Chapter 8 - The Commodore 64: Wierdest Stuff you'll find...
Submitted September 10, 2010 Updated August 10, 2011 Status Incomplete | Hi guys! I am going to be doing reviews of different games!. Read along if you wish to hear about my best, worst, and stupid Adventures around the Gaming Universe. ^^ I will review games you request too! For a price!
Category:
Games » - Other Game Not Listed |
Chapter 8 - The Commodore 64: Wierdest Stuff you'll find...
Chapter 8 - The Commodore 64: Wierdest Stuff you'll find...
One day, My friend gave me a CD, but it wasn't just ANY CD, It was a Commodore 64 CD! It's a CD with a Commodore 64 emulator and a load of ROM's. Not sure whether or nor it's legal, the only mention of copyrights is a readme file saying "The manufacturers and/or distributors/resellers hold no resposability (sic) for the contents of this CD ROM. If your work is included within this production, and you wish for it to be removed, you can write to the address below, and it will be removed from the next version", and providing a link to the emulation site that the ROM's were downloaded from.
As you probably guessed, there's some downright weird stuff here.
This one's a bit dodgy. The main character looks suspiciously similar to Sonic, and the tortoise monsters seem to have been ripped from Super Mario. Saliva Kid's attack is, erm, spitting, but this doesn't seem to hurt the bad guys at all. You start off in a grassy place with palm trees (much like the Sonic games), where you're up against crumbling bridges, motion-sensitive coconuts that fall on you when you get too close and birds. Evil birds from the ninth circle of hell. Level 2 pits you against high-speed snowmen, level 3 sees Saliva Kid underwater, robbing him of his spitting power. I can't get past level 4, the space world. Oh well. You also pick up pink gems. Pinky gemmy gems. Pinky pinky gemmy gemmy.
Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasents, burninating all the people in their THATCHED-ROOFED COTTAGES! THATCHED-ROOFED COTTAGES!
The graphics are good for a C64 game, but I can't work out what you're supposed to do. You play as a dragon and start off flying over the sea, occasionally seeing ships go past. You can breathe fire, but that doesn't hurt the ships. After a while you reach dry land, where blue people who look like toilet-door signs fire arrows at you. You can take THEM out with your fire, but their arrows don't seem to affect you in any way. A bit later on you reach the sea again, and so forth. That seems to be it - you just fly back and forth burning blue toilet-door signs. Maybe the programmer had a bad day and wanted some stress relief.
As a side note, Thanatos is the Greek god of death. His other notable video game roles include his appearance as a snake in Kid Icarus and a large headless woman in Final Fantasy 2.
I loved Thundercats, dont get me wrong, but there was some stupid things about it... I mean, the hero was called "Lion-o", the bad guy was called "Mumm-Ra" and the catchphrase was "Thundercats, ho!", which will never rank alongside "Cowabunga dudes", "Go, go, Power Rangers" or "PiiiikaaaaaCHUUUU". And what was it with the bald blue guy?
If it had been ThunderCOWS, on the other hand, it would've been a classic. Think about it - Guernsy-O! Holstein-Ra! Thundercows, ho! There aren't enough cartoons about cows - but Thundercows would change all that.
In the game you take control of some prat who I'm guessing is Lion-o. You run left hitting tip-toeing pigs with your sword, and eventually you meet these killer midgets which you can only kill if you use your sword while crouching. Level 2 adds bats and fat pink aardvark men to the mix. If only the cartoon was more like the game...
No, that's not the title screen - the in-game graphics in Popeye are quite large. This just makes them scarier, though. Olive leans out the window and her face convulses grotesquely, her eyes looking back and fourth and squinting as she silently mouths. Popeye struts around in slo-mo, and when he gets hit the Popeye theme plays and a tin of spinach appears out of nowhere and empties itself into his mouth, as if held by an invisible hand. Poltergeists? I always knew that there was something suspicious about that spinach (I think it has additives, if you know what I mean), but I never suspected anything supernatural. This explains Olive's problem, too - she's possessed.
As Popeye, you have to avoid Brutus, big bird things, flying saucers and dragons, while climbing on ropes and breaking into houses to steal keys. He's Popeye the sailor man, he's Popeye the sailor man, his criminal tendencies are strong to the finich, 'cause he summoned the forces of Satan himself, he's Popeye the sailor man!
This one's just weird. You play as an old woman who has to whack children with her walking stick as they come home from school, while avoiding signs hurled at you by a lollypop lady. Don't you just miss bedroom programmers?
Probably the most disturbing thing about this game is that the senseless carnage is accompanied by cheerful, plinkity music and graphics resembling children's drawings. Brr.
Oh, and when Granny gets killed, some kind of demonic mask appears over her corpse...
Now this one IS a classic. No, really. Dizzy uses the using-objects-to-solve-puzzles formula of King's Quest and Monkey Island, but it's a platform game. The idea was pretty successful, as Dizzy got a load of sequels, and fan games are still being made to this day.
Dizzy is an egg whose mission is to collect ingredients for a potion with which to defeat the wizard Zacks. It sounds cute but, for the "ultimate cartoon adventure", Dizzy is really grim, man, and the cute main character and references to Wile E. Coyote, Ghostbusters and Dangermouse don't change that. I'm guessing that, by "cartoon", the creators were referring to the stuff Chanel 4 used to show in late-night graveyard slots or squeezed between children's blocks (like Fist of the North Star or that creepy thing with the origami ducks). The perpetual black sky and lack of music - Dizzy's footsteps and the occasional crunching of fallen apples are pretty much the only sounds - give the game a rather dismal mood. Dizzy's village is an eerie ghost town with no signs of life. Aside from Dizzy and Zacks, the world is inhabited only by animals and a ghost. Amongst the potion ingredients are a leprechaun's wig and a troll's brew, but trolls and leprechauns are nowhere to be seen, their possessions apparently long since abandonded. There are, on the other hand, an awful lot of gravestones and skeletons.
And there's a load of floating banners quoting The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, a poem about a guy who gets killed while getting a present for his girlfriend. Cheery stuff.
If there was ever a morally ambiguous C64 game, Save New York is it. Ostensibly, you're supposed to protect the Big Apple from alien invaders - but the aliens aren't posing a threat. They only do damage if you fly into one of them. Sure, on level 2 they start shooting back, but that's just self defense - by then, you'll have killed a number of them. Conversley, your shots are all too capable of damaging the skyscrapers. Out of curiosity, I decided to completely destroy New York. My punishment? Nothing. The poor aliens were still the "bad guys". Your allies also need to get their priorities straight. For some time I thought that the blue planes that fly past providing me with extra fuel were bombers and gunned them down on sight - but they still kept on coming, eager to help me out. Even after I'd totally levelled the Big Apple, they still happily provided me with fuel. What a twisted world we live in.
Another oddity is that you start out on foot, and are able to either climb into your fighter or explore the subway - where you apparently can't do anything other than get run over. Maybe the designers were subtly making a point with this - if you choose to fight the alien tourists, then you "lose" long before your lives run out. If you opt to get killed by a train without hurting any innocents, then you are a true winner. Deep, man.
So, what's New York like when it's not being shot to pieces by a crazy fighter pilot? This game lets you find out! Yes, this could be the world's first tour-em-up. You play as a guy in a car, but you can freely leave said car to visit areas such as the Empire State Building. And getting out of your car isn't a bad idea at all. See the crumpled-looking cars in the screnshot? Yes, those are crashes. NYC is home to some of the worst drivers in videogamedom. Not only that, but driving on the pavement and up the wrong side of the road is practically the only way you'll avoid them.
And here we have the Empire State Building. Once inside, the game turns into a Donkey Kong-esque platformer where you have to get a pretzel while avoiding two evil dudes. Grant's Tomb and the UN building are much the same, but there is some variety. The mart sees you smuggling a pretzel past sliding doors and big-headed people with no trousers, while the zoo has the hero caging in escaped animals and the bank forces him to make his way from one end to the other, avoiding streams of bullets fired by bank robbers.
I haven't yet managed to finish the mart or zoo, so I don't know what happens in the end. Precisely what is the hero planning to do with the pretzels he's so desperate to find? Go to Washington DC and assassinate George Bush in a titanic boss fight?
This one sees the bold hero trekking across Tibet to capture the abominable snowman, sampling exotic Eastern mysticism and bizarre enemies along the way. Don't expect the National Geographic - this one portrays Tibetan Buddhism about as accurately as Neon Genesis Evangelion portrays Christianity. Upon starting the game, the first enemy you encounter is none other than Buddha himself, who practices the famous Buddhist practice of hurling whacking great lightning bolts at you. To progress, you must dispatch him with a single well-placed grenade. Later on you're confronted by some Buddhist monks, who are decidedly dischuffed with you. You can gun them down, but more keep coming out the monestary. How do you deal with them? KABOOM!
US/Tibet relations were somewhat shaky in the 80's.
Bizarre manglings of Victor Hugo's novel didn't start with the Disney movie. This platformer starts with Quasimodo skipping along outside Notre Dame while "Teddybears' Picnic" plays in the background. He then climbs up the wall and the game begins. Your task is to make him walk back to the other side. But, uh, why on Earth didn't he just climb up there in the first place? Quasimodo, you clueless oaf. You won't be finding any tragic historic romance, but you will go up against pits, arrows, ridiculously out-of-scale soldiers and fuzzy purple balls. 19th century French literature at its finest, I'm sure. Hunchback was popular enough to spawn imitators such as "Quasimodo" and sequels such as "Hunchback at the Olympics". Sadly, a Commodore 64 adaptation of Les Miserables was never produced.
Bizarre manglings of Greek mythology didn't begin with the Disney movie, but while Hunchback was cool, this one... isn't. Before you begin one of the randomly-chosen levels, a screen of text tells you the story of one of Hercules' labours, following the original legends to a T. The actual game, however, doesn't; each labout involves Hercules jumping around platforms, climbing on ropes, dodging bad guys (crabs, pterodactyls, one-eyed tentacled creatures - that kind of thing) in persuit of a level-specific object - the hydra, a golden apple, etc.
But there's a twist - not all of the platforms are solid. Some of them disappear underneath you, others burst into flame when you tread on them, killing Hercules in the process. And guess what? There's absolutely no way whatsoever to distinguish between them and safe platforms. You've just got to use trial and error.
I couldn't be bothered to finish a single labour, really. Sorry, Herc, looks like you won't be forgiven for killing your family any time soon.
It's primitive side-scrolling beat 'em up time - with Kurt Russell! Or, er, a blocky thing that's meant to look like him. Digikurt must travel through a faithfully rendered interpretation of Chinatown (i.e. a series of sub Hana-Barbara looping backgrounds) battling powerful supernatural enemies (i.e. a bunch of blocky guys who politely attack you one at a time). Mr. Russell is aided by Egg and Wang, but once you get into a fight they run offscreen - they only actually do anything when Kurt dies, at which point one of the other two will fill his shoes. Brave, brave men.
Some of the artificial intelligence is a little questionable. If you get behind a bad guy, then you just need to keep punching the air - he'll then "advance" to the right, off the edge of the screen. Great stuff.
Fact of the day: at 3,696,100 square miles, China isn't that little.
As you probably guessed, there's some downright weird stuff here.
SALIVA KID
This one's a bit dodgy. The main character looks suspiciously similar to Sonic, and the tortoise monsters seem to have been ripped from Super Mario. Saliva Kid's attack is, erm, spitting, but this doesn't seem to hurt the bad guys at all. You start off in a grassy place with palm trees (much like the Sonic games), where you're up against crumbling bridges, motion-sensitive coconuts that fall on you when you get too close and birds. Evil birds from the ninth circle of hell. Level 2 pits you against high-speed snowmen, level 3 sees Saliva Kid underwater, robbing him of his spitting power. I can't get past level 4, the space world. Oh well. You also pick up pink gems. Pinky gemmy gems. Pinky pinky gemmy gemmy.
THANATOS
Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasents, burninating all the people in their THATCHED-ROOFED COTTAGES! THATCHED-ROOFED COTTAGES!
The graphics are good for a C64 game, but I can't work out what you're supposed to do. You play as a dragon and start off flying over the sea, occasionally seeing ships go past. You can breathe fire, but that doesn't hurt the ships. After a while you reach dry land, where blue people who look like toilet-door signs fire arrows at you. You can take THEM out with your fire, but their arrows don't seem to affect you in any way. A bit later on you reach the sea again, and so forth. That seems to be it - you just fly back and forth burning blue toilet-door signs. Maybe the programmer had a bad day and wanted some stress relief.
As a side note, Thanatos is the Greek god of death. His other notable video game roles include his appearance as a snake in Kid Icarus and a large headless woman in Final Fantasy 2.
THUNDERCATS
I loved Thundercats, dont get me wrong, but there was some stupid things about it... I mean, the hero was called "Lion-o", the bad guy was called "Mumm-Ra" and the catchphrase was "Thundercats, ho!", which will never rank alongside "Cowabunga dudes", "Go, go, Power Rangers" or "PiiiikaaaaaCHUUUU". And what was it with the bald blue guy?
If it had been ThunderCOWS, on the other hand, it would've been a classic. Think about it - Guernsy-O! Holstein-Ra! Thundercows, ho! There aren't enough cartoons about cows - but Thundercows would change all that.
In the game you take control of some prat who I'm guessing is Lion-o. You run left hitting tip-toeing pigs with your sword, and eventually you meet these killer midgets which you can only kill if you use your sword while crouching. Level 2 adds bats and fat pink aardvark men to the mix. If only the cartoon was more like the game...
POPEYE
No, that's not the title screen - the in-game graphics in Popeye are quite large. This just makes them scarier, though. Olive leans out the window and her face convulses grotesquely, her eyes looking back and fourth and squinting as she silently mouths. Popeye struts around in slo-mo, and when he gets hit the Popeye theme plays and a tin of spinach appears out of nowhere and empties itself into his mouth, as if held by an invisible hand. Poltergeists? I always knew that there was something suspicious about that spinach (I think it has additives, if you know what I mean), but I never suspected anything supernatural. This explains Olive's problem, too - she's possessed.
As Popeye, you have to avoid Brutus, big bird things, flying saucers and dragons, while climbing on ropes and breaking into houses to steal keys. He's Popeye the sailor man, he's Popeye the sailor man, his criminal tendencies are strong to the finich, 'cause he summoned the forces of Satan himself, he's Popeye the sailor man!
BIOGRANNY
This one's just weird. You play as an old woman who has to whack children with her walking stick as they come home from school, while avoiding signs hurled at you by a lollypop lady. Don't you just miss bedroom programmers?
Probably the most disturbing thing about this game is that the senseless carnage is accompanied by cheerful, plinkity music and graphics resembling children's drawings. Brr.
Oh, and when Granny gets killed, some kind of demonic mask appears over her corpse...
DIZZY: THE ULTIMATE CARTOON ADVENTURE
Now this one IS a classic. No, really. Dizzy uses the using-objects-to-solve-puzzles formula of King's Quest and Monkey Island, but it's a platform game. The idea was pretty successful, as Dizzy got a load of sequels, and fan games are still being made to this day.
Dizzy is an egg whose mission is to collect ingredients for a potion with which to defeat the wizard Zacks. It sounds cute but, for the "ultimate cartoon adventure", Dizzy is really grim, man, and the cute main character and references to Wile E. Coyote, Ghostbusters and Dangermouse don't change that. I'm guessing that, by "cartoon", the creators were referring to the stuff Chanel 4 used to show in late-night graveyard slots or squeezed between children's blocks (like Fist of the North Star or that creepy thing with the origami ducks). The perpetual black sky and lack of music - Dizzy's footsteps and the occasional crunching of fallen apples are pretty much the only sounds - give the game a rather dismal mood. Dizzy's village is an eerie ghost town with no signs of life. Aside from Dizzy and Zacks, the world is inhabited only by animals and a ghost. Amongst the potion ingredients are a leprechaun's wig and a troll's brew, but trolls and leprechauns are nowhere to be seen, their possessions apparently long since abandonded. There are, on the other hand, an awful lot of gravestones and skeletons.
And there's a load of floating banners quoting The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, a poem about a guy who gets killed while getting a present for his girlfriend. Cheery stuff.
SAVE NEW YORK
If there was ever a morally ambiguous C64 game, Save New York is it. Ostensibly, you're supposed to protect the Big Apple from alien invaders - but the aliens aren't posing a threat. They only do damage if you fly into one of them. Sure, on level 2 they start shooting back, but that's just self defense - by then, you'll have killed a number of them. Conversley, your shots are all too capable of damaging the skyscrapers. Out of curiosity, I decided to completely destroy New York. My punishment? Nothing. The poor aliens were still the "bad guys". Your allies also need to get their priorities straight. For some time I thought that the blue planes that fly past providing me with extra fuel were bombers and gunned them down on sight - but they still kept on coming, eager to help me out. Even after I'd totally levelled the Big Apple, they still happily provided me with fuel. What a twisted world we live in.
Another oddity is that you start out on foot, and are able to either climb into your fighter or explore the subway - where you apparently can't do anything other than get run over. Maybe the designers were subtly making a point with this - if you choose to fight the alien tourists, then you "lose" long before your lives run out. If you opt to get killed by a train without hurting any innocents, then you are a true winner. Deep, man.
So, what's New York like when it's not being shot to pieces by a crazy fighter pilot? This game lets you find out! Yes, this could be the world's first tour-em-up. You play as a guy in a car, but you can freely leave said car to visit areas such as the Empire State Building. And getting out of your car isn't a bad idea at all. See the crumpled-looking cars in the screnshot? Yes, those are crashes. NYC is home to some of the worst drivers in videogamedom. Not only that, but driving on the pavement and up the wrong side of the road is practically the only way you'll avoid them.
And here we have the Empire State Building. Once inside, the game turns into a Donkey Kong-esque platformer where you have to get a pretzel while avoiding two evil dudes. Grant's Tomb and the UN building are much the same, but there is some variety. The mart sees you smuggling a pretzel past sliding doors and big-headed people with no trousers, while the zoo has the hero caging in escaped animals and the bank forces him to make his way from one end to the other, avoiding streams of bullets fired by bank robbers.
I haven't yet managed to finish the mart or zoo, so I don't know what happens in the end. Precisely what is the hero planning to do with the pretzels he's so desperate to find? Go to Washington DC and assassinate George Bush in a titanic boss fight?
YETI
This one sees the bold hero trekking across Tibet to capture the abominable snowman, sampling exotic Eastern mysticism and bizarre enemies along the way. Don't expect the National Geographic - this one portrays Tibetan Buddhism about as accurately as Neon Genesis Evangelion portrays Christianity. Upon starting the game, the first enemy you encounter is none other than Buddha himself, who practices the famous Buddhist practice of hurling whacking great lightning bolts at you. To progress, you must dispatch him with a single well-placed grenade. Later on you're confronted by some Buddhist monks, who are decidedly dischuffed with you. You can gun them down, but more keep coming out the monestary. How do you deal with them? KABOOM!
US/Tibet relations were somewhat shaky in the 80's.
HUNCHBACK
Bizarre manglings of Victor Hugo's novel didn't start with the Disney movie. This platformer starts with Quasimodo skipping along outside Notre Dame while "Teddybears' Picnic" plays in the background. He then climbs up the wall and the game begins. Your task is to make him walk back to the other side. But, uh, why on Earth didn't he just climb up there in the first place? Quasimodo, you clueless oaf. You won't be finding any tragic historic romance, but you will go up against pits, arrows, ridiculously out-of-scale soldiers and fuzzy purple balls. 19th century French literature at its finest, I'm sure. Hunchback was popular enough to spawn imitators such as "Quasimodo" and sequels such as "Hunchback at the Olympics". Sadly, a Commodore 64 adaptation of Les Miserables was never produced.
HERCULES
Bizarre manglings of Greek mythology didn't begin with the Disney movie, but while Hunchback was cool, this one... isn't. Before you begin one of the randomly-chosen levels, a screen of text tells you the story of one of Hercules' labours, following the original legends to a T. The actual game, however, doesn't; each labout involves Hercules jumping around platforms, climbing on ropes, dodging bad guys (crabs, pterodactyls, one-eyed tentacled creatures - that kind of thing) in persuit of a level-specific object - the hydra, a golden apple, etc.
But there's a twist - not all of the platforms are solid. Some of them disappear underneath you, others burst into flame when you tread on them, killing Hercules in the process. And guess what? There's absolutely no way whatsoever to distinguish between them and safe platforms. You've just got to use trial and error.
I couldn't be bothered to finish a single labour, really. Sorry, Herc, looks like you won't be forgiven for killing your family any time soon.
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
It's primitive side-scrolling beat 'em up time - with Kurt Russell! Or, er, a blocky thing that's meant to look like him. Digikurt must travel through a faithfully rendered interpretation of Chinatown (i.e. a series of sub Hana-Barbara looping backgrounds) battling powerful supernatural enemies (i.e. a bunch of blocky guys who politely attack you one at a time). Mr. Russell is aided by Egg and Wang, but once you get into a fight they run offscreen - they only actually do anything when Kurt dies, at which point one of the other two will fill his shoes. Brave, brave men.
Some of the artificial intelligence is a little questionable. If you get behind a bad guy, then you just need to keep punching the air - he'll then "advance" to the right, off the edge of the screen. Great stuff.
Fact of the day: at 3,696,100 square miles, China isn't that little.
Comments
You are not authorized to comment here. Your must be registered and logged in to comment