Adventures in Gaming Part 10
In the 1980s I was a huge fan of of the weekly British comic 2000AD. One of the most popular stories was about the anti-hero Nemesis the Warlock. The Nemesis the Warlock computer game was a platformer released by Martech which had one of Rob Hubbard’s finest pieces of music, a very slow build to an epic score. The game was not very well received at the time and deservedly so, as it was difficult, demanding and fundamentally unfair to play. It had some lazy game design choices, but despite all this I still enjoyed it. It was a static screen platform shooter where enemies would appear from the sides and top of the screen and you could kill them with your sword or limited ammunition gun. If the enemy touched you or shot you with their guns you slowly lost energy.
Once you completed a level (which involved you killing 99 enemies), you had to choose which direction you exited the level. Up, down, left or right. This was where the lazy game design choice came into being. You could only exit the level in one direction, but there were no clues or indications as to which was the correct exit direction. If you choose the wrong exit, you died and had to start that level again. So it was always trial and error, and at best you had a one in four chance to find the exit to a new level. Because each level could take several minutes to complete, in some instances ten or fifteen minutes, getting far in the game was not easy. I think I managed to get to the third level after many hours of playing. The secret to getting far in the game was to always keep moving, save the ammo for difficult combats and find brief safe havens to wait and slowing eliminate the enemy. Oh and always make notes of what the exit route is once you complete the level. It could be several days between chances to playing the game. The game didn't have very many levels and got generally average to poor reviews in the magazines of the day. The graphics were chunky and the bloody “chestburster” animations were vivid and noisy, and the sword and gunplay was satisfying. Every dead body would litter the screen and slowly build up, making difficult and impossible areas to reach much easier, but also it would affect the route the enemies took, making it easier to hunt you down.
Also from the pages of 2000AD came Judge Dredd computer game released by Gremlin Graphics, but it was a platform game with some static three dimensional shooting elements, similar to Operation Wolf. They also made a Rogue Trooper game, but I never got it to load more than three times as it seemed to be a very temperamental loader, despite being an original copy. It looked interesting as it was an isometric arcade adventure.
Star Strike 3D on the Spectrum was a stunning game that managed to get the entire Star Wars arcade game running in wireframe on the humble home computer and running at a respectable speed. An official version of Star Wars would later appear, but the stunning technical achievement of Star Strike 3D rightfully stole this game’s thunder. They did eventually release an official version and it was very well done, but a little late.
The Sacred Armour of Antiriad was a Commodore 64 game that was a platform arcade adventure but was also a difficult game but with a back story worth playing to find out the ending. It was one of the best arcade adventures for the machine, and rivalled the best that the Spectrum had to offer. The music and ambient sounds were brilliant, and most notable for being very hard.
Barbarian was a notorious computer game released for all the 8 bit machines. I got the Commodore 64 versions. It was a single or two player fantasy fighting game. What made it notorious was two factors. The first was with the decapitations that were fairly easy to pull off. And the blatantly sexist adverts. It actually was a decent fighting game under all those huge graphics, despite all the anti-sexist and anti-violence crowd complaining. It had two venues, a forest glade or a mini arena and an opponent which got ever harder. It was a very good game that was helped by Maria Whittaker (a popular Sun newspaper Page 3 topless model at the time) posing on the box art and the blood and violence of the game itself. Barbarian was far superior to the Ocean Software game released around the same time. Highlander that was released that year as well, based on the film and was a terrible game. The game is limited because it only had three opponents for you to fight, but each opponent had to be loaded as a completely separate game.
Barbarian proved to be an immensely popular game despite the outrage of a half naked man and woman on the cover. It proved to be that popular it spawned a sequel, Barbarian II, which was visually the same fighting game, but introduced an arcade adventure element which had you wandering around dungeons, forests and other locations and encountering different creatures as well as human opponents to fight. This kind of exploring and beat em up gameplay would not be revisited until the release of the almost legendary Moonstone for the 16 bit home computers.
Pitstop 2 on the Commodore 64 by Epyx was a driving game that was legendary for causing severe hand ache and for being the first driving game to introduce the infamous pit stop sequence. Pitstop 2 had a very good driving game model that was far superior than even the highly acclaimed Atari Pole Position game. Pitstop 2 was made even more special by the addition of a two player element, tyre wear and fuel. Driving around six different tracks you had to pay attention to the wear rate on your four tyres which slowly changed from green, to yellow to orange then to red. You also had to watch your fuel level as you could run out of fuel. Red tyres blew out and reduced your speed to a crawl, while running out of fuel had the same effect. The game therefore became a very basic strategy game where you were watching your tyre wear rate and fuel consumption and decided when to make that all important pitstop. You then played an arcade sequence wherein you filled the car with fuel and changed all four tyres at the same time. The pitstop element blended time management and strategy together to ensure you were not wasting valuable seconds. You had to manually change all four tyres and ensure you didn't over spill the fuel nozzle, which if you did reset back to zero and would count up again. Races would last over many laps would take up to twenty minutes to play, and if you played a whole season of six tracks, that was a whole afternoon gone. The actual tracks themselves were named after real world counterparts, but none of them actually bore no resemblance at all. It would be a a few years later that we’d get to play the original Pitstop game and it was nothing special at all. It was one of the most iconic Commodore 64 games of all time.
