I don’t care if you’ve never heard of it, this game was the BUSINESS and it’s what we played in PAL land while everyone in the rest of the world played Metroid.
Before Turrican came along that is.
I don’t care if you’ve never heard of it, this game was the BUSINESS and it’s what we played in PAL land while everyone in the rest of the world played Metroid.
Before Turrican came along that is.
| Jun 29, 11 | Robocod |
| Jun 23, 11 | Text Adventures |
| Feb 20, 13 | Dropzone |
| Aug 21, 11 | Chips Challenge |
| Mar 7, 12 | California Games |
Man oh man did I love this game. I remember seeing it in the arcades and thinking that graphics were getting too fast. Thankfully the pretty poor C64 version was slow as treacle and calmed my aging nerves.
Sega Master System version was good too, but then I finished it, sanded down the cartridge connections and returned it to the shops as faulty. God I was a little turd back then.
| Jul 22, 11 | The Sentinel |
| Jul 24, 11 | Outrun |
| Aug 20, 11 | Little Computer People |
| Jul 16, 11 | Micro Machines |
| Feb 8, 12 | NBA Jam |
Andrew Braybrook’s classic C64 shooter was a groundbreaking game for many reasons, but not many people know that it was the first game about being bitter and cynical! Video games are art, etc.
Anyone remember developer diaries? They were things where the developer wrote about making the game in a games magazine – without a PR person in between the creator and editor. CRAZY TIMES!
The Amiga version was OK I guess.
| Nov 23, 11 | Beach Head |
| Aug 23, 11 | Bomb Jack |
| Jun 15, 11 | Usagi Yojimbo |
| Jul 6, 11 | Impossible Mission |
| Jul 4, 11 | Chase HQ |
Head Over Heels was a isometric adventure game by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond. It was one of the earliest games that really shaped my taste in games – cute, charming characters and a great sense of humour. I highly recommend it.
Not the most interesting of stories to go with a comic but they can’t all be gems mate.
The C64 version was the one I played the most, even though it was blatantly obvious that it was a lazy port from the Spectrum. Who knew the Spectrum had good games? (he says hiding from the mob with pitchforks…)
| Aug 21, 11 | Chips Challenge |
| Jun 24, 11 | Pitfall |
| Jul 26, 11 | Ancipital |
| Aug 24, 11 | Ghosts N Goblins |
| Jun 15, 11 | Usagi Yojimbo |
Not many people will remember this game. It was pretty much ignored upon release, only garnering a couple of scathing reviews before disappearing into the giant pile of unplayed games that lives in every Commodore 64 owner’s bedroom.
But man, I remember this game very well.
I bought it shortly after release, allured by the budget price and the fact that it offered “ARCADE GRAPHICS” on the box. Arcade graphics, man! Not your regular graphics. My sister chose BMX Simulator for her game purchase, but that just looked dumb and stupid.
Upon playing it at home I discovered that Super G-Man was a terrible game. What you see in the comic pretty much matches what you did in the game – which isn’t much. You floated about a bit and shot aliens and crashed into the ground and then came back to life and the timer ran out and you died. All of a sudden that copy of BMX Simulator looked mighty tempting but my sister wouldn’t let me play it until I apologised for calling it stupid.
So I grew even more determined to eke out any amount of fun that I could out of the thing, playing it for hours at a time until I convinced myself it wasn’t that bad. My friend and I would take turns playing it, unable to be convinced that there’s no fun in it. We figured that if we played long enough, and discovered its many secrets, there would be a fun game to be unearthed. We were wrong. Very very wrong.
It’s saving grace was that we decided to use it as the basis for our year 9 science experiment. We proposed that to determine the effects of sleep deprivation on the human mind, we would play Super G-Man for 24 hours and record our scores over time. This was the only time we were able to use the Commodore 64 for the supposed “educational purposes” I tricked my parents into believing to get them to buy it in the first place.
The game was terrible, we ended up staying up until 3am playing it, and we even managed to get a passing grade for the class. That was pretty much it for me with high school, and now 20 years later I’m drawing stupid comics about Super G-Man. So thank you Mike Clark, whoever you are, for making a crap game that I love anyway.
This game seemed unnecessarily hard to me when it came out – it didn’t help that I was playing it on someone’s clunky Apple 2 with monochrome monitor and those weird joysticks that didn’t correct themselves. Still! People don’t understand how peanut butter and vegemite could be a good combination, so who am I to judge what turns out popular?
There was no Commodore 64 version, but they ported it to the Sharp X68000? What the hell?
October 2011 Edit: They DID make a Commodore 64 version! IT’S AWESOME!
| Nov 2, 11 | Cool Spot |
| Jun 9, 11 | Toobin’ |
| May 9, 12 | Star Control |
| Sep 28, 11 | Battle Chess |
| Sep 21, 11 | Theme Hospital |
I keep buying Robocod because they keep re-releasing the darn thing. The MegaDrive version is my favourite, of course, but it’s just so huge and cute and full of hidden surprises that I can’t resist quad dipping.
I bought the DS version when it came out and my wife played it while I was out one day. I came home to her livid. “BAD GAME”, she growled, pointing at the Robocod cartridge like it was a puppy that just messed up the rug.
“VERY BAD GAME.”
Forget finances, politics or religion – Robocod is an issue that really tests a marriage.
And man oh man, I think Robocod wins the prize for being the game that got converted to the most number of machines. It was released in that curious nexus where 8, 16 and 32-bit machines all peacefully coexisted and had new games released for them. I know I spent a fortune of magazines at the time keeping up with it all…and now look where all of it got me!
| Aug 10, 11 | Zombies Ate My Neighbors |
| Nov 16, 11 | Bubble Bobble |
| Jul 6, 11 | Impossible Mission |
| Mar 20, 13 | Strider |
| Jul 27, 11 | Road Rash |
Never did get past the first screen of this darn game, but wouldn’t it have made for an awesome ’80s college movie?
I mean that first screen was stupidly hard. Like, it was “everyone in the world except the guy who made it hasn’t got a hope in Hell” hard. Nobody tested this kind of stuff back then!
| Aug 26, 11 | The Last Ninja |
| Jul 2, 11 | Head Over Heels |
| Jul 9, 11 | Double Dragon |
| Feb 1, 12 | Shadow Of The Beast |
| Jul 4, 11 | Chase HQ |
Two sequels later he still can’t admit that he’s illiterate. Or that he only has one tracksuit.
This was one of the earlier C64 games, everyone went crazy for it and then I played it and thought, well it’s OK I guess. I guess now it’s OK to admit that? I hope so!
| Feb 1, 12 | Shadow Of The Beast |
| Jun 11, 11 | Turrican |
| Jul 22, 11 | The Sentinel |
| Apr 18, 12 | Archon |
| May 2, 12 | Combat School |
Even the best games suck until they’re a few weeks away from being finished.
Anyway, Pitfall was pretty good but has not aged well at all, and you should really play the sequel.
I used Pitfall to illustrate how I wanted a swing to work in one of my games and the programmer said that he had no idea what I was talking about. SHEESH.
| Jul 10, 11 | Way Of The Exploding Fist |
| Apr 24, 13 | Black Tiger |
| Jul 1, 11 | Super G Man |
| Jul 3, 11 | Paradroid |
| Jun 9, 11 | Toobin’ |
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