This diary reveals thoughts and feelings that C64 games have woken in the C64hq staff after hours of playing the games to their completion, checking that the games work and taking screenshots along the way. 2006-09-03: Emerald Miner Emerald Miner (1989) is a privately made and sold action game that lies somewhere between Boulder Dash and Dig Dug. It draws its inspiration from a commercial Amiga game called Emerald Mines. As in Boulder Dash, we control a miner who moves under the ground, digging through it in search of emeralds. There are various things to avoid, including bugs, falling boulders, and water that fills up caverns rather quickly. Already in level 3 we meet the deadly water. As water moves almost as fast as the miner runs, it is important to find out ways to stop it from expanding to all caverns. A number one observation is that water expands only down and sideways. Therefore it is possible to safely mine a cavern even below water as long as you make a short upwards tunnel to stop the water from chasing you. Also small, confined trickles of water can be eliminated with bombs. Keys are needed for doors that lead to further levels. Keys can also be used to open chests that contain random items. It is always good to keep a few extra keys in your pocket. Some levels do not provide you with any keys, and it is well possible to get stuck in a level when you run out of keys. Therefore it is also advisable not to open boxes when there are no spare keys around. The game mechanics appear to be less finetuned than in Boulder Dash, for example. When digging through ground, first a piece of ground disappears and after that the miner moves into the empty space. This makes it possible to get caught under a boulder when you dig through a thin layer ground with boulders stacked on top. In Boulder Dash this never happened. In Emerald Miner, it does not happen always, but sometimes it does, and it may become a bit frustrating to guess when it happens. It also seems odd that explosion chain reactions proceed upwards infinitely fast, but downwards they proceed only one block at a time. Emerald Miner's level design makes most of the challenges optional – if the player wants, he can quite often run straight to the next level. But if he so chooses, the player can try to gain maximum points by rolling boulders on each other and collecting the resulting emeralds. There are practically 35 levels in the game. Some early levels contain text, such as level 6 which states "Hi Dan! This is not Dig Dug 2". Levels 7, 25 and 33 appear to be nearly identical. Level 35 has the text The End written into it. The only exit in this level is located at a far corner, surrounded by brick wall that is immune to bomb blasts. This level seems impossible to complete. Still, there are more levels in the game, all the way up to level 42. You can reach the levels after 35 by a trick that I found by accident. First, prepare two copies of the game disk. One is to be the original disk, and the other is an exact copy except that the disk label is changed. I named it "c64.com" "00 2a" but probably other names work too. Then play the game normally with the original disk, until in level 34 switch to the renamed disk. When you finish level 34, the game tries to read the next level. But because the levels are stored in the directory track that has been altered, the loading fails and you get level 34 again, only that the level number is this time 35. Now switch back to the original disk and complete the level again. This time the loading succeeds and you get level 36. When you finally complete level 42, the game jams, so apparently there is no level 43. 2005-12-04: Total Recall, Predator 2, The Predator Total Recall (1990) is a typical licenced game. The game presents some scenes from the movie and keeps the player busy with the usual kind of platform and driving action. As a hint to the second level where you drive a car, there are two ways across the river, and the lower one is just too slow. The best thing in this game is the ample endscreens. Also the music is moody, although the in-game graphics do not seem to support the mood. Predator 2 (1991) is another movie-based game. In this Operation Wolfish shoot'em up we advance step by step along the general lines of the movie. The game seems a bit vague as many times nothing special happens on the screen except for the masses of drug gangsters walking here and there, shooting every now and then. Towards the end the game becomes very hectic. I had to use a credits cheat. I played the crack by Fantastic 4 Cracking Group, and it seemed to have some bugs concerning the use of rockets in the later levels. I suspect these bugs are not in the original game. The Predator (1994) is a crappy game made in Shoot'Em Up Construction Kit. The game contains graphics ripped from Predator 2, and also the game is in the same genre. We shoot everything that stands or walks on the street, advancing from a level to another. After the eighth level the backgrounds remain mostly black, so I assume the authors did not intend the game to be played any further. I played the crack by The Bingo Team. 2005-12-03: Breakthru, Dare Devil Denis, Darkman, Navy Seals, Mag Max, N.O.M.A.D Breakthru (1987) is a technically very low-quality game that still manages to keep me entertained. Gameplay is rather crude as are the graphics and sounds. We drive a breakthru vehicle through various scenarios in an effort to recover a stolen USG111 spyplane. The spyplane's model somehow reminds me of U.S. Gold who released this game. While we drive on, enemy vehicles keep appearing and driving all around the screen, greatly disrespecting physical laws and other plain facts of real life. There are obstacles that we can jump over by pressing Space. The game keeps a nice flow of variation going, at least in the first levels, and that pleases me. A big downside is that from level 3 on I could not shoot properly anymore. For some bug-like reason my bullets disappeared immediately after being shot. That made the game a bit more difficult. Luckily it is not necessary to destroy almost any enemies to proceed in the game. This bug happened in both the Mad Max/MHI crack and the Triad crack. I did not encounter the bug when playing the Computerbrains crack using their sprite collision cheat. Dare Devil Denis (early 1980s?) is a platform with the genuine early 1980s atmosphere. There is a lengthy background story involving thoroughly bizarre things like eating porridge for invulnerability. There is also the standard classical music SID transcriptions playing on the background. It all gives a very personal touch to the game. I can imagine Simon Pick programming this game in a room by himself, implementing ideas to the game as he figures them out. Note that the game calls itself Dare Devil Denis even though the game's package calls it Daredevil Dennis. I respected the programmer's opinion in choosing which will be the name of the game in our database. I played the game using the Trebla crack. I was unable to find a crack where the cracker would not have altered the game in some way. All the crackers had written their name in one of the screens that you see in the beginning of the game. Darkman (1990) is based on the movie with the same name. The game is basically a beat'em up but it includes also middle phases where we take photographs of people, run over rooftops, or hang from a chopper on a rope over a highway. The game is presented in a smooth fashion; the graphics are neat and the title tune is good. Towards the end, however, the special moments do not top those that you have already seen in the first levels. The ending is rather disappointing. I completed the game using the crack by Triangle. Navy Seals (1990) has a typically American theme. We, Navy Seals, the protectors of the world, must go and shoot some Arabs. Despite the politically doubtful clothes of the game, it provides interesting strategic action content. The game is a platform but not brainless in action. Any bullet can kill, so you must be careful in your actions. We also have a rather wide selection of moves, and so do the Arabs. However, the enemies mostly stand put and shoot in our general direction. Usually it is easy to avoid a bullet because the Arabs only shoot while standing. Ironically, in the last level they have also learned how to squat. By shooting green boxes you may find life replenishment or random weapons. Even though different levels have different names such as Harbour and Hostages, in all of them we just have to plant time bombs to packs of Stinger missiles. I completed the game using the Legend crack. Mag Max (1986) is a shoot'em up from Nichibutsu much like Moon Cresta. In both games the hero can be built up from pieces that you can find here and there. In Mag Max the building up just does not seem to help much – our spaceship gets a lot bigger and is thus an easier target. The extra firepower that the three additional pieces give us is not very necessary as all the enemies can be killed by just one regular shot. Another thing that seems odd to me is that progress in Mag Max is not shown in any structured way. The scenery changes every now and then but nothing relevant happens. The same enemy attack formations approach you time after time. Three times I was ambushed by a boss monster. Every time after shooting it down, the same old thing continued. Here is a hint for the boss monster: When it appears, there is a second or two before it starts shooting. Immediately move very close to one of the two heads of the boss and shoot it. As you are very close, your shooting is very rapid. The head should die in a fraction of a second. Then shoot the other head in the same way. I played the Triad crack of Mag Max. N.O.M.A.D (1986) is a rather original shoot'em up. We control some kind of a robot in technically decorated corridors and rooms. There are stationary guns and moving creatures to stop us, but we can shoot all of them. Furthermore there are doors that can be operated by switches. The corridors branch but in general all the branches lead to the same place unless you get confused and start circling. In the end you find a boss monster. After you kill it, you restart the level without much celebrations. Controlling the robot is tricky. First of all it is not always clear which direction you are facing. Furthermore, turning while moving results in a few uncontrollable extra turns, and whenever you hit a wall, you bounce off facing a totally different direction. Add to this the gravity in some rooms and you really have a big control mess in your hands. Sometimes when you bounce from a wall, you may jump back into the wall and get stuck. I played the Newlook crack of the game. 2005-11-30: The Addams Family The Addams Family (1992) is a nifty platform game from the late era of the C64. The game is pleasantly full of things, and gameplay feels good. There are lots of little puzzle-like things to solve which mostly concern how to jump from a place to another. Remember to jump on enemies to bounce higher. I completed the game using the Enigma crack. After loading a new level some crap appeared on the left and right side of the screen. It went away, however, when I died all my lives and used a credit to start again from the new level. 2005-10-13: The Time Machine The Time Machine (early 1980s) is a text adventure written by the grand man of text adventures, Brian Howarth. Location descriptions are short and there is not much content in the game, as is common to Howarth's games. To those who wish to play this game, note that pressing Enter, i.e. giving the empty command, displays important information about your location in place of the crude graphic display. Also, as usual, the command I or Inventory shows your inventory, Save saves the game, and Quit quits. I completed the game using the X-R crack. 2005-10-12: Where's My Bones 2 Where's My Bones 2 (1986) is a hack by The Tapebusters Team (TTT) on the game Where's My Bones? by Lee Braine. TTT has edited the game, changing the titlescreen, sprites, and levels. All the three levels are more or less based on the sole level of the original game. The second level contains a lot of text written into the level's walls. The third level seems to be exactly the original game's level. The sprites are ripped from Cauldron and perhaps from Monty on the Run. The player sprite is now smaller than in the original game, and it enables passage through narrower holes. In the first level there is one set of bones that does not disappear when you collect it. This results in repeated collection of more and more bones, finally reaching the number of collections required to complete the level. Apparently this is not a bug but a cheat intended by TTT. They even mention it in a text on the wall of the level. I played the Manik crack. 2005-10-11: Mega Paratrooper, Paratrooper, Paratrooper [Compute!] Mega Paratrooper (1990) is something quite awful for a game. The game seems to be severely unfinished, or maybe the authors never intended it to be really playable. The game is partly in German and partly in English. The first part, Gate 1 as the game calls it, is a bad joke for a shoot'em up. All you have to do is all you can do, and that is to keep your fire button depressed. There is some sprites moving on the screen, but it is all the same what happens and where your shots fly. You win by keeping fire depressed and that is all. Gate 2 is all about reading a cryptic telegram on the screen and then choosing the right equipment for a battle. There is no battle to be played, you just have to make the right choices or otherwise you are given a crude game over. After surviving Gate 2 you are rewarded by some actual gameplay. Gate 3 is the familiar caterpillar game where you control a worm that wants to collect fruits (or blocks in this case) while avoiding hitting itself. After a vague amount of playing (I collected over 3000 points) and dying (I died six times) you without any warning advance to the next Gate. If you do not manage to collect enough points before dying you get game over instead. Gate 4 is the ultimate fight according to the game. But instead of a good fight there is only a safe that you are to break into. The excitement of the gameplay is condensed into choosing between whether to move the joystick to the left or to the right. The safe has a dial with fifty numbers. You break the safe by first turning the dial down to the correct number. The correct number is revealed by one of the lock parts clicking open. Now you change direction and dial up to the next correct number. After finding all the four correct numbers, you press Fire and then you are probably supposed to see the end screen. Unfortunately it did not load properly in any of the three cracks I had. However, I was able to load the end part separately. Just load the file YA from the disk and you see it. I took screenshots using the Dominators crack. Paratrooper (early 1990s) is a small Swedish BASIC game, originally distributed on disk 10 of the Swedish SYS PD library by Softwolves. You can still find SYS PD on the net. Overall the game is quite entertaining, much due to its music and simple gameplay. The game appears very primitive, as if it was made in early 1980s, but the newschool soundtrack reveals that the game is from around 1990s or later. The High Voltage SID Collection states 1989 as the release year of the background tune which was made by Jens-Christian Huus, evidently before the game and not knowing of the game. On the other hand, the SYS PD index disk, dated 1993, lists the game along with the contents of all the SYS PD disks. That means that the game was released between 1989 and 1993. No further information on the release is available as the only identified author of the game, Peter Karlsson, also known as Mr. P, claims to have forgot details about the game. However, Karlsson recalls either typing the game from a magazine or copying it from another PD directory. He also claims to have modified the game, hence his name is in the credits. Paratrooper [Compute!] (1984) is another simple BASIC-made parachuting game, perhaps a model for the later Swedish PD game. Gameplay is simple and enjoyable. 2005-10-01: Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz Emlyn Hughes Arcade Quiz (1990) is a quiz game in arcade clothing. The game consists of several difficulty levels. Each has a scrolling checkered play area where you move. Each square may be a question, a coin, or some special square. Coins add up to your bank account which is also your score when the game ends. Money also enables you to buy easy access to later levels. You can complete a level in a fair way by moving on the play area faster than it scrolls. If you go too slowly – for example by getting stuck in a question square, answering many times wrong – you lose the game. This gives you the choice whether to just quickly complete a level or to stay there for a while, looking for bonuses. The questions come from several areas that are colour coded on the game area. There are lots of questions but still it is not uncommon to get the same question twice in one game. I found many of the questions rather nice. Some were difficult because they were rather specific to the British culture or the 1980s, but the other questions were often easy enough to answer correctly. 2005-09-28: All Terrain Vehicle Simulator All Terrain Vehicle Simulator (1987) is a racing game in the spirit of Kikstart. In ATV Simulator the vehicle is implemented in a cool way by giving separate sprites for the tires and the body of the vehicle. This gives a good feeling of off-road racing. Sadly, there are only six different levels, and they are rather short. After completing them all, you get back to the first one with a much stricter time limit. Like Kikstart, ATV Simulator has a two-player option with the modification that the screens of the players can move independently of each other. If one player cannot make the time limit, he is out of the competition and only the other one can continue. I played the crack by Lurid & Tricycle. 2005-09-26: Alien Smash, The Chrome Brothers, Fire Eagle Alien Smash (1992) is a game devised in the Shoot'Em Up Construction Kit. Alien Smash offers little content. There are easily defeatable boss monsters after every few screenfuls of normal shoot'em up action. The other enemies do not really give more surprises. I played the crack by Troep+Garbage. The Chrome Brothers (1992) is also made in SEUCK but gives more excitement than Alien Smash. Both games have the same author. The Chrome Brothers is a platform game with cutey style. The heros can only climb and shoot – and shooting helps in just about nothing because its takes lots of time to shoot down an enemy. So the interaction is pushed down to a minimum. But the three levels keep having tricky parts one after another. The most entertaining part though is to hear the hero's cute death squeak. Watch out for the P key as it resets the game. Fire Eagle (1992) is another shoot'em up made in SEUCK by the same author as The Chrome Brothers and Alien Smash. Fire Eagle is very difficult. Most enemies shoot forward at a fast pace, and we have only one forward-shooting weapon with no upgrades. This means that in order to kill the enemies we have to sweep in front of them, submitting to their firing. There are many places where the only means of survival is to know where the enemies will appear, and shoot them before they manage to shoot any bullets. Another nuisance is that sometimes after losing a life we reappear inside a wall, unable to get out. This of course results in another life loss. On the other hand, boss monsters can be passed by just waiting in a safe corner for a while. Shooting them down is good only for obtaining points for extra lives. I was unable to get the Laser crack of Fire Eagle running in the Vice emulator apparently due to some PAL/NTSC detection problem. In CCS 2.0 it ran fine. The other crack by Troep+Garbage worked fine in both emulators, and that is the crack that I ended up playing. 2005-09-18: Carry on Laughing Carry on Laughing (early 1980s?) is an oldie platform game like Manic Miner. Carry on Laughing is loosely situated in school world and extends into imitations of scenes from famous computer games of its time. Its nine levels feature school dinner, a school bully reminding me of Brutus from the Popeye game, an athlete impersonating Donkey Kong, a ship that could be from Tales of the Arabian Nights, a chemistry lab in the shape of Pipeline, and a few other scenes possibly with models that I do not recognise. The nine levels are located in a 3x3 grid. After completing one you can choose which adjacent level you move to. After completing each level you get a bonus. Alternatively you can avoid some difficult levels and move between the easy ones. Carry on Laughing is another gamer where I could not find a crack that had not messed up the game by changing texts into crack credits. I played the ABC crack of the game. 2005-09-15: Hyper Active Hyper Active (1988) is a fast-paced shoot'em up. The action consists mostly of flying around the horizontally scrolling game area and shooting lots of enemies. The levels are of four different kinds. Only in survival levels the condition for proceeding onwards is not just to kill everything. Instead, you must pick up static pods and deposit them into a yellow container located somewhere in the level. When you manage to get a highscore, you can enter your name in a cool highscore writer that transforms a letter into another in a 2D vector animation. A similar writer can be seen also in Mikie, which is programmed by the same guy as Hyper Active, Tony Pomfret. I played the crack by Hotline. 2005-09-14: Helikopter Jagd Helikopter Jagd (1986) is an enjoyable helicopter rescue game in the style of Choplifter. This time the rescue mission happens at sea. There are people in the sea, and we pick them up. We have to take care of the chopper's fuel level by picking up occasional yellow gas barrels. There are also a few different buoys and rocks in the sea. Inhabited buoys contain another person to rescue. A white beacon buoy is a place to drop the saved souls before they become too many, drawing the chopper down to the sea. There are of course jet fighters, boats, minichoppers and missiles to stop us. That is why our chopper is armed with a laser and bombs. Bombs are mainly for the boats, but you can even hit a missile or another flying thing with it. If you manage to do it, you hear a special sound effect. Any mid-air collision of the jets, minichoppers and missiles produces a parachute jumper – another person to rescue. After rescuing enough people on a white beacon buoy, you reach a new level with new dangers such as ufos. All the four different cracks of Helikopter Jagd that I managed to find have additional text in the titlescreen with the credits. Some of the original credits are replaced by cracker information. I played the crack by FCG, and it is also seen in the screenshots. The original text says "In conjunction with Quelle Soft" in place of "Broken and packed by Duke of FCG". 2005-09-10: Painterboy Painterboy (1987) is a Finnish game made as an advertisement for the Tikkurila company. Tikkurila has been a Finnish company making paints since 1862, and in the 1980s it started spreading also to other European countries (see www.tikkurila.com). The game is based on a series of Tikkurila TV-advertisements that were shown in Finland at the time. The advertisements involve a team of two paintermen, a senior expert and a young apprentice. The common factor of the advertisements is that the apprentice is distracted by a gorgeous lady, and the older man is commanding him to focus on his work instead of flirting with girls by saying "Poika, eipäs pelehditä!" The interjection "Poika!" is also sampled into the game. The game itself consists of the two paintermen doing their job. First you choose the correct paint for the next target. If you choose wrong, the senior painter will scold you. Then you drive around the city area, seeking the place to paint. While driving you get some direction help from the black and white compass rose on the lower left part of the screen. The white squares point towards the place you are supposed to find. When you manage to reach your target – easily recognisable by a flashing Tikkurila logo – you start controlling the apprentice, and your goal is to paint the building. Beware of colliding into the senior painter – he actually does nothing to help you in your job – and into other living things running around the place. You can even spot the girl from the TV-advertisements. Pressing fire puts your hand into a vigorous painting motion. Paint all the blue areas into red. By pulling down on the joystick while painting you can bend down to reach low parts. To pass over to the other side of the senior painter, walk out of the screen and keep on walking to that direction until you come out from the other edge of the screen. The game ends when you have crashed your paint van three times or when the clock has turned from 11 to 12. The game does not contain credit information, but searching on the net you can find a CV of Teijo Pellinen where he lists Painterboy as one of his merits. I played the Hotline crack of the game. 2005-09-04: Magic Carpet, Oils Well, Manic Miner, Paratroopers, China Miner Magic Carpet (1984) is a simple arcade game where we fly a magic carpet through three caverns. The caverns provide little content but lots of variety. Controlling the magic carpet requires good precision and dexterity as is common to early C64 arcade games. Oils Well (1983) is an arcade game that distantly resembles Pac-Man. We control an oil drill that has a very Pac-Manish tip, trying to collect all worthy droplets from the cavern. There are little critters around that we can also eat. But if the critters hit the oil pipe, it breaks down. There are eight levels of increasing difficulty. The game gets hectic in the later stages when you have to return the pipe repeatedly back to the surface just to eat some critters that are just about to bite the pipe. Many cracks of Oils Well throw you back to the BASIC prompt when it is time to show the high scores. Soft resetting the C64 puts you back to the game. One version shows a T on the top left corner of the game screen. This is probably the signature of the cracker. I completed the game using the crack by Desperado. Manic Miner (1983) is one of the classic platform games of the early 1980s. There are 20 non-scrolling levels that prompt you to collect a set of keys and then reach a gate to jump to the next level. Loyal to the early 1980s platform game style, each level has a name, a set of lethal critters, and a layout often tied together by a loose theme. Level 2 is called The Cold Room and it is equipped with penguins, level 8, Miner Willy Meets the Kong Beast, has a supposed Donkey Kong creature and a few barrels rolling on the platforms. Level 10 is The Endorian Forest and it contains creatures that perhaps imitate the Ewoks from the Star Wars movies. Some of the levels have special effects. In level 5, Eugene's Lair, after you pick up the last key, a big white monster (probably Eugene himself) descends rapidly onto the final gate. You can only complete the level if you leave as the last key the one that is closest to the gate. In level 19, Solar Power Generator, there is a beam of light that is reflected whenever a mirror carrying critter gets in its way. There is a crack of Manic Miner where Tim of Laser Cracking Service has built a screen editor. This version goes by the name Manic Miner Construction Set even though it is nothing but the original game with the home-made editor attached as a loader menu to the game. I completed the game using the Remember crack. In level 19, Solar Power Generator, I faced odd behaviour that is probably a bug in the original game. After jumping on the platforms for a while, Miner Willy suddenly started walking in the air, one block above the platforms as they appeared on the screen. Dying reset the odd behaviour but it soon occurred again. Paratroopers (1983) is another classic arcade game from the early times of computer games. This C64 version is pleasantly configurable. We can choose between single and rapid fire, normal and guided missiles, mobile and stationary bse, and vertical or angled fire. Guided missiles change direction in air along with the gun turret that we control. It is possible to send a series of slow shots in the air and then make them wave through the air, sweeping enemy aircraft on the way. I played the game using the Remember crack. China Miner (1984) is an oldschool platform game in the vein of Manic Miner. China Miner, being a later product, improves on Manic Miner in sound and graphics, and contains the same kind of humour as Manic Miner. Level 3 is called Manic Minter and it features little jesters with a J printed on their shirts. This may be a reference not only to Manic Miner but also to the game-maker legend Jeff Minter. Level 5, Loony Jetman, features four men in space suits and a jetpack. This supposedly refers to the Lunar Jetman comic and game. Level 6, Fort Apuckerlips, featuring kissing lips and blinking laser gates, reminds us of the game Fort Apocalypse which has laser gates similar to those seen in level 6, at least to my memory. Level 11, The Yobbit, featuring odd punk-like creatures, obviously refers to J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. Level 12, Horace Goes Walkabout, features weird deformed creatures that are actually straight imitations of the Horace creature that features in the C64 games Hungry Horace and Horace Goes Skiing. I completed the game using the Manik crack. 2005-09-02: Where's My Bones? Where's My Bones (1984) is an arcade game, quite similar in style to the later game, Caverns of Eriban, by the same author, Lee Braine. The game is almost a platform game, but you do not move on the platforms. Instead, you fly. This little twist in game mechanics may seem small, but it may be the first step to branch off a new minor game genre off the platform games, cave flying games. Even if this is not a big merit, people still remember Where's My Bones from the 1980s as a game they found interesting. I completed the game using the great Lucid & Tricycle crack. 2005-05-06: The Big 100 collection The Big 100 collection was released by Wicked Software. It was used as inspiration for the C64 Crap Game Competitions (C64CGC) in 1999 and 2001 (http://www.cgc.cosine.org.uk/index.html). The Big 100 is said to be one of the worst compilations of crappy games. And there is something true in that. Most, if not all of the games are programmed in BASIC, many are hastily translated from another language, and playability in general is a bit this and that. Also the games lack a lot on the technical side. But there is also something good. Some of the games have a good idea and they are amusing or interesting at least for a while. Read below for more comments on each game. To be precise, the collection contains 100 games and 1 utility. The utility program is Invisible Clock which displays the time in the bottom border. Some of the games appear as many copies with varying names, so the number of different games is 96. 0 and X can also be found as Noughts and Crosses. Only the filename differs. The same happens with Draughts and Checkers, Golddigger and Gold, and Nailboard and Shuffleboard. 2005-06-24: Pengo, Rocky, Space Maze, Starfighter, Zap! Pengo (early 1980s?) is a primitive version of the game known as Petch or Pengo. In the original game the monsters can be killed by crushing them with movable blocks. In this Pengo by Courbois Software I was unable to kill all the monsters. In fact the remaining monster was able to walk through all walls and even out of the playfield. It seems that this game was not finished when it was released. Rocky (early 1980s?) is a boxing game for two players. There are only two kinds of punches – stomach and head – and seemingly no blocking moves. I was left missing a stamina meter for the players. Currently the only warning for a knockout is the raising hiss of the audience. Space Maze (early 1980s?) is a version of a classic game of accuracy. We fly a spaceship through an ever narrowing tunnel, avoiding collision with the walls. The controls feel sticky and the game is slow. Compared to the low quality of the game, the Get Ready screen surprised me with its existence. Starfighter (early 1980s?) is a shoot'em up probably inspired by the Star Wars movies and the Buck Rogers game. Nothing much happens in the game. We keep on shooting alien ships that look a lot like TIE Interceptors. Every now and then our ship speeds up for a while as a sign of achievement. Zap! (early 1980s?) is a simple game of accuracy. Enemy missiles fly across the screen and we are to shoot them down. Everything flies slowly – at least in the beginning – and the distance from our gun to the missiles is long, so a proper hit requires some aiming. After a while the number and speed of the missiles increases. Despite its simplicity, Zap! works nicely as a whole and is a relaxing game for a while. 2005-06-23: Flight Simulator, Klondike, Shuffleboard Flight Simulator (early 1980s?) is a flight simulator almost identical to High Flyer. You are to land a plane. Press A and D to tilt the plane, W and X to lift and drop the nose. Space toggles undercarriage. The minus key shuts down the engine and turns it back on. I found no other way to slow the plane down. Klondike (early 1980s?) is a Solitaire card game with an interface similar to the computer game Patience. The computer Klondike differs from Patience in that you can bet on your play. There is also no possibility to shuffle the deck in Klondike, and drawing happens card by card. Shuffleboard (early 1980s?) is a two-player computer version of the traditional game Shuffleboard, known in the early times in the UK also as Shovelboard. The objective is to push disks along a long table, trying to make them stop at targets that score the most points. 2005-06-22: Crash!, Push, Space Hit, Alien Attack, Tennis, Centipede 2025, Crazy Golf Crash! (early 1980s?) is a Caterpillar game played against the computer. There are 8 different skill levels that include partly invisible worms and distracting aliens moving in the game area. The computer opponent is not very smart and is easy to win except maybe when the worms are partly invisible to the human eye. The filename is named Pathways, but the game calls itself Crash!. Push (early 1980s?) is a unique action puzzle game. We move in a rectangular area with lots of pushable boxes and a few enemies. We must avoid the enemies and at the same time try to trick them between the boxes. The enemies cannot be crushed, but they can be disposed of by surrounding them with boxes so that they cannot move anymore. This requires careful movement and fast thinking. Space Hit (1983) is a variation of the classic meteor avoiding game. We fly on a space ship in a meteor storm. A crash into a meteor is fatal. We can shoot meteors but it costs points. The variation is that there is a mothership that we need to protect. The mothership is unable to avoid the asteroids itself. Alien Attack (early 1980s?) is an arcade game reminding of Space Invaders. We are to destroy a big UFO. There is a horde of aliens in the way. A static mass of aliens acts as a shield in front of the UFO. We must shoot through it. Other aliens home in on us, trying to block our bullets or just trying to collide with us. The game is very fast paced and a bit difficult. For some reason the game filename is called Spy Attack. Tennis (early 1980s?) is a Ping Pong game for one or two players. It seems to be translated from Dutch as some of the text is not in English. The game is very simple. Centipede 2025 (late 1980s?) is a version of the classic Centipede arcade game. The game contains sprites from other games. The spider is from Forbidden Forest, and the scorpion is from The Great Giana Sisters. As the latter game was released in 1987, this game can be at most as old. Crazy Golf (mid-1980s?) is an arcadish golf game with a nice idea. Unfortunately the game lacks something in its implementation. The game is slow to play. Most annoying is to try to get past trees as the golf ball tends to get stuck. Apparently it is impossible to go over the large tree. The only way to the other side that I found was to hit through the tree trunk, avoiding the leaves. It worked at least a few times. After swinging to the hole the game changes into putt mode which is less annoying. This game could be very good with better implementation and more variation in the golf courses. 2005-06-21: Eagles and Gators, Grand National, Dubble Fighter, Miner 64 Eagles and Gators (early 1980s?) is a two-player game of reflexes. Both players try to conquer area with their animals. An animal can be assigned to pushing the area border further by pressing Fire at the right time. The game is simple but the idea is nicely fresh. Grand National (early 1980s?) is a game where you bet on race horses. Playing the game is mostly waiting for the slow horses to jerk forward on the screen. It is one way to get excited, and perhaps not at all worse than betting on real horses. For some reason the title screen shows bare garbage. Dubble Fighter (early 1980s?) is a two-player game where each player controls a jet fighter, trying to shoot the other down. The fighters move at a constant speed unless you push joystick forward which causes a speed boost. There are no fuel or ammunition limits. The game area is viewed from above and it wraps at the edges. I remember typing down a highly similar game with merely different graphics after seeing the BASIC listing on a Finnish computer magazine called Mikrobitti. I faintly recall that Mikrobitti called the game Top Ace. Perhaps the listing was published also on a few other computer magazines and somebody got the idea of selling the game. Miner 64 (early 1980s?) puts us in the shoes of a gold miner. We are armed with a drill, a pump, and some explosives. Normal ground can be digged with no sweat but granite requires the drill. Occasional underground streams flood the tunnels and we need the pump to get rid of the water. Explosives are another way to dig through hard stuff. Digging takes money, especially with the special equipment, so we have to surface from the mines every now and then to deposit any gold nuggets. There is a bug in the game. Once you are underground, you can blow up the hard ceiling of the mine and surface without the elevator. Then you can dig through the bank. 2005-06-20: Sea Search, Switcher, Torpedo Run, 2D Tennis Game, Cosmic Carnage Sea Search (early 1980s?) is a simple adventure based on historical facts. We challenge Vasco da Gama in search for India. The sea search starts from Lisbon, proceeds around Africa, and ends in the West Indies. The journey consists of events such as catching whales for food, and landing at rivers in search for supplies. Some events have action content, mostly in the form of typing the word "flee" as fast as possible. There are indeed many dangers. A pirate ship or a terrible storm may stop the journey short, and in many cases there is no way to avoid them. The main point in the game may just be to demonstrate how difficult sea travel was in the late 1400s. Switcher (early 1980s?) is a variation of the two-player game noughts and crosses. The game board is 5x5 squares, each having a neutral colour, or a colour of one of the two players. On his turn a player can either colour a neutral square with his colour, or he can rotate one row or column of the game board by one square. The winner is the player whose colours first form a straight line of five. The idea is innovative, applying noughts and crosses in a way that is easily implementable only on computer. Torpedo Run (early 1980s?) is a simple action game where you are to shoot enemy ships with your attack submarine. There is a line of friendly submarines in the war zone and you have to watch out not to shoot them. The positive things in this game include that it does not seem to contain bugs, and that of the little content, most is action. The game's name is written only in the filename. Use the cursor keys to move the submarine and Space to shoot a torpedo. 2D Tennis Game (early 1980s?) is a simple tennis game. As the name suggests, the ball movement regards only two dimensions. You control the movement of the ball by moving to the direction where you want to hit when you touch the ball. Moving towards the opponent's half gives the ball more speed while moving away slows it down. One can say that the game is mostly just a complex version of Pong, but as the game seems to contain all the rules of tennis that I know, it is more tennis than Pong. Cosmic Carnage (early 1980s?) is an arcade game in the vein of Space Invaders. Waves of alien ships slide closer and closer to us. They must be destroyed before they hit our spaceship. The aliens do not shoot. Further levels in the game are more difficult as the aliens start their slide closer to us. These increases in difficulty end after level 4, and all successive levels look the same. 2005-06-16: Casino Royale – Monaco, Flipper 9, Moonbase, Patience Casino Royale – Monaco (early 1980s?) is a computer Blackjack game. You can choose a one- or two-player game. The game is simple just like Blackjack. There is nothing much more than the excitement of when you will lose your money. Flipper 9 (early 1980s?) resembles a slot machine where you try to bounce a coin from the side of the machine into holes at the bottom. Flipper 9 has nine holes and you have 15 coins to fill all holes. The strength of your bounce is the only thing that determines where the coin falls. Moonbase (early 1980s?) is a lunar landing game that seems unfinished. First of all the game does not contain its name anywhere but in the filename. Secondly I found no way to actually land the lander. No matter how slowly I touched the pads, the result was always a horrible explosion. And by a horrible explosion I do not mean a big ball of fire but an immensely ugly sprite. Patience (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the card game known as Patience or Solitaire. The game allows three sets of rules. The differences involve the number of changes allowed. The game does not give any instructions on how to operate the cards, so here it comes. You move cards from a place to another by giving a pair of codes. Numbers 1 through 7 are codes for the stacks of cards marked with the same numbers, H is your hand, and A is the final stacks where you are to put the cards in ascending order of rank, each suit in its own stack. Pressing N draws new cards to your hand. Pressing C before a number lets you move a whole column of cards on one go. Finally, if you seem stuck, pressing Arrow Up shuffles the cards in your hand, giving you new possibilities. Even though I managed to crash the game a few times (try pressing C, number, H, number), the game is nice to play and I prefer the keyboard interface to the mouse interfaces of the computer solitaire games that were made a decade or more later. 2005-06-15: Stardragon, Treasure Quest, Bally, Canyon, Europe Quiz, Joe the Ball, Prisonball, Spacebomb, Submarine, Blocktower Stardragon (early 1980s?) is a very simple arcade. The goal is to shoot a star dragon piece by piece. Only head shots count. Our ship is easy to control. Otherwise the game feels quite repetitive. After destroying the star dragon three times you move to next level in which the dragon is longer and moves wilder. Annoying things include the flashing of sprites. The star dragon is mostly so long that on alternate frames you see only its head or its tail. The same goes for the ship and the bullets. This makes it also difficult to get interesting screenshots as all the dragons look like they are of the same length. Another annoying thing is that the name of the game is shown the first time after you have played one game. The title screen contains only very short information on how to play. Treasure Quest (early 1980s?) is a maze game dressed up as a text adventure. The goal is to find an old pirate treasure. The game contains no real parser. You can only give movement commands to the principal compass points, up, and down. The game map is not easy to draw, and most of the rooms are the uninteresting "you are in a twisty little passage" kind. There are a few landmark rooms such as the hall of the gnome king, a room with a book, a black hole, etc. It is possible to complete the game by just trying out directions until you get some idea how to get from one landmark place to another. Despite being very simple, the game succeeded in keeping me entertained for the few minutes I played it. Some room descriptions were surprising, and the game has a few surprising twists. This game is better than I first thought. Bally (early 1980s?) is a simple breakout game with rather innovative levels. The first is the classical brick wall. The second introduces a brick wall to your front and back. When the ball passes the bat, you lose a life. The third level presents a more complex variation of the second level. The game was apparently first called Squash but then hastily renamed to Bally. In the titlescreen you see an animated Squash text come on the screen but on the last minute it changes to Bally. During the game you see the name Squash all the time. The hasty renaming may have been done because the Big 100 collection where Bally appears has another breakout game called Squash. Canyon (early 1980s?) is a light strategy game for several players. The game offers also a one-player option but in practice there is no point in it. The game's idea is that players take turns in dropping bullets down the canyon. The canyon has spoons that can catch the bullets. If you hit the handle of the spoon, it turns and drops the bullet it is holding. The total number of bullets dropped below the lowest spoons determines the winner. F1 aims the bullet and F3 drops it. Europe Quiz (early 1980s?) is a trivia game where you are to know the capitals of European countries. The game is full of typos such as Belguim and Zwitserland. Joe the Ball (early 1980s?) is a game where you control Joe the Ball. Joe keeps on bouncing and you can only tell him to go left or right. Joe moves very stubbornly and he is in danger of getting blown up by spikes and brick walls that lie here and there. You guide Joe through a series of screens with increasing difficulty. Screen 6 is highly difficult. Screens 7 through 10 are very easy, and screen 11 seems impossible. Maybe that is why screen 10 says it is the last screen. Prisonball (early 1980s?) is an interesting breakout game for two players. Both players have their own bats. There are three balls on the field and five layers of bricks. If a ball gets past a player's bat, it appears on the other player's side. The player who has touched a ball the last time earns the points the ball makes in destroying tiles. At times the brick layers come back. I really like the way Prisonball improves on classical breakout. I would like to see a remake of this game with more care put into implementation. Even this game is well suitable for playing. Spacebomb (1983) is an action game where we try to find an atom bomb. The game has a serious flaw. When I enter the third level, it returns me to the BASIC prompt immediately. Submarine (early 1980s?) is a submarine simulator. We command the submarine Polaris. Armed with an infinite supply of torpedoes we are set to sink a given amount of tonnage. That includes transports and warships. Warships shoot back, so it is good practice to keep moving and stay under the surface. Commands for moving and aiming torpedoes are given in degrees in a top-down view on the battlefield. The simulation is fairly simple and thus also easy to enjoy without too much hassle with details. Blocktower (early 1980s?) is a computer implementation of the well-known mathematical problem called Hanoi Towers. You can choose towers from 1 to 7 blocks tall. The rules are the usual; you have three piles, and one starts with all the blocks stacked from largest to smallest. You move one block at a time and you can place only a smaller block on top of a bigger. You are to move all the blocks to another pile. The optimal solution is known to be exponential to the number of blocks, so you better start with small towers. 2005-06-14: Munchie, Safe-Cracker Munchie (early 1980s?) is an educational game that teaches addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Kids are lured into calculations with the help of the Pac-Man character. Addition is easy but at least the level 9 division exercises take quite a lot of time to solve without pen and paper. Or maybe I should just dig out a pocket calculator from the drawer. Safe-Cracker (early 1980s?) is a version of Mastermind. You are to guess a row of five colours, each of which can be chosen from 15 possibilities. Depending on the difficulty level the computer tells you if you have guessed a correct color and perhaps even if you have placed it in the right position on the row. The game seems very difficult as there is also a time limit for solving the right row. 2005-06-13: Astronaut, Battleships, Dragons, Grubs Astronaut (1983) is a two-player action game. Two astronauts in spacecraft fly around in a small arena and try to shoot each other. Due to a few serious bugs the game is in actual practice unplayable. There are eight directions for movement. If you face diagonally up and right and you shoot, the bullet does not fly but stays put in air. An even more serious bug is that if you try to move diagonally down and right, you die instantly. Unless you change your course immediately to some other direction, you will lose all your lives successively and lose the match. The BASIC listing of the game reveals that the game was made by Elwood Computers in 1983. Battleships (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the battleships game that is usually played on pen and paper. You can play against a friend or against a computer if you leave the second player name empty. The game does not respect the rule that no two ships must occupy adjacent squares. The titlescreen of the game says Battleship, but the real name of the game is Battleships. It can be seen in the BASIC listing of the game. Due to a bug the last S is not displayed in the titlescreen. If you go edit the program code on line 40 and move the game name one character to the left, you will see the whole name of the game. Dragons (early 1980s?) is a simple action game. You move among dragons, trying to kill them all. You can defeat a dragon by standing in the square in front of its feet, diagonally below his head, and pressing Fire. Entering a square adjacent to a dragon's head gets you killed. The program listing contains some remarks apparently written in Dutch which may give some hints of the original author and language of the game. Grubs (early 1980s?) is another Caterpillar lookalike. In Grubs you do not grow length when you eat apples. The game area is static. After you have eaten all the apples without touching any poison, the game ends bluntly. 2005-06-12: Daredevil Dave, Gold Rush, Matchbox, Ping Pong, Smasher, Star Ship Entry, Tug-A-War Daredevil Dave (early 1980s?) is a cute little game where we play the role of Daredevil Dave, a daring motorcycle stuntman. Dave knows his job very well, so all that the player must do is choose the right speed for different jumps that Dave must perform. Too slow and too fast a speed will result in an accident. The stunts become more and more difficult as you pass them. Finally you face an impossible jump. Gold Rush (early 1980s?) is an original variation of the classical Caterpillar game. The player controls a man who is to collect pieces of gold within a time limit of two minutes. He must not hit the borders of the game area or trees and other random objects. The man moves very quickly and thus he must be controlled with precision. After collecting all the gold in the area the man moves to the next level with a different shaped game area. Level 6 and all later levels have plain rectangular game areas. I noticed one bug: when moving with joystick, the movements for northeast and northwest are reversed. Matchbox (early 1980s?) is a puzzle game where you change colours of 3x3 squares in an attempt to produce a given pattern. Colours change from orange to blue and back to orange. You can only operate on orange squares. When you change an orange to blue, some of the surrounding squares change their colours too. Which squares do it depends on which square you operated on. There are five different target patterns to choose from. Ping Pong (early 1980s?) is a simple text mode breakout game. The bat cannot affect the direction of the ball so the game gets frustrating when there are only a few tiles left to clear. Further frustration is caused by the unpredictable movement of the ball and the nasty fact that the bat is sometimes a lot slower than the ball. Smasher (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the common amusement park attraction where you have a hammer to smash heads that peek out of a dozen of holes on a board. In this computer game you press numbers from 1 to 8 to smash at that hole. You have one minute for smashing. The game is rather minimalistic but surprisingly close to the original. Star Ship Entry (early 1980s?) is a simple arcade game where we try to land our space ship past a few blocking ships. The game boasts with its bad and typo-filled English "...for even more enjoyment this game was invented with a 3D veiw as if you are realy there trying to land your own space fighter." Tug-A-War (early 1980s?) is an interesting computerisation of the classic outdoor sports game tug of war where two parties pull a rope trying to obtain all of the rope to their side. In this computer game the rope is replaced by a sequence of squares coloured with four different colours. There is also a mark located in one of the squares. On their turns two players choose how many squares from their end they want to change colour. The players have the opposite sequences in which the colours change. If you change the colour of the mark, it moves one or two squares according to which colour it was on originally. 2005-06-11: Golddigger, Aktiv, Pacman Jnr., Row Boat, Space War, Supermaze, Worms, Adonis, Beekeeper Golddigger (early 1980s?) is a simple collect game. You walk underground between randomly placed rocks and gold nuggets. You can pick up gold and you can blow up rock with the 10 dynamite charges that you have. Whenever you blow up a charge, new rocks appear in random positions. Be sure to go deposit your gold back home before you run out of dynamites. The new rocks have a bad habit of blocking your way home. Aktiv (early 1980s?) is a physical training program, quite far from a game unless you consider physical exercise as a game. You can select a difficulty level. It determines how many repetitions there are of each move. You can also select the number of minutes you want to practice. After this the program shows you the moves that you apparently should do along. The Big 100 collection calls this program Keepfit Fanatic but the titlescreen shows Aktiv as the name. This was most likely a cheap attempt to rename the game for an English audience. Pacman Jnr. (early 1980s?) is a very simple Pac-Man game. It is in text mode, there is only one level, one enemy, no sounds, and no power pills. Row Boat (1983) is exactly the same game as Baby Monty which is allegedly written by Antony Crowther. Row Boat claims to be made by Elwood Computers. Even the graphics are the same in both games. The only difference is the titlescreen. It also seems like Row Boat has some occasional sprite bugs. Also the number of boats seems to be 0 at all times whereas Baby Monty shows the correct amount of moles left. Space War (early 1980s?) is a terrible game. It seems to make an attempt at being Space Invaders but fails horribly by total lack of playability. Sprite movement is very blocky and there is almost no feeling of being in control of the game. Our spaceship's bullet imitates the sideways movement of the ship and does not hit enemies every time when the sprites overlap. The game over screen crowns the horror by flashing the border black and white in an obvious attempt to trigger an epileptic fit in the player. This is the worst game I have seen. It must have taken effort to make this game as repulsive as it is. Supermaze (early 1980s?) is a maze game. We are in the middle of a maze we do not know and we must get out. Luckily the game builds the map of the maze as we proceed. We can even have a peek at the whole maze by pressing Fire. Oddly the congratulations screen after getting out of the maze flashed by my eyes very fast. Maybe it is a bug. Worms (1983) is a fairly good Caterpillar game. There are 16 different levels. In each you have to collect five sweets that make the worm grow longer. After the fifth, exits open to the sides of the game area. Adonis (early 1980s?) is an enhanced version of Ghosty by Elwood Software. Adonis does not carry copyright markings. Adonis improves on Ghosty in graphics and in gameplay. Falling into the moat does not kill you but only gives you penalty points. Your goal is to survive for 60 seconds. Beekeeper (early 1980s?) is an arcade game of some sort. Unfortunately I was unable to operate it. The game instructs the player to use the joystick. Only joystick in port 2 seemed to have effect. Fire button made the hero fire, but pushing the joystick created only a ticking sound without any movement on the screen. My experience with this game is thus very limited. 2005-05-15: 10 Pin Bowling, Airraid, Chopper 1, Ghosthunters, Keno, Pinball Arcade, Space Galaxy, Super Pinball, Battlestar Fighter, Draughts 10 Pin Bowling (early 1980s?) is a simple bowling game. The game rules seem to be correct. Hitting the pins is sometimes very difficult. Once my ball managed to slip between to adjacent pins without hitting either. On the other hand, once you find how to do a strike, you can do it almost every time. Airraid (early 1980s?) is an arcade wargame where you shoot down black bombers from a pitch black sky. You have a cone of light and three flares to help aiming. There is some interest in the game but the pace is terribly slow and the action seems to get a bit repetitive after a while. Chopper 1 (early 1980s?) introduces a familiar game scenario – a big city is under an attack by a UFO. The rules of the war are clear: The UFO cannot be shot but to be fair it only drops 100 bombs on the city. Our chopper must defend the city by shooting the bombs. There's a lot of action, which makes this game better than an average game in the Big 100 collection. Ghosthunters (early 1980s?) is a game very similar to Ghosty. Ghosty is made by Elwood Software and Ghosthunters is made by Elwood Comp. The authors are obviously the same. The game's controls are very blocky and slow. There is one amusing point though. All the ghosts smile in a very cute way. Keno (early 1980s?) is a gambling game in Las Vegas style. We try to guess a bunch of numbers that the computer has randomised. As in gambling in general, losing is inevitable, just like the game informs at the end. Pinball Arcade (early 1980s?) is an extremely simple pinball game. The ball moves horizontally at a constant speed, and the vertical movement is very limited. In fact I could not shoot the ball back to the top of the pinball machine once it had reached the flippers. The ball does not roll on any surface but sustains a jumping motion. Bumpers are the only objects on the playfield that score points. Space Galaxy (early 1980s?) is a lousy arcade game, just as the name suggests. We control a space ship that is to shoot alien ships. The aliens do not shoot back. The only way to die is to run out of fuel. But refueling can be done at any time by reaching the bottom of the screen. To top all this lousiness, the end screen says "Siruis has defeated you again!", with the typo. Super Pinball (early 1980s?) is a breakout game with an innovation. There are two bats to control, one for the right half of the field and one for the left. The game is quite fast and it requires lots of skill to keep the ball in the field. However, the physics is very simple. The ball moves only diagonally, there is no way to aim the ball, so when there are only a few tiles in the field, the game gets a bit stressing. Battlestar Fighter (early 1980s?) is an arcade game that seems to be inspired by the Star Wars movies – the enemy starships look like Tie Bombers. But there is something terribly wrong in the game. I was not able to hit the enemy ships even once. Many of my shots went straight at the enemy but I got no points and the ship was never destroyed. I believe this is a bug in the game. Even the title screen has a glitch. This game obviously did not go through any kind of quality control. Draughts (early 1980s?), also known as Checkers, is the game of draughts played against the C64. The rules did seem to have some quirks. At one point I was able to move my regular man two squares diagonally on one move. I was also able to eat my own piece, and I could eat an opponent's man with my man by jumping backwards. And once I was not allowed to eat an opponent's man by jumping forward. The C64 moved his kings always just one square at a time. The game was quite easy to win, perhaps because I took use of the unusual rules. 2005-05-08: Mastermind, Panzer, Quadrato, Snocat, Squash, Xyron Mastermind (early 1980s?) is the well-known Mastermind game on the C64. As the original game is very simple, there is nothing surprising in the computerised version either. Panzer (early 1980s?) is a simple tank simulator. Enemy tanks drive across a field and you must take a shot at them. If you miss, the tanks may shoot back. There are three tanks to choose from and they differ in turret speed, armour, and firepower. The most interesting thing about this game is that after staring at the checkered battlefield for a few minutes, shooting the tanks, when you look away from the screen, you have a nice optical distortion in your sight. Quadrato (1986) is a puzzle game where you try to find a given pattern from a randomised game board. You work against time. The game seems quite easy as I got a top score on my first try. Snocat (early 1980s?) is similar to the better known game Olympic Skier, and in particular its downhill part. Snocat is just a lot simpler. We drive a snow car to the top of a hill. The speed is terrifying and the hill is sparsely covered with trees. Luckily the car has brakes. Squash (early 1980s?) is a highly simple breakout game. There is just nothing special in this game. Xyron (early 1980s?) reminds me very distantly of Gateway to Apshai. Xyron just lacks content, playability, and immersion. 2005-05-07: Thunderbird, Yahtzee, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Backgammon, Caterpillar, Domino, Frogs, Haunted Castle Thunderbird (early 1980s?) is a breakout clone utilising simple character graphics. The ball cannot be aimed at all, so the game lacks the tactical aspect of Arkanoid or Krakout. Moreover the ball moves always rather slowly, so the game requires little reflexes. The goal is not to break all the tiles but to break through the tiles and let the ball escape to the opposite edge of the screen. As an extra, if the ball hits a punched tile, the bat – the Thunderbird – shoots a ray that creates three more tiles. Yahtzee (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the well-known dice game. There is no computer opponent. The game rules seem to be adapted well. Even though the game is in English, I managed to get an error message in German. Apparently the game was translated from German to English when it was put into the Big 100 collection. 3D Tic-Tac-Toe (early 1980s?) is a noughts and crosses game on a 3-dimensional board of size 3x3x3. There is no computer opponent. You move your pointer on the board only in two directions, left and right. The pointer jumps to the next row and to the next board when appropriate. Very simple but working. Backgammon (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the well known dice and board game. The game does not contain the gamble aspect of the original Backgammon game. But it does contain bugs. In the endpart of the game, when the players are bearing their checkers off the board, the computer opponent's checkers were left on the board when he bore them off. I had no idea that I was losing until the game was suddenly over – with a handful of the opponent's checkers seemingly still on the board. Also, whoever translated the game into English missed at least the phrase "Aai-ik ga de bar in", which should be something like "Argh, I go to the bar." Caterpillar (early 1980s?) is the classical worm game. In this version the worm cannot advance but to squares that are two squares from its body. The first line of the BASIC source listing contains the name Elwood Computers. I believe it means that the author is the same as the Elwood Software of Ghosty, another game found in the Big 100 collection. Domino (early 1980s?) is the domino block game using a double-6 set, played against a computer opponent. There is one exception to the common block game; you can only place your domino at the right end of the line of dominoes. There is also no scoring. The winner of a game is forgotten in the next game. Frogs (early 1980s?) is a puzzle where you are to lead two squads of four frogs across a bridge, the squads leaping over each other. The puzzle has an optimal solution, and once you find it out, there is nothing more to the game. Haunted Castle (early 1980s?) is a simple and slow arcade where you collect the witch's cats from her castle. 2005-05-06: Poker, Save Your Teeth, The Starlight Zone Poker (early 1980s?) is a very simple poker hand simulator. The title says it's you against the CBM64. But in reality you do not play against anybody. You gain score by getting good hands. There is no betting and no opponent. The game never ends. Your score just gets get negative if you lose too much. Save Your Teeth (early 1980s?) is a buggy arcade game. The concept sets us to defend teeth that are attacked by various kinds of teeth-rotting foods. The idea is funny and it closely reminds me of Jaw Breaker. But the game itself has at least one serious bug. The foods jumped to a totally different place a few times when I tried to shoot them while being on top of them with my toothpaste tube. Frustrating. The Starlight Zone (early 1980s?) is an extremely simple action game based on avoiding sprites. It dwells on the territory of Squish 'Em but lacks a lot of the magic of it. 2005-05-05: Bump-n-Run, Connect'em, E.T. Puzzle, Ghosty, High Flyer, Leaky Roof, Othello Bump-n-Run (early 1980s?) works on the idea of table hockey. Each of the two players control a target that is able to capture the puck. There is a goal in both ends of the playfield. The players must capture the puck, speed up the target, and then release the puck by pressing Fire. The puck glides on the field, hopefully hitting the right goal. If the targets bump into each other and one is carrying the puck, they exchange the puck. A simple idea that seems addictive. The controls are not that smooth though. Connect'em (early 1980s?) is another classic game that can be played with cross-ruled paper and pens. Players take turns to draw one line connecting two adjacent points on the paper. If a player manages to close a square he gets one point and he must draw another line. The paper in Connect'em is either 7x11 or 7x6 squares and at least with the bigger paper it takes quite some time to get to the interesting endpart of the game. The computer opponent didn't make very good moves in the endpart. There is also the possibility to play against another person. The texts in the game are a weird combination of English and Swedish. E.T. Puzzle (early 1980s?) is a computer version of the classic slide puzzle on a 3x3 board. In a slide puzzle, one of the squares is always empty, so the game's author has cleverly decided to use one sprite for each puzzle piece. After you complete the puzzle, you are rewarded with a windowbreaking interpretation of the E.T. theme. Ghosty (1984) is a very simple and lousily realised arcade game. We control a monk who is supposed to shoot down ghosts that threaten the monk's monastery. After finding a suitable play rhythm the game becomes rather dull. High Flyer (early 1980s?) is a simple flight simulator. We are in the controls of a passenger jetplane. The plane is running out of fuel and we have to land. The procedure is easy – slow speed down, take course towards the airfield, lower the altitude. Soon you will see the runway. Then lower the landing gear and touch down. Despite the simple procedure, the relatively fast pace of the game gives you good chances of failure. Quite a nice game for its simplicity. Leaky Roof (early 1980s?) is a very simple game where you collect falling waterdrops into a bucket, one at a time. The drops speed up, and very quickly many of the drops are totally out of your reach because the bucket moves only very slowly. Frustrating. Othello (early 1980s?) is the classic Othello board game with a computer opponent. The opponent has three difficulty levels. At least the second one was not very good as it gave me very easily possession of the all corner squares and most edge squares. 2005-05-04: 0 and X, Arcade Baseball 0 and X (early 1980s?) is a noughts and crosses game on a three-dimensional board of size 4x4x4. There is a computer opponent that provides some challenge. I lost my first three games but won the fourth. The best part in 0 and X are the comments the computer opponent throws in to cover the delay while it is thinking. I found the comments fairly amusing and even humane. I like this game. Arcade Baseball (early 1980s?) is a reaction game disguised as baseball. The computer pitches the ball and the player presses Fire on joystick port 1 to swing the bat. The ball flies to one of several holes. Each hole is either Out, 1 Base, 2 Bases, or 3 Bases. Depending on the number, the runners advance that many bases. There is also a two-player mode where the second player can pitch by pressing F1, F3, F5 or F7. Each F-key gives a different kind of pitch. 2005-05-27: Questprobe 1, Uuno Turhapuro muuttaa maalle Questprobe 1 (1984) featuring The Incredible Hulk is the first of the Marvel Comics text adventure series by Scott Adams. The game is quite short and repetitive. Many have said that this adventure is of the worst from Scott Adams. I cannot much argue with that. One of the funniest things in the game is when the Hulk says "The Incredible Hulk (Tm) very mad." To my surprise I found a version of Questprobe 1 that took a whole diskside and contained greatly enhanced graphics. The actual game seems to be the same in both versions. The regular, small version is marked Version 1c/126 in the game's title screen. The enhanced version is marked Version 3-127. It appears that the enhanced version is a re-release by Commodore because Commodore has its name in the first screens of the enhanced version and there is no mention of the company in the small release. Uuno Turhapuro muuttaa maalle (1986) is a Finnish game based on a movie with the same name and released in the same year. A Finn myself, I feel it is my obligation to explain some background to this game. Uuno Turhapuro is a fictional Finnish comedy character. There are around twenty Uuno Turhapuro movies all the way from 1973 until 2004. Uuno is a pig for a man. As he is thoroughly lazy, Uuno is happy to be married because his wife makes him food while he lies on the sofa. Uuno causes great distress not only to his wife but also to his father-in-law who is a well-off man. The game starts as Uuno returns home and finds a note from the fridge. It says "I guess this is where you will find this note the quickest. As you may have noticed, I have moved away. I will not tell where. My lawyers will contact you later. -Your ex-wife Elisabeth." The movie plot continues so that Uuno travels to his home village, and to his surprise he finds his ex-wife there. Also the father-in-law has moved to the village in an attempt to get far away from Uuno, not knowing that it is his home village. The village is under threat by a big road building project, so Uuno sets out to collect money in order to stop the building project. This is what the game is about. Uuno collects money (rahaa in Finnish) by plowing a field, waterskiing, and finally by looking for his father's illicit still in the woods. Remember to pick up bills in the woods. It seems that two of Uuno's good friends, Härski Hartikainen and Sörsselssön, can be spotted from the game. Sörsselssön rides a bike in the first level and Hartikainen is smoking a cigarette in the third level. Other characters include the father-in-law who wears yellow trousers in the third level, and Uuno's father who throws a rock or a similar object at Uuno in the second level. The game credits Amersoft and Nasse-setä Oy. I have a strong belief that Nasse-setä Oy is a joke. Nasse-setä is another Finnish comedy character, played by the actor of Uuno Turhapuro. And finally, please note that the correct Finnish spelling of the game's name involves only two capital letters, not four. The crack by Hotline seems to be screwed up. The font totally lacks the letters A and E and also some of the graphics is mangled. Also the crack by TWR seemes to have som slight sprite bugs. I completed the Byterapers+The Sharks crack of the game. 2005-05-26: Trivial Pursuit It was very difficult to arrange all the copies I found for Trivial Pursuit. To my knowledge, there are four versions of Trivial Pursuit: Commodore Genus Edition, Baby Boomer Edition, Young Players Edition, and Trivial Pursuit – A New Beginning, also known as Genus 2. Some of the versions are also translated to other languages. I found German versions of Commodore Genus Edition and A New Beginning, and a French version of Commodore Genus, and apparently there exists also a Spanish version of the game. The original games seem to have come on two disk sides. The first one contains the game engine and the second one contains additional questions. Some crackers have managed to squeeze the two sides on one, but some have not. The big difficulty comes from the fact that most of the cracks I found do not carry any signature of the cracker. Missing title screens cause extra trouble because it is just about impossible to name the game without the title screen. However, I tried to look how other C64 sites have named the games, and I also tried to look at the filenames on the D64 images. I managed to find a question disk that claims to be for the Baby Boomer Edition, but all the Baby Boomer game disks were actually copies of the tape version of the game, so the question disk is useless as it is. Of course one can try copying it into a tape image. In the middle of all the difficulties and ambiguities, I decided to complete and shoot Trivial Pursuit – Commodore Genus Edition and Trivial Pursuit – A New Beginning, both in English. Trivial Pursuit – Commodore Genus Edition (1988) is a computerised version of the world-famous trivia board game. The game comes with a few different question sets of which one can be loaded into memory before the playing starts. The questions include not only the regular ones that are written in text, but there are also tasks to identify a picture or to recognise a melody. The question procedure is implemented in an interesting way. It is of course very difficult and actually downright impossible to make a good trivia game judge out of a computer. Trivial Pursuit solves the problem by asking the player if he answered right. It is then up to the players to determine if the given answer was close enough to the one that the computer reveals. I completed the Hotline crack of the game. Trivial Pursuit – A New Beginning (1988) is a spiced-up version of the Trivial Pursuit board game. The basic rules of the game are largely the same as in the board game but the game has been dressed up as a challenge of space travel. Answering right to trivia questions gives you access to six items that correspond to the wedges of the original game. When you have all the items, you face a final question. 2005-05-24: Oh No!, International 3D Tennis Oh No! (1988) is a high-adrenaline shoot'em up in the vein of Insects in Space and Galax-I-Birds. We guard flashing dots called oxes. We cannot die, but the game ends when all the oxes have been stolen by alien transports. Hitting an alien merely bounces us around the area. Being in the right place at the right time is crucial in order to shoot the transports before the oxes are gone. It is worth knowing that shooting a red stationary alien gives you an extra oxe. Shooting a blue alien seems to help advancing to the next attack wave. The last, 11th level presents extra difficulty by having a spherical texture cover all the game sprites. After completing the last level you get to read about the game's authors' view of Wizball and Nebulus. I completed the Hotline crack of the game but took some of the screenshots from the Pulsar crack as it has the original titlescreen texts. International 3D Tennis (1990) is one of the few C64 games using 3D graphics. The tennis simulation itself is unsurprising to me. However, my experience with tennis games is minimal. It is sometimes difficult to hit the ball as it requires good timing. Also the ball sways left and right sometimes even while flying in the air. Pressing S in game (but not while the ball is on the court) gives you the scoreboard. Pressing number keys gives you different views to the court. Many of the views are totally useless while playing but may be fun to use when you let two computer players play against each other. A nice detail is that in a season game, the stadiums grow in size the farther you get in the games. One season takes awfully long to complete. There can be around 20 tournaments in one season, and in each of the tournaments you play up to 6 matches, maybe even more, depending on the size of the tournament. Each match contains 1-3 sets, depending on your choice. In each set you have to win 6 games in order to be successful. Of course you can lose some match but that will drop you out of the tournament. 2005-05-22: Insects in Space Insects in Space (1989) is a nice shoot'em up from Sensible Software. I fancy the simple yet impressive weapon of the heroine. Even though hitting an enemy requires some accuracy, rapid fire makes up all difficulties so that in the last hand the game is a lot about firing like a maniac. If you feel like doing some high-precision work, you can also concentrate on saving the little men that live on the bottom and top grounds of the world. They are constantly grabbed by killer bees. You have to shoot the bee, grab the man, and carry him back onto ground. Do not miss the nice if rather short title tune by Martin Galway. 2005-04-29: Kid Grid 2 Kid Grid 2 – Kid vs. Kid (2004) is a recent sequel to Arti Haroutunian's game Kid Grid. Kid Grid 2 was made by the group Hack'n'Trade by improving on Arti's game that was made over 20 years ago. The basic idea of the game is the same as before – conquer area on a checkerboard by outlining squares one by one. But as an extra twist the game has also a two-player mode. There are two Kids, controlled by joysticks in port 1 and 2. Kid and Kid compete for the ownership of the most squares. Both Kids have their own colour. It is possible to overwrite the other Kid's colour with your own. The regular monsters are there too to complicate the competition. No more is there a limited supply of lives. Kid and Kid are only stunned by the monsters. The two-player mode is an excellent idea. Duelling against another human makes the original game more interesting. There are different strategies to use against the human opponent. You can try to conquer new squares as fast as you can, or you can try to sabotage the other Kid's squares. Every detail in Kid Grid 2 is well done. The game retains the original look of the game but still manages to stand out from the original game. Playability is just like in the original. There are no bugs. The game comes with separate instructions that show wrong my earlier assumption about Kid Grid that the monsters are all alike. Thuggy is the most persistent monster whereas Squashface is the most unpredictable. Overall, it is remarkable how Mathman and Frantic of Hack'n'Trade took the trouble to improve on Kid Grid with such quality. Kid Grid 2 is a great distinction on Arti's original game. 2005-04-28: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles [Konami] Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles [Konami] (1991), also known as The Coin Op, is an arcade game about the mutant turtles. Compared to the turtles games of the previous year, this one is much more straightforward. The safest way to complete the game is to use only the jumpkick attack. While you are in the air you are invulnerable, and all attacks inflict the same amount of damage anyway. Just about the only exception to the jumpkick rule are the big robot bosses who are better dealt with by waiting them to come to your level, then hitting once, and running away. The crack by The Sharks lacks the two player option. The crack by X-Ray had serious bugs in the end of the sewer level when the boss should arrive, but luckily X-Ray also installed a level skip that can be activated by pressing backspace. If you press it before the bug appears, you can continue from the next level. I completed the game using the Hotline crack which worked all the way to the end. 2005-04-27: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (1990) is a vastly enhanced version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There are improvements everywhere in the game. First of all, there is a lot less loading during the game. This makes the game already a lot more enjoyable. Secondly, the game's controls have been altered to better suit fast action. Everything on the screen moves smoother. Jumping is performed by pushing the joystick up, not by holding Fire down as in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Graphics have undergone some slight modifications that make the game look a lot clearer. Sadly, all cutscenes have been removed as well as at least two huge boss monsters – a huge robochicken and an electrocuting tank. On the bright side, the removals contribute to the much smaller size of the game. There is one good general tip to be found in the game: Ultimate mastery is of the mind, not the joystick. In area 3 the jump to get the missiles for the party wagon is now very easy to do. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the jump was impossible. Also the party wagon doesn't move anywhere unless you have collected a bunch of missiles. In area 4 I was surprised to find out that emerging from one of the sewers was followed by my immediate return back to the same sewer. It required lots of tries until the game let me stand on ground and move away from the sewer instead of returning back in. I didn't notice a similar glitch in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And one final note on sloppiness: The very last text in the game talks about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. I completed the Triangle 3532 crack of the game. 2005-04-23: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) is such a frustrating platform beat'em up adventure that I can't figure out another as bad. People knew how to make platforms and beat'em ups already in the 1980s so why is this game crappier than any other? I don't know, but I do know what makes this game so crappy. First of all there is too much to load for such little content. There is loading before and after every little piece of sewer or house even though each of them is very short. Secondly, the action is very far from being ninja-like and exciting. The turtles move slowly, just like real turtles. Weapons – both the heros' and the enemies' – hit their targets from odd distances. The turtles are difficult to control; not only do their jumps fall down early way too easily when they just scratch a wall, but also the control to make the jump – hold Fire down – is too clumsy to have any positive effect in an action game where enemies don't wait for your Fire button. On top of it all the graphics look messy. For example, there are energy-reviving pizza pieces here and there in the levels, but the pieces are sometimes very difficult to spot from the background. Here are some hints for completing the game. Choose a trainer mode if possible. I found it infinitely frustrating to try to beat up the enemies without infinite energy. Mostly the game is just wading forward in enemy meat and collecting items as you spot them. In general, when you are on the map, you should just walk as far as you can, then enter the last building you see, beat your way to the end, and that usually completes an area. In area 2 there is a stage where you swim in caves and your objective is to disarm timed explosives. The trick of disarming is to hit the turtle's legs to the wire between the bomb and the timer. When it succeeds, you see the turtle wiggle for a while and after that the timer's red light will not flash anymore. In area 3 you find yourself in a city with barricades blocking some roads. The idea is that you find missiles that your party wagon can shoot to destroy the barricades. The problem is that the missile packs that you can access in the area blocked by the barricades are behind jumps that are seemingly impossible to perform. What I did was to jump into the party wagon (press Commodore on the party wagon to do it) and trick myself behind one of the barricades so that I could pick up another set of missiles. The trick uses the fact that a barricade blocking your passage to the east will push you left. But if you drive the party wagon south while the barricade pushes you, you can slide your wagon to the other side of a barricade. The rest of the game has nothing surprising. In the end there is some pizza as your reward for saving the world. The cracks of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Mirage, NEC, and Horizon seem all to be very close to being identical. If one disk is broken, it is possible to use the same disk from another crack. Mirage complains in the end of the instructions that can be found on the second disk of their crack that NEC and Horizon have ripped Mirage's cracks. The Mirage crack incorporates an unusual cheat program that changes the contents of the first disk so that on all successive loads you will have the cheats that you chose. I completed the game using the crack with the NEC crack intro. 2005-04-16: Blagger, Son of Blagger, Blagger Goes to Hollywood, and Blagger Junior Blagger (1983) is a classic platform game by Antony Crowther. It is easy to see what appeals to gamers in this game. The hero sprite is well animated, he is easy to control, the levels have themes along with semihumorous titles, and the game is challenging, yet not too difficult. The game should be possible to complete with a little practice. There is a joke release of Blagger by the name Blagger 2. It was altered from the original game by German Altering Company and released later in Venlo by Tristar. An even more interesting crack is the one by 1701. It includes a level editor. This release is also known as Blagger Construction Kit. It however includes the original game (with a few obvious alternations) and the level editor is seems to be rather hastily added to it, so I consider it a crack of Blagger instead of being a game of its own. There is one crack that I classified as unknown at first. But later I noticed that in the game's first level the enemy sprite which is a cart that originally was carrying an oil pump is now carrying the text 1302. Also the collectable boxes that was originally named Safe are now named Sune, and the hero sprite has an extremely long, wiggling nose! I took the liberty of calling this the 1302 crack. I completed all the 30 levels of the game using the Laser crack. Son of Blagger (1984) is a sequel to Blagger. This time the game area scrolls in all directions. Levels are located as rooms of varying shape inside the big game area. Completing a level means collecting all keys in the room and then moving through the level door. After the final, twelfth level you see a little bonus screen and get back to the first level. There are a total of three cracks of Son of Blagger by Me+Clonekid. Every crack is of different size. Perhaps successive releases were made after successful attempts to crunch the game into a small and smaller space. The games cracks don't seem to differ in other ways. I completed the game using the smallest crack from Me+Clonekid. Blagger Goes to Hollywood (1985) makes quite a long step away from the original Blagger games. It is not a platform anymore, and even the programmer is not Antony Crowther. At first sight this game feels a bit chaotic and unfinished and doesn't quite have the same intensive and intelligent feeling of Crowther's Blaggers. But after trying out the game for a while one can find some pleasing aspects. The game sets Blagger in a set of rooms. Each one is a setting from a famous TV-series or movie. Blagger wants to put an end to the hero of each stage. To do that, he needs the items that relate to that hero. To kill Superman, Blagger needs cryptonite. To get rid of Jaws, Blagger needs an air tank and a gun loaded with the right kind of bullet. Tarzan and James Bond can be killed with anything. The final adversary is Darth Vader and light sword is the right weapon. I beated all Hollywood stars using the crack by Ass. Check out also the solution I typed down for the C64 Walkthrough Site. Blagger Junior (early 1980s?) seems not to be a commercial release but carries close resemblance to Antony Crowther's Blaggers. The game begins with an instruction screen that is apparently written in Dutch. The actual game plays Jarre's Equinoxe 5 with an earshattering lead instrument. The visuals of the game seem so messy that at first sight the game looks like it is not meant to be played at all. But it is. The levels are completable despite the fact that the difficulty level has been geared close to the maximum. I completed all the ten levels of the game using the Computerbrains crack. 2005-04-12: Quasar Quasar (early 1980s?) is a shoot'em up with the third dimension. Quasar looks pretty much like Buck Rogers but lacks music. After playing some time I started wondering why nothing really happens in the game. The levels repeat with minimal variation and difficulty stays about the same. Very minimal. 2005-04-10: Aquanaut [Interceptor Software], Aquanaut [The Power House], Arctic Shipwreck, and Quango Aquanaut [Interceptor Software] (1984) is just about as difficult as an old action game can be. This might be characteristic of the game's author, Ian Gray. In the game we are to avoid homing missiles all the time. The missiles cannot be destroyed by shooting, only by making them crash into a wall. Our ship is as fast as the missiles which makes evasive manoeuvers almost impossible. There is one helpful thing to do. If you shoot the missiles, they slow down for a very short while and move a little bit up. By shooting a missile continuously you can make it hit the ceiling. You can also outrun a missile but that's sometimes a matter of luck. I can say straight that I would never be able to complete this game on a real C64 without any kind of cheats. Aquanaut [Interceptor Software] has several cracks many of which have a small but crucial quirk. In order to get proper colours in the game, you have to change the foreground color manually in the BASIC prompt before running the game. That is, after you have loaded the game by commanding LOAD"AQUANAUT",8,1 or similar, change foreground color to brown by pressing Commodore-2. Then command RUN. This way you get white foreground colour in the game. If you don't change the colour in the BASIC prompt, then the foreground colour in the game is the same dark blue as the background colour. You can also try out other colours by pressing Commodore and some other number between 1 and 8, or CTRL and some number between 1 and 8. It took me some hours before I figured out the fix to this colour quirk. My finding was guided by one specific copy of the crack by 1404. The copy had a short BASIC program that displayed some documentation to the game and then loaded the game. In the loader's listing I saw the colour change. Of course I didn't believe it was crucial, but after a lot of trying with different things I finally realised that the colour change was significant. One of the crappiest cracks ever made of any game is the Aquanaut crack by The Metro Boys. The game is jerky and slow. To add to the confusing feeling, the member of The Metro Boys who made the crack is called The Mafia Guys. How does it sound to your ear: The Mafia Guys of The Metro Boys? The Mafia Guys emphasises in his crack intro that he is just a person, not a group. Looking at the name it would not be evident. Despite the crappiness of the crack, some nice documentation is included in the release. I completed Interceptor Software's Aquanaut using the Computerbrains crack. Aquanaut [The Power House] (1988) is a somewhat uninteresting shoot'em up from the company that seems to be specialised in making games that are hard to grasp. The Power House's Aquanaut lacks something in gameplay. The hero submarine is slow in its movements and it is a bit frustrating to try to avoid the fast and more or less randomly moving enemy masses. One cool effect in the game is the narrowing tunnel where we avoid dark blue instant kill mines. The mines move with different speeds creating a nice visual depth effect. Power House's Aquanaut has been cracked by Ikari among many others. There are two imports of the Ikari crack. One import is by The Survivors. Their import intro calls the game incorrectly as Aquanoid. Another import is by Legend. After you press Space to exit their import intro, you can see a flash on the screen as the texts of the Survivors' import screen fly by, just to be erased off the screen as quickly as possible. It seems that Legend wanted to hide the fact that they imported an import. The Ikari crack doesn't work all the way to the end of the game. When the distance meter has reached the second to the last position, the scenery should change to something that resembles giant pumpkins. The Ikari crack shows garbage instead, and after scrolling a while the background stops totally. There are also no enemies to be seen. I completed the game using the Soldiers Against Protection crack which worked fine until the very end. Arctic Shipwreck (1983) has a cool idea for a game. We control a mammoth on an ice raft. There has been a shipwreck and the survivors are lying helpless on the raft. Situation is critical as the raft tilts very easily to all directions. The mammoth must run around the raft, balancing it so that the people won't fall off into the deadly cold water. There is also an occasional pterodactyl to pick one person as its meal unless the mammoth is to run into the big bird and drive him off. I got fascinated in the game so much that I played it until the 17th level which looked exactly like the 16th level. It occurred to me that levels are colour coded in the following way. Every time you complete a level, the colour of the sea changes. Colours are blue, green, black (although the Black Sea is not arctic at all), and red. After the sea colours have cycled back to blue, the colour of the people change. Possible colours are black, red, yellow, and gray. That makes 16 different levels. The score display looped back to zero after 99999. I played the Bombjack crack of the game. Quango (1984) is a Boulderdash-like game from Ian Gray. His very own puzzle-like thinking can be seen from the game's design. There are eight levels where we collect mushrooms. The levels consist of small subpuzzles, less than ten each. To solve a level it is enough to figure out how to get the mushroom from each subpuzzle. The puzzles are positioned one after the other so that once you figure out which direction to go in the first place, it is fairly easy to keep on track. It is important to keep on track because there are lots of dead ends in the levels. Dead ends are frustrating on one hand, but on the other hand they tell you that you are on the right track – just choose a different route from the last crossing. There is no such thing as a dead end in a place that is not almost the right route. The second level introduces slight variants to the first level. Subpuzzles still have the same basic solution but you have to improve on some details in order to stay alive. The third level is again the same as the first level. The game's manual talks about eight caverns but I guess that's just what the releasing company wanted but didn't get. Compared to Boulderdash, Quango is considerably simpler. There is the same basic game area in all the levels, with slight variations included in every other level. Once you understand to go around the level in counter-clockwise direction and you figure out how to solve each subpuzzle, it becomes fairly easy to survive in the game. This on one hand may make the game boring after a while. On the other hand it gives the player a good feeling of mastery. Once you get the trick, you can get much higher scores than your friend who just hasn't quite found the trick to one of the subpuzzles. The co-op crack of Quango by Cyborg Power Systems and Gotcha of GCG has some glitches in the game font. There is an unknown crack with even worse graphical glitches and where also the game sprites have been replaced by letters in the Quango title. I played the nice and recent Commo Bam crack. 2005-04-09: Caesar's Travels Caesar's Travels (1984) is a sequel to Caesar the Cat. The plot continues where the action game prequel left off. Caesar loses the battle with mice in the pantry and he is thrown out of the house. Caesar's big challenge is now to re-find his place in the world that is full of choices. The game has a strong educational edge, heavily weighed towards young children. The game proceeds by giving sets of options to the player. A similar game format can also be found in the much later game Steve Keene Private Spy. To choose your liking, press one of the F-keys. F1 is for running and walking, F3 for jumping, F5 for climbing, and F7 for hiding and waiting. On other screens you can enter an answer to a simple educational question concerning counting objects, naming a color or a shape, or recognising a melody. Pressing Enter gets you back to the previous screen in case you want to change your mind. Caesar has a total of 18 different futures to choose from. One of the most delighting is the one where he travels to Paris, climbs a lot of stairs which he later finds to lead to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and is taken as a pet by a friendly lady. Another nice one is where Caesar sees a building on fire, sees a man under burning wood, and shows firemen to help the man in distress. Caesar is rewarded with a medal and the firemen ask him to be their mascot. A third, even more unbelievable ending than the Eiffel one is the one where Caesar gets lost in woods, is captured by aliens, and starts a new life on Mars. 2005-03-24: Supremacy Supremacy (1990) is a fairly straightforward action strategy game. The user interface may be a bit cryptic, and that is what initially got me thinking that this game is complex. But after some hours of trying I got used to the controls and after that playing goes on smoothly. To start with, it is good to read at least the documentation provided by Dominators. To add some essential points to their writings, note that every space ship (excluding the solar panel) need a crew before it is of any use. Crew can be assigned in the cargo screen. Another important point is that you can transfer money from planets to your starbase with the big button with a yellow arrow and two planets on the left of the planet statistics screen. It took me a long time to figure these things out, so I hope this info will be of considerable help to anyone who decides to try this game out. I also found a copy of the game that works only in NTSC machines. This copy is titled Overlord and not Supremacy. It is the same game however. The only difference between the two versions apart from working with different standards is that the credit list in the PAL version mentions Tape Protection, and the credit list in the NTSC version mentions Disk Protection. Apparently one was a cassette release and the other a disk release. At least two copies of the game jammed after some playing. The jam was always the kind that when I sent a ship to another planet and the game prompted me for the destination, I could only move the cursor but no press of the Fire button would affect anything anymore. Also Space wouldn't work. In a normal situation I could have escaped the destination prompt by pressing Space. The jam was persistent in most cases even when I continued from a previous snapshot of the game session. Also the game save/load prompt had the same kind of jam as the ship destination prompt. I also encountered another kind of bug in Supremacy. A few times it happened so that one of my planets was under attack and I was about to lose the battle. I used to send a carrier with fresh platoons on the battle planet. But if I landed the carrier on the planet when I had lost the battle already, the carrier was lost. However, all the platoons inside the carrier stayed alive. I just couldn't control them anymore. This was bad because such useless platoons ate up the maximum of 24 total platoons I could have at any one time. At some point in the game – probably when I reconquered those planets – the stranded platoons were finally deleted from my lists. It was essential in order to win the second opponent. Supremacy gets a bit difficult with the two final opponents. I took the liberty of not completing but the first two of the four opponents. Luckily the crack by Dominators which was imported by A Touch of Class and retouched by North East Importers has an additional feature to see the end sequences when the game loads. I took the endscreen snapshot using that feature. 2005-03-16: Frankie Crashed on Jupiter Frankie Crashed on Jupiter (1985) is a humorous and fairly simple text adventure from Kingsoft. We are seemingly the sole survivor of a crash of our spaceship onto Jupiter. We try to get out and reach the city in Jupiter. There is no doubt about which company made the game because they advertise themselves throughout the game. They mention their previous games Grandmaster and Zaga in favourable light. For example the spaceship captain – dead of course – has a slip of paper in his pocket, and the paper reads "Grandmaster is the best chess pro..." You can also see Zaga on a computer in the crew's restroom, and there's "an original Zaga distribution disk with write protect notches on both sides." The whole game actually consists of finding parts for a Commodore 64 computer and assemblying it all together. The computer gives us a password that is required to get to the city on Jupiter. I liked this text adventure very much because of its relaxed mood and humour. 2005-03-12: Back to the Future 3 Back to the Future 3 (1990) is another nice game based on a movie. Playability is good and different levels are really different. The game contains nice special little things to liven things up. To start with, level 1, the riding sequence, alternates between a side-scroller and a vertical scroller. There are Indians and Yankees to shoot, gorges to jump over, and other stuff to avoid. Level 2, the shooting stand, has among the usual bandits also a green commando and a granny. And by shooting all the six colours of little ducks, you get a special item sequence consisting of a teddy, a radio, and other silly things. By the way, the way to complete level two is apparently to get over 50000 points. Level 3 is totally silly – defend yourself against bandits by throwing saucers at them. You can control the saucers slightly with joystick while they are flying. Level 4 is full of action. There is a big train on the screen, it's moving all the time, and other stuff is flying across the screen. The feeling is really cool. The game ends with a proverb. 2005-03-06: Predator Predator (1987) I consider a good example of a movie based game. The game follows the main ideas of the movie and still doesn't copy it outright. Most importantly, the game is not just a shoot'em up dressed up in the movie's clothes – Predator is more an adventure game than an action game. This can be seen in the crucial role of problem solving, and the fact that enemies are scarce in the game overall. You are given lots of freedom to choose your means of progress – there is an amplitude of weapons to choose from, and several items too, not all of which are easy to figure out a use for, and some even seemingly needless. What counts most is can you figure out the ways to overcome the biggest obstacle, namely the predator itself. There are two versions of the game around. The more common one seems to be an incomplete release. There are rumours around that it cannot be completed. Namely the log at the very end of the game must be lifted and then lowered in order to crush the menacing creature, but the log is inoperable in the incomplete release. I tried only the complete version. The incomplete version is also missing large parts of the intro, and the title tune is different from the other version. The incomplete version is also missing a highscore table. The crack by Triad gives a peek into the supposed endscreen. There is a cheat that lets us win the game right after the first level has loaded. The endscreen reveals a picture of scorched forest, and then a picture of the hero – if he is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, the main actor from the movie, then he is awfully thin – and our score. According to the rumours this screen is unreachable by normal means of gameplay. Most strangely, neither of these endscreen pictures can be seen in the complete version. The forest picture is totally removed, and the thin Arnold has been replaced by a better picture that can be seen also in the titles. In fact the endscreen that you see after completing the complete version of the game is exactly the same what you get when you die in the middle of the game. Quite a disappointment. All the cracks I found, except the Double Sided Delinquencies crack, which was apparently done even a few years after the game was released, are of the incomplete release. 2005-02-27: Turbo Charge, Citadel Turbo Charge (1991) is a racing game with a little plot, lots of shooting, and nice music and graphics. Shoot everything you can. In the middle of every level there is a border checkpoint. When you reach it, your car gets repairs and extra fuel according to how many other cars you have destroyed. Brutal but cool! In the later levels it is beneficial to shoot endurant, hostile cars from a pistol range and not let them get close to you. Almost no fuel canister should be missed. Fuel is best used in speeding past hostile helicopters. Press Space for a turbo boost. Some extra excitement comes from the occasional incoming traffic and splitting roads that prove quite lethal. It is surprising, however, to find an occasional helicopter or jet fighter fly inside a tunnel. As in many other System 3 games, you can find the company logo in the game. I found the logo in two places in addition to the intro. One was an obvious place as you can see in the screenshots, and the other was not that visible. Another fabulous detail are the level endscreens which vary slightly in their details, not to speak of how the colours get a bit darker when you drive into a tunnel! The game's endscreen is as enjoyable as the intro. Everything is spiced with a pinch of humour. Overall, Turbo Charge makes a brilliant exception to the general rule that games of the 1990s lack soul. Citadel (1989) is a rare mixture of a shoot'em up and a puzzle game. Surviving in the game is in the last hand based on not getting hit by the numerous enemies. There are locked doors to operate and maze-like levels to explore, but all the logical puzzles are very easy. It suffices to roam the levels, open all the door switches, and if you end up in a dead end, then just back up and take a lift to the other floor and continue there. Eventually you will find the exit to the next level. Personally I would probably have enjoyed the game more if it favoured puzzles over action. As it is, the game doesn't feel like a full shoot'em up. There just isn't enough firepower to crush the enemy hordes. The levels differ from each other slightly. Each has its own visual style. The last, eighth level's speciality is that enemies hide in their bunkers until you reach the middle of a group of them. Then they attack all at the same time. Citadel earns one special plus for its nice ambient sounds. The electric doors make different hums in different levels. All of them are fascinating in their industrial style. Another special plus comes from the great tunes that Martin Walker has embedded into the game. There is one thing I noted about Citadel cracks. First of all, when you wait for a while in the title screen, the game starts introducing game objects, which you can speed up by pumping Space. The Cosmos and Fairlight cracks have a similarity: Near to the end of the list there are weapon pods. The letter E in the third weapon pod's name has been changed into a messy character in these two cracks. 2005-02-25: Tusker Tusker (1989) is an adventure game that leans heavily on action. The main character and the title seem to be ripped straight out of Indiana Jones. Only the whip is missing. There is a nice solution available on the net. My biggest problem in completing the game was where to get water. The hero gets thirsty very quickly. The game manual reveals that in the first level you get water by hitting a cactus with a knife while you are holding a water bottle. I used this but at first I couldn't figure out how to find water in the remaining two levels. However, I managed to complete the game without drinking in the last two levels. It was tight but possible. After some wondering I found out that in level three you get water in the fountains in the temple. Just hold the water bottle empty handed and punch the fountain. Level two's water supply is still a mystery to me. The crack by Ikari+Talent crashed when it was time to load the endscreen. I also tried out the crack by Unicess. It seems to have a sprite bug. When a knife flies to the left, it has some garbage as its shadow. It also seems that the game has a crash bug in level two. After you have given the medicine to the shaman and received the key, when you emerge from the round door with a big face on top, go out of the screen and come back, running into the first pair of tears that fly from the face. The game will crash. Another sprite bug is in the first level when you enter the map room in the cave. Reading the map with the book gives you a view on the level, but when it stops, you have lost the lower part of your body and so has the tribesman in the room. This gets fixed however when you exit the room or if you re-read the map. 2005-02-20: Deadlock, Time Machine, Vendetta Deadlock (1990) is another game that was never released and never finished, but thanks to Games That Weren't, it is available for the public in the form of four game previews. Deadlock is a platform shoot'em up that emphasises graphics over playability. The result is flashy but not that enjoyable as a game. There are some keys to use in the previews. This list is abbreviated from info available on the GTW site: the F-keys deal with your weapon, to use a lift face out of the screen and hold fire to call, to go through doors face out of the screen and press up, the plus and minus keys cycle through which room to start in and P makes you go to that room. Not all of these keys are available in all the preview versions. Time Machine (1990) has a fascinating idea for a game. The game is kind of a puzzle game where solving one puzzle enables us to advance to further screens. The plot has disguised this problem solving as altering the past to cause things in the future. Namely, the hero has been trapped in the distant past and he must create the future anew. It must be mentioned that Time Machine's title tune is a great piece to listen to. Every time I load the game, I stop to listen to the tune before continuing. I enjoy the tune but as a downside it takes a lot of my time and slows down my game screenshooting job for C64hq. I wonder if Martin Walker thought of this kind of negative side effects when he made the tune. By the way, while listening to the tune, you can amuse yourself by pressing the keys 1 and 2. They choose which line in the title screen is flashing but apparently there is no deeper meaning in the effect. I found one crack of Time Machine by TSMI, but it wouldn't load. Another crack by Censor Design loaded fine but it had a serious bug in the fifth screen of the second age. I moved on to use the Triangle 3532 crack which seemed to work fine till the end. After the endscreen the game ended in a crash once. Another try from an earlier snapshot gave no crash. The oddities may be in the original game. Namely, no copy I tried played the title tune after I had played one game and died all five times. Moreover, I found that the crack by Crazy had some weird issues about dying. After falling into a hole in the first screen, the hero sprite just vanished. Vendetta (1990) is an adventure in the style of Last Ninja. This time our weaponry consists of plain kicks (to distinguish them from cool ninja kicks), knife swings, grenades, and automatic weapons. Important items are hidden in the scenery just like in Last Ninja. The biggest difference comes from the total lack of background music. To me it lowers the game's entertainment level considerably. Vendetta compensates with driving midsequences. There are splitting roads, other cars and helicopters to shoot, and the police to stop us every once in a while. There were a few places where I managed to walk outside the game area in a way that was definitely a bug in the game. It seems that the game isn't as finished as Last Ninja where I have found no such flaws despite countless hours of gameplay. Vendetta has many cracks. The crack by Triangle 3532 I could unfortunately not load despite my tries on a real C64. By the way, do not confuse this game with another with the same name that was released one year earlier. I think I am going to take screenshots of that game for the next update. 2005-02-13: Armalyte 2 Armalyte 2 (1990) is a shoot'em up that was never released. Thanks to the Games That Weren't site, this collection of previews is available for the public. The game shows promise in the large arsenal of weapons but there is nothing much more in the preview. It would have been nice to have also this game finished. Remember to check out also the separate music made by Reyn Ouwehand. 2005-02-12: Galax-I-Birds, Robocop 3 Galax-I-Birds (1986) is a tongue-in-cheek shoot'em up. There's lots of action in the looping 16 levels of varying, if a bit high difficulty. The game might be enjoyable as an occasional time killer. Robocop 3 (1992) is a movie-based game of the usual kind. The first level is an Operation Wolf -like shoot'em up, and the rest of the levels are more shooting, this time in a sidescrolling platform style. There are elements from the Robocop movies such as the corporation, their walker droid, and a big bunch of angry criminals. It's an enjoyable game but lacking some of the fascinating moods seen in the games from early 1980s. Then again, is it necessary to compare games from different eras? I know I am heavily biased towards the old, so maybe Robocop 3 is a decent game after all. Decent among its contemporaries. 2005-01-31: Caesar the Cat, The Jewel Chest, Kid Grid, Kokotoni Wilf, and Ms. Pacman Caesar the Cat (1983) represents the harmless category of family games from early 1980s. The game concept is tame enough to suit young kids, and the gameplay is fast enough to challenge adults. Caesar's mission is to catch mice and carry them out of the screen. The first batch are normal gray mice which are relatively easy to catch. After catching a few, the mices turn into blue ninja mice. They are very quick and it is more a matter of luck to catch them. If you manage, they turn into white turbo ninja mice whose supernatural teleportation powers can only be matched by sheer luck. The game area contains breakable items which will break very quickly. The Jewel Chest (early 1990s?) is a very simple game. The basic idea is that of Tetris but all the falling pieces consist only of one block. The block colors vary, and the idea is to form lines of three of the same color. There is no available info on when the game was made. The graphics are not too flashy, except for the titlescreen, and that might suggest the game is a product of the 1980s. But the bad gameplay and overall lifelessness of the game tell it is definitely from the 1990s. The game would be totally dead if it wasn't for the cheery tune that plays on the background. That tune is the only reason why I screenshot this game. Kid Grid (1983) caught my eye because it is made by Arti Haroutunian, the same man who made Juice! (yes, with the exclamation mark). And not only that but the game also looks very much like Juice! and is released in the same year by the same company. I find it fascinating to group games by how closely they relate to each other. Maybe Haroutunian used the same routines for both games. Or maybe he was experimenting with this master idea that he had, trying to find a real hit game. While in Juice! you jump on blocks to colour them – much like in the famous Q*Bert – in Kid Grid you must walk the outlines of the blocks to colour them. The result is a mixture between Q*Bert, Stix and Pac-Man. Haroutunian obviously decided to give the game personality to the extent that he gave names to the four enemies, regardless of the fact that they do not differ but by look. There are lots of levels. Some of them form letters of the alphabet. I tried to read a hidden message from the levels but found nothing. Kokotoni Wilf (1984) is an early platform, from the old times when game characters were not cute and sprites were scarce. We control a butterfly man who is apparently on a mission to gather nearly 70 pieces of an amulet. The adventure proceeds through prehistory, present, and the futuristic and mysterious year 2001. There seems to be a background story behind it all but I am unfortunately unaware of it. The game was not too large and it had a clear map structure, so I decided to build a game map out of screenshots. Ms. Pacman (1983) is yet another Pac-Man game. Playability is very good and all the usual elements are there. As a nice bonus there are simple intermissions between some levels. It is actually quite remarkable how the authors have created a love story behind this simple arcade game. I guess this is how brands are made. 2005-01-23: Shadowfax Shadowfax (early 1980s?) is as simple a game as can be. The main idea is the good old "dodge and shoot incoming sprites". There is absolutely nothing more. I hear that the game's animation of a galloping horse and a rider is imitated from the earliest (or at least one of the earliest) known animated series of pictures which was made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1881. The game's name refers of course to Gandalf's horse in the Lord of the Rings. 2004-12-25: Kickman, Killer Watt, and Trollie Wallie Kickman (1982) is an arcade that requires fast reflexes. I cannot quite figure out how did anybody come up with an idea for a game like this but here it is, a combination of Breakout, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. I found two versions of the game, one having slightly simpler graphics and a tag hinting that it is Version 02. Whether the other version is Version 01 or perhaps the Final Version, I do not know. In any case, both games act the same way, so it is quite certain that they are the same game. Both carry the Commodore copyright tag. Killer Watt (1984) is a little Antony Crowther game that was missing from the site. All the elements of an early game are there: the game tune covering Bach's Toccata in D minor with a few transcription errors, shameless use of colo