when driving too.

 

 

If you reach certain objectives you gain medals like some sort of proto achievement system. And when you die you get a Cannon Fodder style funeral for your players.

 

This is an overlooked classic. If I could change anything maybe tighter controls and an easier difficulty level where the enemy spawn rate was a little more forgiving but this should have gotten a sizzler at the very least. Crowther and Bishop must of been gutted by the Zzap review (although other publications rated it as above average.)

 

This unexpectedly ties with Slimey's Mine as pick of the week. It's not an easy game to pick up on your first go but give it a chance and it will get it's hooks in.

[squirtle]

Yeah, it was a real surprise this and a game that kept opening up as you played more. Some really great aspects to it and when I was playing it I was thinking am I wrong here and noticing all these things it's doing? I'm glad you feel the same @Unofficial Who. My favourite Crowther game by some margin and out of nowhere the best Commando style game that we have looked at on the machine.

[Unofficial Who]

7 minutes ago, squirtle said:

Yeah, it was a real surprise this and a game that kept opening up as you played more. Some really great aspects to it and when I was playing it I was thinking am I wrong here and noticing all these things it's doing? I'm glad you feel the same @Unofficial Who. My favourite Crowther game by some margin and out of nowhere the best Commando style game that we have looked at on the machine.

 

It makes me wonder if it failed due to the odd garish graphics and the direct overhead camera versus the tilt you have with games like Commando and Ikari Warriors.

 

Because I'm with you on this, possibly the best of it's ilk on the C64. Paging @S0L, if you're still working with Ratt let him know Fernandez Must Die is finally being recognised for the brilliant work that it is.

[S0L]

5 hours ago, Unofficial Who said:

Because I'm with you on this, possibly the best of it's ilk on the C64. Paging @S0L, if you're still working with Ratt let him know Fernandez Must Die is finally being recognised for the brilliant work that it is.

 

I didn't even know that was one of his! I'll give him a nudge in the morning

[Unofficial Who]

Battle Ships is a solid conversion of the old pen and paper game. You set up your ships on a grid, your opponent does the same.

 

 

Then you take turns selecting spots on the map to barrage on the hunt for your opponent.

 

 

There follows a short animated sequence showing your guns firing as planes strafe your ship. (It's purely for show, the planes will never hit you.)

 

 

Turns continue until one navy is left without ships. Simple.

 

I first got my hands on this in 1993 thanks to a Commodore Format cover tape and had a decent time with it as I hadn't played Battle Ship since the 1970's. Handily enough two things prevent it from being tiring. Since no-one in the 90's was going to be willing to play Battle Ships with me there is a one player mode. The computer is a decent opponent but isn't a mind reader. (Having said that if one of your ships is located the computer will focus all it's salvos on that area of the map.) Oh! And there's a "salvo" mode. This changes things up a bit, instead of the traditional one turn each you can have up to 20 turns per round depending on how many ships you have left. Every ship sunk decreases that amount by four. 

 

This is a solid rendition of an old game. Perhaps a little pointless in two player mode if you have other ways to play but great for a solid solo game. A decent budget release and perfect cover tape fodder.

 

Of interest this was released by Epyx in the US and Canada as Battleship, note the trademark at the bottom there.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I feel unqualified to talk about Kane II.

 

The Kane games always got a lot of love from people at the schools I attended and I just couldn't work out why. I just never got my head around the original, the targets always felt too tiny. And so it is here. I only got as far as the second level, a fort with enemies the size of pinheads.

 

 

For this sequel most reviewers judged it more harshly than they did the 1985 original. More of the same. Not my bag at all.

[Unofficial Who]

Sword Slayer or Spartacus: the Sword Slayer is a bit of an interesting one.

 

I remember seeing the screenshot with the portly sprites and writing it off as a Barbarian clone.

 

 

Playing it though with it's intro and narrative screens was a bit of a surprise in that this feels more like it's trying to be the Roman version of Karateka. I didn't get too far, I found the controls a bit muddy and was taken out by an eagle.

 

 

But there's obviously an ambition here to try and do something bigger. Of course this all succeeds or fails on execution and for me it didn't land but I admire the ambition here. If this had been released in 1985 it might well have been a bit of a cult classic.

 

There's a long play here that shows the variety of later backdrops including a chariot escape scene.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I'm skipping Professional Snooker Simulator, saving myself for some of the more interesting pool and snooker games that are coming down the pipe.

 

This looks like something from the early 80's. Anyone have anything to add?

 

 

edit.... hang on....I forgot the amazing cover!

 

 

There is a lot going on here!

Edited March 24 by Unofficial Who

[Unofficial Who]

19 Part 1 : Boot Camp was one I skipped for a couple of reasons. One was that I had the suspicion that this was only half a game. Four events in the Combat School mode that would apparently effect what your stats would be like in the combat game in part two. But part of it was the song that the title evoked, 19, which was age of a lot of the soldiers sent over.

 

It also felt a little distasteful. Platoon kind of got away with it at the time, but this being based on the song felt like a bridge too far. Anyway I finally had a quick look at this compilation of four games today.

 

First up, the assault course.

 

 

This is a Combat School style race. The first surprise was that it's not all waggling although it uses a weird gauge for jumping I could never get the hang of and felt rather hit or miss. The graphics here are pretty decent with parallax scrolling and smooth animation. It's ruined a little with the brown of the main sprite blending into the trees. I couldn't get past the monkey bars here. So a bit like real life.

 

Second, the shooting range.

 

 

It's your standard shooting range with you using the scope of your rifle to aim. It's not bad although I would have like the rifle to title a little to indicate whether I was pointing to the left or the right of the field.

 

Third, the jeep obstacle course.

 

 

This isn't great. A standard race but with hills that while clever end up reducing your view to the point where you can't see in front of you. This felt like a poor version of Buggy Boy and weirdly enough it was the section I was best at so I got to play this several times while really not enjoying it.

 

Last the obligatory fight with your instructor.

 

 

Nicely animated with crunchy sound but not as good as many martial arts game on the C64.

 

It feels very much like it was graphically designed for 16 bit machines which is strange because it was only ever released on the C64 and Spectrum. It's not brilliant stuff and my instincts from back in the day were right, this feels like the intro section to a much larger game.

 

Speaking of which that other half is talked about here and it is wild.

 

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/19th-bootcamp-pt2/

 

Quote

Rather interestingly, it seems that there were actually to be two separate games produced for the sequel. With the action game on one side created by the Cascade team, and a second different style of game on the second side… produced externally by Consult Computer Systems by Paul Cole

 

That different style?

 

Quote

“Game was based upon a hippy writing letters to congress to stop the vietnam war. But the design of it ws too big and too complex, it was suppose to be able to understand letters that were anti-war and score points for them, quite a bit of AI even by today’s standards.

With 19, I think the idea was original it was going to be on the opposite side of the cassette version, or second disk, but the game never got finished. I don’t know who worked on the cascade version, as we were a separate development house.

It was to be separate from their battle games and set in San Fransico.”

 

That would be a big ask even now I suspect. In retrospect I give these games (and movies and tv shows) a lot more side eye than I did in the day. To an extent they partly romanticised the war, made it entertaining. I don't think 19 was ever released in Australia in any case, the Paul Hardcastle song wasn't a big hit here and we already had another song by the same name that was certainly a lot more harsh about the war and a lot more humanising about the poor kids selected to go and fight in it.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

New week new episode! As always you can get it here https://zappedtothepast.com/

 

Games covered

 

-Katakis

-Mr Wino

-Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge

-Trojan Warrior

-Tracksuit Manager

-Diamond

-LA Crackdown

-The Vindicator

 

And this is the second issue of Zzap with a cover tape. It was to be a playable demo of Katakis but a last minute legal intervention from Activision led to it being replaced with an old arcade adventure Time Tunnel.

 

I covered it back in 2021 here 

I mean it's not bad as a freebie.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

Katakis was a bit of a lost classic. Forbidden fruit. So worried was Activision that this would make their conversion of R-Type look bad that they put the hard word out. To the point where the promised demo wasn't even on the cover.

 

At the time I thought this was some weird Australian thing. I got it in my head that over in the UK others were playing this playable demo and I was stuck with this weird dated game about a goblin.

 

But I found out eventually this game was not to be, not in this form anyway.

 

I've now played this, or at least one of the many bolted together versions of it and...well it's ok. I think I might have liked Salamander more!

 

 

It does look lovely in motion although the ship is a tad too big making squeezing through gaps a bit of a challenge.

 

But I don't think Activision had much to worry about here. Sure, they've stolen the drone that defines R-Type that you can bolt on to your ship. And they've stolen most of the weapon loadouts. It plays like R-Type.

 

But it's missing the distinct look of R-Types levels and that music which makes a big difference. The bosses look great in stills but they're a little glitchy and worse still you don't get enough feedback as to when you're doing damage. I played through this once with a cheat and there are some neat level touches but they feel distinct from R-Type.

 

Playing without a cheat? It's rock hard. Not as hard as IO but perhaps too hard as a home game. I could only get to the end of level two unaided.

 

 

Back in the day I would have loved this but it would probably have had me more eager to buy R-Type. I can only think that Activision were worried about this cannibalising their sales. Maybe their version was in trouble? (No maybe about that but that's a tale for another time.)

 

I suspect this will be my pick of the episode but it's not quite the legend I thought it would be. Then again maybe I've bigged it up in my head for the past 35 years. That and having played Turrican 2 back in the day this could never really live up to the reviews I read last century.

 

Solid stuff nonetheless.