Adventures in Gaming Part 13

Amongst the games I got with my second hand Commodore 64 was most of Jeff Minter’s back catalogue of games (Batalyx most memorably), and I found out why he was loved and hated so much by the press and games buying public. A lot of his games were sheep and llama populated clones of already existing games. What made Batalyx interesting was that it was six games in one. You could switch between any of them at any time. I honestly don't recall what the purpose of the game was other than to get a high score, and it seemed almost impossible to die. If you did it dropped you back to the game selection screen with your score intact. Also with this Commodore computer came a huge back catalogue of ZZAP64! magazines which filled out the missing issues and I was able to chart the rise and rise of the Commodore 64.

Despite all this “retro-gaming”, discovering games I had missed first time around while growing up in Ipswich, I began to yearn for the next level of computing. I began starting to see adverts for the new 16 bit computers Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga A500 in my 8 bit magazines that I bought just before moving to Spain, and in those rare British imported computer magazines I bought in Spain (always at vastly inflated prices). Both machines were priced at four hundred pounds each, which was the same price as my BBC Model B almost ten years ago. It was always my intention to eventually own both machines as I believed the same situation would occur with the Spectrum and Commodore in that I would need to own both machines to enjoy the full range of games, as each machine would be host to system exclusives. In reality, this wasn't the case, as apart from the MIDI interfaces unique to the Atari ST, it was an inferior machine in the video and sound department. Sinclair dropped out of the home computer market to focus on the business end of machines and to explore other innovations selling its entire computer business to Amstrad. This left Commodore and the newly invigorated Atari to fight the 16 bit home computer market. The most popular outlet was the Silica Shop who sold both machines. Each one came with a small collection of pack-in games. The Atari came with twenty games and the Amiga only came with ten. The Amiga games were the same as the Atari ones, but seeing as The Silica Shop was a dedicated Atari specialist, they pushed the Atari machine over the Amiga for the same price. It just shows you how wrong you can be, that despite twice as many “free” games the Atari still undersold the Amiga many times over. And obviously I was wrong about their being system exclusives as games that were released for both machines, and in almost every instance it was better on the Amiga. The only benefit the Atari had was a inbuilt (well on an included Disk) a version of BASIC and MIDI In and Out connections. Amiga had better dedicated sound and graphics chips. Silica Shop’s eventual undoing was their steadfast focus on the Atari despite the Amiga being a better and more popular machine. Silica Shop also entered the PC market too late and sold PCs that were too expensive. They also championed the stillborn Atari Lynx and Jaguar consoles, both with too many overstocks. I should have stuck with the Amiga and forgotten all about owning an Atari ST, and saved myself four hundred pounds in the process.

The 16 bit market would belong to Commodore and Atari, as Sinclair had withdrawn from the home computer market. Sinclair instead explored the business potential of the Sinclair QL machine (which had a microdrive tape drive and was fairly decent at playing games) and his C5 electric car, both of which flopped because they were too far ahead of their time. Sir Clive Sinclair did not see the future of computers as a games machine. I think he disliked the reputation as a producer of a games machine that was home to piracy being his legacy. He would eventually sell the entire business to Amstrad and focus on his other business interests which at the time would require a lot of funding to succeed.

I decided to choose to buy the the Atari first, which in hindsight was a terrible choice, as although the machine came with twenty games, as opposed to the Amiga which only came with ten, the Atari was an inferior computer. I knew I'd get bored quickly of just ten games. The Atari ST FM would be the second and last time I'd own a piece of Atari hardware. My parents flew to back to the United Kingdom as they needed to update their passports and documents and brought the Atari back. In retrospect it was a bad decision, as the Atari ST was a poorer machine all round. The processor was faster than the Amiga, but it didn't have any of the dedicated chips inside for graphics and sound. I didn't know anyone in the United Kingdom let alone Spain who actually owned one. It was damaged when my brother eventually brought it back from Spain to the United Kingdom and the flight insurance paid out enough so that when we sold it at a later date to a musician who wanted it for its MIDI music interface capability, we got most of our money back, half through the sale, and the rest through insurance.

The twenty games that were bundled with the computers were fairly average, only a few of which were stand out titles. They were designed to get you playing and stop you being bored.

Quadralien was a brilliant puzzle game that had you solving large maze puzzles all the while trying to keep the nuclear reactor cool with water barrels. Most of the puzzles would give you access to more water barrels and so complete the level once the reactor temperature was under control. Although I didn't see beyond the third level, these were big complicated layouts with many traps that would force you to restart. It had some mesmerising music by Andrew Whittaker. This was a game that kept me really interested. You could play it with a joystick, but the best control method I found was the mouse. I think of all the games I played on the Atari this is the one I sunk the most time into and made ironically made the least progress. It was a sliding block Sokuban style game that I thoroughly enjoyed, and mixed in with the sci-fi elements made for an engaging puzzle game. The levels were huge and spread over many flick screens, meaning you had to think puzzles through far in advance, as you could push blocks between screens as well. Added to this the different “robots” you could control as well as keeping your eye on the ever increasing temperature of the nuclear reactors wherein you would have to push cooling barrels into the reactors to buy you more time.

Return to Genesis was a game I remember very little about, despite playing it a lot. I think it was a good shoot em up that reminded me a lot of Uridium mixed with a platform game.

Marble Madness was a straightforward clone of the brilliant Atari arcade game that was done competently well, but was difficult to play with a joystick or mouse, like every version of this kind of game, it was best played with a trackball. In hindsight the mouse on the Atari wasn't great so it was a poor trackball unit, and hence made the game more challenging than it ought to be.

Ikari Warriors was one of our arcade favourites from my time in Ipswich and a difficult game as well, especially without the directional control stick that you had in the arcades. All the 16 bit conversions played like a two-player version of Commando, i.e. you shot in the direction you were moving in. It had great power ups and grenades and it was enjoyable to drive tanks briefly, but you needed to watch out that you didn't kill the second player. The game tried to emulate the “tall” monitors of the arcade, by having black borders left and right but it still gave you a very limited view of the path ahead. The gameplay was similar to another of our favourites, The Jackal, a two-player Konami game in a similar vein.

Arkanoid II was a game I played once or twice. I don't know why but I just have never liked the gameplay of Breakout or any of its clones, and Arkanoid is as poor/good as any other version. Maybe it is because I don't see any depth to the game, but the idea of bouncing a ball to destroy walls just annoys me. Maybe I played some really bad Breakout games with terrible physics making you suffer just to destroy the final brick which took forever. I would be happy to never play Breakout or Arkanoid again.

Thundercats was a platform game based on a cartoon series from the 1980s that I never watched and the game was uninspiring and unenjoyable. I think I played the game once, and only tried it once more a week later to confirm how bad it was. Beyond the Ice Palace was the unofficial sequel to Thundercats and just as tedious, and probably explains why it is included in this pack.

Black Lamp was a side-scrolling platform game that had you wandering around dark castles as a Jester rescuing your friends. It had impressive colourful graphics, lots of variety and its slow paced platform adventure really worked well. I think the exploring the castle and finding treasure and keys to open doors to the next level just seemed to work very well. I actually enjoyed this game a lot, it didn't have any save points so it was a real marathon to play. When you lost all your lives it was back to the start. This was a game I played a lot of and returned to quite often.

Buggy Boy was probably one of the most enjoyable arcade conversions, especially when I got to play it on the Amiga. Whilst it wasn't a faithful rendition of the arcade game (in fact it looked and played nothing like the arcade game), it was brilliantly playable arcade driving game in its own right and very fair in punishing bad driving. You drove around circuits which had a time limit which counted down. Every star or challenge you completed increased your time limit which reset every time you crossed the line, it was a driving game you could stick to.

Test Drive II The Duel was a sequel to a disk only American game on the Commodore 64 which prick-teased you into thinking you were driving a high performance sports car. It was the first of the Test Drive game series on the 16 bit machines, and despite the huge power leap from the Commodore it still had to overcome the speed limitations of poor graphics and draw distance by simulating you were driving up a mountain, meaning the horizon was just sky, and the right hand of the screen was a flat brown rock effect. The intro to the game had a sexy woman’s voice introducing the game and its full title. The steering controls had very little effect which combined to produce a very poor driving model and no amount of talent would take you far in the game. It also suffered from legendary slow loading times. Whoever designed this game deserves to be shot. It would load up the title screen, then load up the game, then load up the options, of which there were several (choice of car, colour, skill level), and each option choice led to more loading. Between each driving level there was even more unending loading, as you repaired your car, and refueled. I think you spent more time loading than playing the dismal game. Test Drive failed in delivering the fantasies of many wannabe car drivers, by offering an experience that was vapid and dull.

Zynaps was a Nemesis clone that got very hard very quickly and was a 16 bit version of an 8 bit game by Hewson Consultants. The first two levels were very difficult, and after that it became virtually impossible.

Wizball on the Atari (and also the Amiga) was a shoddy clone of the Commodore 64 version. I'd be happy to never see this game again. Whereas the 8 bit Commodore 64 original was clever, inventive and was a carefully balanced perfect game, the 16 bit versions were programmed by someone who confessed that he had only played the original game a few times, and didn't understand the mechanics of how the game actually worked. It resembled the original game only visually, but played nothing like the classic version, and was an abomination. All of the gameplay elements were there but the controls, the waves of enemies was all wrong, and you were left with a tedious left to right scrolling shoot em up game.

Thrust was a tough but incredible game that even on the 16 bit computers still managed to look like the 8 bit versions, but to be fair, the game needed no embellishment. It had incredibly basic wireframe graphics, but it had brilliant gameplay that was an early example of physics based puzzlers. Each level was a genuine challenge and this kind of gameplay has been mimicked many times over. It was originally a budget game by Firebird, but many people raved about it as being a game good enough to have been released full price. It was  essentially a mission based Lunar Lander game that harder and better. This was a game I played many times and on many different platforms. It existed on the 8 bit computers as well, but the Atari ST version was the first time I had encountered it.

Chopper X was an overhead shooting game with great digitised graphics and sound but dismal and boring gameplay.

Ranarama was a 16 bit version of a classic 8 bit game that was similar to Gauntlet and was essentially an arcade adventure. I had played this game on both the Spectrum and Commodore and was surprised that the graphic jump to 16 bit wasn't that great from the 8 bit versions.

Chopper X was a terrible vertical scrolling shoot em up.

Roadwars was a futurist driving game/shooter that looked and played terribly.

StarQuake was a throwback to the 8bit flick screen arcade adventure games. It looked okay, but played average.

Xenon was The Bitmap Brother’s first masterpiece.

Eddie Edward’s Super Ski was a re-skinned version of a shoddy 3-d skiing simulator.

Seconds Out was a sub-standard boxing game.

Summer Olympiad ‘88 was a poor attempt to cash in on the Summer and Winter Games series that were hugely successful on the Commodore 64 by Epyx Games.

And that was it. I never bought any more games for the Atari St other than a wrestling game.

We did find one game to buy for the Atari, a  wrestling game, which had eight wrestlers and lots of fighting. Despite buying the game in Spain, the instructions and game itself was in English. We got it because as at the time me and my brother were watching WWF constantly on Sky Satellite TV and that inspired us to try wrestling computer games.

The Atari ST FM had a BASIC programming language that had to be loaded each time you wanted to program on it. I did try to learn how to program and even began planning on teaching the Atari how to play Games Workshop’s Talisman board game as the Troll. I choose the Troll as it was the simplest of characters to emulate. Atari BASIC adopted a windowed format of program listing, which made programming easier, but it was a concept that I didn't really get my head around, as I was used to listing numbers, rather than essentially a long text file. You typed the program in one window, and the output of the program appeared in another. It came with a very simple instruction manual really designed to just about get you going but didn't allow you to do much more. You would need to buy a specialist programming book to really be able to benefit from the software. The operating system of the Atari seemed fairly unstable and the machine would crash and bomb quite often. I don't remember the Amiga being that fragile, having only seen the infamous Guru Meditation Screens a few times in all the years I was using it, comparing the many times it happened over the six months I had the Atari ST.

Adventures in Gaming Part 12

My parents decided to emigrate out to Spain and I reluctantly went with them. Because of this I missed out on the start of the 16 bit home computer revolution, but this was no bad thing as while I lived in Spain I continued to enjoy the ZX Spectrum 48k+ and my Commodore 64 until my Commodore 64 motherboard unit had a fatal burnt out. I did eventually source a second hand replacement (at a price that was almost the same as an Amiga) in Spain, but with it acquired a huge library of games I knew of but never played before. It was an incredible haul and probably one of the most exciting times of my youth.

I spent literally months going through every tape, every floppy disk searching for games, and I was never disappointed. He had two tape drives, boxes and boxes of original games and magazines. It also came with a disk drive which was a new phenomena for me. Disk drives meant for fast loading speeds, and a spare tape drive. I had never owned one of these devices before but was familiar with how they operated due to my Saturdays spent hanging around the business computer shop where my parents bought the Color Genie all those years ago. I knew all the Disk Operating System (DOS) commands to get what I needed off the floppy disks. I also played games I had never heard of before like Sky Fox (a game which could only have been played on a floppy disk), the beautiful second life experience that was Alter Ego, and disk-based Infocom adventures like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and many others including all four of the first Lucasfilm Games. My games collection exploded overnight, and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the games he had on disk. The guy who owned the machine before me seemed to have an incredibly extensive and varied collection. I was able to load and save games and files from a floppy disk. I spent weeks and many late nights going through every file on every disk and finding hidden gems, especially when I found out later that some of the disks were double sided. The previous owner of the machine was heavily into programming and had bought an assembler development kit and programmed several of his own games, including a Crystal Castles clone which was a pretty decent effort as well as Q*Bert!

Boulderdash was a visually simple arcade puzzle game that was addictive and enjoyable. I already had the first game, and managed to find a version with a construction kit built in before moving to Spain. When I bought my second hand Commodore 64, it came with all the versions of Boulderdash that existed to that date. Boulderdash is a simple puzzle game where you controlled a tiny character digging through underground mines looking for enough diamonds to complete the level and move onto the next one. It was beautifully simple with logical puzzles that required arcade like skills. The game was all about learning the rules of the blocks and the physics, and then having the level designer exploit it, and you attempting to solve it. If you died you died because of your lack of skill not because you were cheated out of a life. Everything happened for logical reasons. What blew the doors open on this game was the construction kit. I think the game spawned many sequels and user content and the variety of this action puzzle game really was impressive. The iconic hero was a symbol of the Commodore 64. I spent many hours creating my own levels and creating levels felt more like sandbox levels than levels to play and complete. I also spent time recreating some of the more enjoyable later levels.

Hidden away on two floppy disks were the original four games made by LucasFilm Games, Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus, The Eidolon and Koronis Rift. Ballblazer was a two player “football” game that was blisteringly fast but had a difficult computer opponent. I am not sure how much skill was required to play this game, but there was no doubt about its technical performance. The game was a simple one on one football game. When you were not in possession of the ball, your craft would face the direction of the ball or the opponent who had the ball. Crashing into the other player would cause them to drop the ball and you could collect it instead. The ball would stick to the front of whoever had the possession. Once you had possession, your craft faced the direction of the opponent’s end and you could either race to the opponent’s goal and walk it into the net, or fire it towards the goal. It was a narrow goal that constantly moved so it wasn't easy. It was a futuristic version of air hockey games. It was very frenetic, fast and colourful. Lucasfilm released Ballblazer on the 16 bits and consoles, but never really made the same impact as the gameplay wasn't not deep enough to hold interest for maturing gamers.

Rescue on Fractalus is probably the finest and my most favourite of LucasArts initial classic four games released by them in the 1980s. I would go as far to say it is certainly in the top ten games for the Commodore 64 of all time. Incredible graphics and very tense action in the skies and on the planet. Looking at it now the frame rate is horrendously poor, although it was better on the Atari computers. The graphics of the mountains was stunning but did have some cheesy graphic tricks such as the spiraling colour palette when you launched from the mothership down to the planet was nothing more than a simple programming trick that anyone could do themselves. But the game played like a dream and was compelling and tense. Despite their being no speech or dialogue, there was ample room for you to create your own story and narrative. The game got progressively harder with each planet you visited. I don't think I ever died in the game, I just switched it off as the game could last for hours, and there was always other games to play.

The Eidolon was a bizarre maze game that used the same graphics engine as Rescue on Fractalus but less satisfying to play. The pace of the game was sedate and slow, but mysterious. Most memorable was the graphic style which was very H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Victorian Steampunk. The game was meant to simulate walking through the dream states of the mind. The name of the craft you flew it was called the Eidolon and it was in this that your cave maze journey was viewed from. It was a mysterious game that was full of atmosphere.

Koronis Rift is an intensely deep game that I found very difficult to get into even with the instructions. I never really explored what I could and couldn't do. It was like Rescue but you had trading elements thrown in as well. I did have many tries at playing this, and like Morpheus on the Commodore 64 as well, I struggled to make sense of this. I may yet come back to this after watching a YouTube guide. It’s amazing how much they managed to squeeze into 32 kilobytes and still manage to get such a deep and immersive game.

Sky Fox was a near future combat flight sim wherein you controlled a jet fighter that could fly above the clouds for aerial combat, and under the clouds for ground based warfare. Because of the graphics were different depending on where you were in relation to the cloud level, it could only be loaded quickly from disk which would happen fairly seamlessly when you flew between the two game levels.

Alter Ego is an almost impossible to describe game, that is best described as a life simulator. Before playing this game, I had never played anything like it before, and its fair to say nothing like it since. I knew nothing of this game before loading it, and instead was sucked into a world that had me hooked from start to finish. A floppy disk only game that was a icon and text based journey that took you from birth to death and all the possible life changing events in between. When you first loaded the game you chose whether to be male or female, then either could play a stage in the life of your Alter Ego, (I think there were five in total for each gender, giving ten in total) or play the entire “campaign” from birth to death. You could either randomly create your character’s personality or answer a series of detailed questions to define how “you” would be in the game world. You were rated on happiness, success, education, wealth and so many more things. Visually the game was white icons and text (with minimalist colours) on a black background. Everything in your life was a series of decisions, which would improve one area of your life, and weaken others. New options became available depending on your life situation, but the clock always moved on. Sometimes you had a choice of up to four different decisions of which you could only choose one. E.g. Find a job, get an education, get married, emigrate etc, once a choice was made you couldn't go back. It was a stunning game that could have only existed on a disk. It had a profound effect on me, and only wished I had learnt some of the life lessons the game was trying to teach. Although the game was all content driven, the variety and options meant the game was replayable. The game took a long time to play each module. Luckily you could save, as well as progress between the five modules and document your entire virtual life.

Crystal Castles and Q*Bert were classic old school arcade games. The guy who had owned the Commodore 64 before me had learnt to program in machine code and had written his own version of Crystal Castles. He had a lot of programming manuals and even his own machine code compiler. I was too busy playing games to pay any attention to it sadly. The Commodore 64 was an aging machine that was about to be replaced by the Amiga A500. One of the assembler programs he had was the Ocean Software development kit. I had several reference materials at my disposal should I have wanted to get into programming.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was a frustrating but funny computer game version of the book which was co-written by Douglas Adams himself. I knew the story, the radio play and the TV show very well, but even then without access to online guides playing this was impossible, as it had some beautifully fiendish puzzles. I did read a few hints in various magazines I had at the time which helped you through the infamous Babel Fish puzzle. I made my way further into the game and became stuck at the “Tea” puzzle, which is where I gave up. You could die extremely easily in the game, which while was humorous meant you had to reload. The game also had pre-programmed events if you typed in something and would recreate asides and funny moments lifted directly from the novel. I later read a guide and was disappointed that the game just ended when you solved one difficult puzzle rather than tell the whole story of the book, and felt the puzzles were just too difficult to be enjoyable. The game was disk only as it pulled text from the floppy whenever you typed in a command. I also later found out the tea puzzle was the last puzzle in the game and the solution was, like most of the puzzles in this game, obscure. These type in adventures were definitely games that I didn't really enjoy playing. A lot of it was to do with my previous experiences but also fighting the parser and language was half the battle. He also had Douglas Adam’s Bureaucracy text adventure which was a game deliberately designed to frustrate and annoy. I never did complete the game, and this just further frustrated me as an adventure gamer.

Adventures in Gaming Part 11

A small group of us started going to Felixstowe on Sundays in late 1980s and it was there that we discovered the joys of “modern” arcade cabinets. I had always been enthralled by individual cabinets I used to see dotted around pubs, hidden away in a corner of a local chip shop, all of those early primitive and raw games such as Asteroids, Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Galaxians. But it was at these dedicated amusement arcades that we got to enjoy the big dedicated arcade cabinets of the era such as Sega’s full-size hydraulic Afterburner, Konami’s Jackal, Ikari Warriors, Double Dragon, Gauntlet (the most addictive coin pumping arcade game of all time), Super Sprint, Quartet (Sega’s answer to Gauntlet) and Irem’s R-Type. We spent a lot of money there and had some great times. Our first visit to Felixstowe was particularly memorable as we missed the last train home and walked all the way from Felixstowe back to Ipswich, a ten mile hike.

One of the most lucrative sources of revenue for software companies in the 1980s was home computer conversions of arcade games. The Commodore 64 was home to most arcade conversions. Some were good, like Gauntlet, Out-Run, and some shockingly bad ones as well, such as Quartet. The Quartet committed the worst sin a home computer conversion could make, which was that it copied what you saw on the screen but contained none of the gameplay. We enjoyed Quartet in the arcade as it was a side scrolling four-player platform shoot em up designed to capitalise on the Gauntlet style of multi-player gameplay. I foolishly bought the game the day it was released without reading any of the reviews for it hoping it would emulate the arcade experience. When it was finally reviewed it got ripped apart (and rightly so) as it was terrible to play. Most arcade conversions were produced by US Gold and Ocean Software to deadlines who often farmed the work out to developers who could produce this kind of work fast and to a specific brief. In the original arcade game all four of the characters in the game had unique powers and abilities, the conversion none of these features were present, everyone was the same but different colours. I have, using MAME gone back and played the original Quartet ROM again, and it is a disappointingly poor game from Sega designed to cash in on the four-player craze that was filling up the arcades and proving to be very profitable, with games such as Gauntlet.

The Commodore 64 was also home to some stunning original games such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood and anything by Jeff Minter. Despite having 64k of memory, the Commodore 64 only had access to 32k of it, as the rest was reserved for the operating system, colour, graphics and sound. There were some very inventive programmers who managed to get the computer to perform miracles. There were enough exclusives to both the Spectrum and Commodore to make me happy to have owned both. It managed to create some clever music and graphics. I was always of the belief the Commodore 64 was a great machine, and it was and still it, but the graphics and colours were blocky and the colour range dull especially when compared to other home computer conversions. Where the Commodore shined was in its original games.

Although not a brilliant or a classic game, Mutants by Denton Designs was a game released by Ocean Software that had a beautiful soundtrack by Fred Gray, who still plays this music live. The object of the game was to visit sixteen overhead scrolling worlds and shoot your way through various styles of mazes to find a part of a relic. Once you recovered the relic you fought your way back to the exit portal to complete the level. As you recovered each piece, a four by four puzzle picture slowly built up. Once you completed all sixteen levels you won the game. It was a very challenging game, as the enemies were tough to shoot, and the “weed” which you shot to reveal the relic very quickly grew back if you didn't grab it in time.

Into the Eagle’s Nest on the Commodore 64 was a World War Two top down themed version of Gauntlet that was very difficult to play. It only had four levels, but these were huge and ammo was limited and it was very easy to die or run out of ammunition. There was a finite number of German soldiers on each level, but there was not enough ammunition to kill them all, so it was down to you to choose the best route. You could pick up health and more ammunition even if you didn't need it, so you needed to be careful not to walk over health and ammunition you didn't need. One thing I clearly remember was the “wellington boot” sucker sound as your army hero moved about. To ensure the game had longevity, there were a total of four missions and the Eagles Nest castle of the title had four levels which you could visit. This type of game was suddenly quite popular and spawned other Gauntlet clones such as Ranarama and Dandy of varying quality. It was a thinking man’s shooter as you also had a limit number of keys to open doors. Like all the other clones this was a single player only game, and it would only be Druid II: The Enlightenment that would provide two player gauntlet style action.

Spindizzy was Paul Shirley’s underrated masterpiece. A flick screen game where you controlled a gyroscope that required precise delicate control. It was a massive game that took a long time to play. The map was immense and even had lifts to take you up and down to different levels. There has been a long running plan to make a retro version of this, but to no avail. A huge game with so much to discover, and asked a lot from the player by only giving you limited lives. It got high review scores in the magazines but somehow failed to turn positive reviews into sales.

As the end of the 1980s approached so did the era of the 8 bit machines. I guess it was bad timing for me as my parents were getting ready to emigrate to Spain. People still seemed happy playing 8 bit computers with 8 bit games, graphics and sounds, and the mass market consumer popularity of 16 bit era was still a couple of years away, although the machines were available to buy, they were almost four times the price of a Spectrum, and three times the price of a Commodore.

During the 1980s the price of 8 bit computers had fallen to a price bracket that made the machines easy to afford. One thing I clearly remember about the era was the constant war waged between Commodore 64 and Spectrum owners. I feel most of this bashing was fueled by the computer magazines (Crash and ZZAP!64) and not the owners themselves. The 8 bit computers had dominated the last decade, and I was becoming disillusioned with the slow pace of development within computer industry. Looking back it was clear that Moore’s Law was in full operation. The 8 bit machines hadn't really improved in almost ten years, instead just offering more of the same but with slightly better memory. The game play had moved on, but computing power hadn't. I remember designing my own computer games, but all of them required more powerful computers to fuel the graphics I had in mind, more powerful than the incredibly weak 8 bit machines.

Those school friends who had owned the ZX Spectrum lost interest and moved onto new things, like work and girlfriends, and no one took any notice of the new emerging 16 bit monsters.

Adventures in Gaming Part 10

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.

Adventures in Gaming Part 9

Everyone loved the speeder-bike chase sequence from the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi, and Death Chase on the ZX Spectrum was the closest you got to recreating that experience. It was fast pseudo-three dimensional driving game that had you riding a bike with a headlamp and gun mounted on the front. Your job was to hunt down helicopters and other motorcyclists and shoot them. It alternated between day and night, and then got gradually got harder and more difficult by introducing more trees, and more enemy motorcyclists. It was the Spectrum’s killer app because it ran on even the lowly 16k model.

Deus Ex Machina was and still is one of the most novel and unusual games to have ever existed on the ZX Spectrum. It was ahead of its time, but despite all this Deus Ex Machina was nothing more than a series of mini-games that are laughably amateur in nature, but is made special by the addition of a synchronised audio cassette tape filled with progressive rock music, voice acting and singing by some of the most surprising names possible. Most of the actors are dead now, and include Frankie Howerd, John Pertwee and Ian Drury. It was a mix of narration and oddball songs and was a computer game and musical interpretation of William Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It”, and included many quotes directly lifted from it, including such lines as “All the world's a stage”. The mini games took you from conception to birth, to teenage and eventually old age and death. The games were usually a simple jumping game to avoid obstacles or touching objects as they fell from the sky. It was more of an experience than a game. You started out at 100% life rating, and everything you do in the game reduces it to nil. I played the game twice and both times ended the game at 0%. The game doesn’t end, just keeps going until the story is over. It then shows you the percentage score you had at various stages in the game. I still listen to the audio tape of this game, even as recently as 2014. The game got mixed reviews and was harshly treated by those who didn't like the game or had an agenda against Mel Croucher the author. Getting hold of the game was equally difficult because it was independently published you could only buy it mail order. I don't recall how we got our copy, most likely in a second hand shop.

Wheelie was an unusual Spectrum platform game where you rode a bike on a scrolling screen, but you could change direction and go backwards. I did complete the game, and after you did, you had to return back to the first level by driving the opposite way, but with no enemies, but with a time limit. The game was challenging but not difficult. The main bike sprite had perpetual motion, meaning the bike was always moving left or right, meaning you had to make a quick choice.

The Hobbit on the Spectrum was similar to the Twin Kingdom Valley graphic adventure game, and took just as long to draw each scene, but the storyline was more familiar to me. This was a difficult game because the damn dwarves kept going off and doing their own thing if you left them to real time. And you needed to have several of them present at different times to help you complete certain parts of the game. If you did nothing things still happened in real time. I don't think there was much to do in the game, and the puzzles were solved only one way. I recall starting the game in Bag End, and went east and encountered the Trolls, east again and I was in Rivendell, went east again and met Gollum, went east and arrived at Smaug. It was quite a leap of imagination to expect that something you forgot in Bag-End you could simply “nip back” and collect it and then “pop back” to Mirkwood and carry on, hardly an epic moment. There was a lot of truncating of the journey. The world of Middle Earth was ready to explore and wouldn't resurface until many years later as War in Middle Earth by Mike Singleton.

Way of the Exploding Fist on the Spectrum was a brilliant martial arts game where we all got to hear exactly how much noise the Spectrum could make, and also got to hear the exact sound you would make if you got a punch in the groin. It was fast paced and deadly and you wouldn't see a game as fast paced and as good as this until the arrival of International Karate+ on the Amiga. You had limited health and it was all about getting in the best and most effective hit first time. It was Rock, Paper, Scissors taken to a whole new level. You started each level with two full yin-yang symbols and each hit you received took between half or a full point away. The graphics and animation for the era was stunning. Every hit you made ended that encounter and you started again with your reduced health. This was years before the likes of Street Fighter with its longer health bar and “fight until your health is zero” style of game-play.

Lords of Midnight on the Spectrum was a truly unique and beautifully stylish epic game that allowed you to complete it in many different ways. Unrivalled in its scope and delivery you could win the game through following the adventure quest, creating your own storyline or by recruiting other lords and waging an epic war. In truth the game required you to indulge in all three. Doomdark’s Revenge also on the Spectrum was the sequel to Lords of Midnight. I only played it briefly, but wanted to finish the first game before I even attempted the sequel, and because I never finished the original, I never really got to explore this at any length. The game had no music or sound, but this was understandable as the memory was used for graphics and text and not music. Both these games came out for the Commodore 64 but I always felt they should be played on the silent Spectrum with some epic movie soundtrack music playing in the background. The introductory novel that came with it perfectly set the scene. I was reading fantasy novels at the time and Lords of Midnight really captured that epic story feel of a war against an intelligent enemy and the natural ice. To ensure you stood the best chance of winning you approached the game in three different ways with the four main characters at various stages of the game. The fire and ice elements of the story has sat with me for many years. It would prove to be Mike Singleton’s finest game, and despite his best efforts (sequels and Midwinter) none of his later games would achieve the same level of status even though his later games were equally as good as Lords of Midnight.

The first wave of Spectrum games released by Ultimate Play the Game, Jetpac, Pssst!, Cookie and TransAm, was an incredible mix of arcade games that really made people sit up and notice what both the Spectrum was capable of and of how brilliant Ultimate Play the Game were as a company. Prior to their arrival, most Spectrum games were pleasant affairs with nothing outstanding to report on. But Ultimate Play the Game released a consistently prolific series of highly polished and exceptional games, it seemed everyone owned these games. Of the four, it was Jetpac I played the most and clocked it several times before quitting. I didn't enjoy the single screen games of Pssst! and Cookie (the games were virtually identical) and TransAm while impressively fast, didn't really feel like there was a game inside to play. Their second wave of releases was heralded by Sabre Wulf on the Spectrum. A flick screen sword waggling hero. A rather tense game, and a difficult one at that. I have seen the map for this game and its very extensive. Sabre Wulf had you wandering around a flick screen map looking for the infamous four parts of an amulet which would open the doorway to the exit. The screen was always busy and full of enemies to fight, and there was also the unkillable Sabre Wulf himself that lurked around the edges of the map. I never completed the game as I was never a huge fan of the classic arcade adventure. I would play games like Avalon, Feud and Zug, but any game where map making was essential was a turn off. Also in this wave was Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman. Despite all this they created some of the finest games for the Spectrum and really managed to push the machine to its limits. Ultimate Play The Game/Rare Spectrum games are hard to find online as for legal reasons these ROMs are hidden/protected.

Jetpac was the closest you could get to an arcade game experience (at the time) on the Spectrum. The game was fast, fluid and colourful. Playing like a single screen mixture of Defender and Joust, this game was enjoyable to play, and became, along with Manic Miner a leading symbol of the success of the Spectrum. You had a hero character who fired lasers across the screen in a very satisfying “spray” of colour. You jetpac hero also had real world physics and required bursts of jets to keep him hovering. It was an incredible achievement. Of all their games, this was the one I played the most. I played Jetpac and managed to “clock” the game, i.e. I went through all the different waves of enemies and built every different type of spaceship, before the game cycled around to the start again.

Psst! and Cookie almost seemed to be the same game as both looked and played almost identical. Psst! had you trying to grow a sunflower whilst exterminating insects that tried to eat it. You killed an insect with the same colour bug spray. Cookie had the same screen layout, but had you throwing flour bombs at ingredients knocking them into a mixing bowl. It makes sense to reuse the game engine.

Trans-Am was a top down driving game, but it seemed to make no sense to me. The game tasked you to drive to check points around a heavily shrunken map of Northern America. Whilst trying to do this you were chased by black cars attempted to bump and knock you off course. You also had to keep an eye on your fuel as an empty tank meant game over. You drove over fuel pumps to increase your fuel and carry on. It played like a very large scale game of Dodge-ems but with none of the fun. A lot of people really liked this game, but I didn't really see the appeal. There was no way to dispatch any of the chasing cars easily, and if you did, they simply reappeared.

Sabre Wulf was the first of the Sabre Man games and was a difficult flick screen arcade adventure game where you had to hunt for the four parts of a key which would open a gate to allow you to escape and win. It was at the time a big and difficult game to play.

Atic Atac was another flick screen arcade adventure but made very different by the inclusion of a choice of three different characters to play. Whilst each one shot the same powered weapon (albeit with different graphics), what made it different was that each character used a different set of secret doors. I think you had a Wizard, a Knight or Serf. The Wizard used bookcases to warp around, the Knight an armoury rack and the Serf used something else. If an enemy hit you, you didn't lose a life instantly, but instead you had an energy bar represented by a cooked chicken which slowly was eaten away to reveal a chicken bone carcass. You did have weapons to fire at the enemies, but it wasn't that accurate.

Lunar Jetman was the sequel to Jetpac and was a mixture of platformer, the original Jetpac game and the classic Moon Patrol. While it was incredibly beautiful to look at, it was a bitch to play as there was so much going on in the screen at once and was a challenge to play and coordinate yourself. There was two elements to the game, the flying around like you could in Jetpac and then the driving sections like Moon Patrol. Often you would encounter craters which required repairing before you could drive over them, meaning you had to get out of the buggy, avoid or shoot enemies to make the repair good. The only trouble was quite often the destroyed enemies left even more craters than before. I never managed to get far.

Knightlore on the Spectrum was the first game to have isometric graphics. It was unheard of before and heralded in the first of the forced perspective three dimensional isometric graphics. I remember being ill one day from school and played this game the whole day. Knightlore had you wandering around forty or so flick screens looking for spell components to mix into a wizards cauldron in the centre of the map. Once you collected all the components, the wizard would brew a potion to turn you back to human permanently. The game had a set time limit of forty days and nights. I remember watching the game as I had cuppa soup while waiting for the forty days and nights to see if you really did die and stay a werewolf and also to time how long the game actually lasted. There were three clever things with this game that hadn't been seen before. First was that enemies reacted differently to your hero depending on whether you were man or werewolf, second, the change between the two forms paralysed you for a brief moment, you meaning you had to find somewhere safe for it to happen or you’d die and third, every time you played the game the location of the various spell components had limited randomisation. The game cleverly solved the colour clash problem by having the entire screen the same colour, but then each screen being a different colour. These isometric puzzle games reached their zenith with Head Over Heels on the Commodore 64. I did have a quick guide which would help you find the spell components rather than wander aimlessly, but it still was a difficult game to play, you still had to make pixel perfect jumps and avoid the faster moving enemies and you still had limited lives. I don't think I ever completed this game, but it took a lot of my time up.

The sequel, Underwurld was not as enjoyable, as I spent far too long learning how to swing on my rope to really enjoy the exploring, and did away with the isometric look and went back to side scrolling action.

Valhalla for the Spectrum was a flick screen text graphic adventure game based on Viking mythology, that had some humour and was interesting to watch characters move and interact without any player input. It have innovative graphics that seemed ahead of its time, but was in fact a front end for a very BASIC game. The game sometimes would crash and reveal its BASIC origins, only the graphics were drawn by machine code. The company would only ever release one other game, The Great Space Race before they called it a day.

School Daze was a perfect game for a school kid to be playing. A single (bi-directional scrolling) level which mimicked a school and you spent a day being the naughty school kid you always dreamed of. All of the teachers and head staff were male, and the school itself was all boys. I watched someone complete this on Youtube many years later and it's shocking to see how difficult the game was. One of the goals of the game was to destroy the trophies the school had won and this was accomplished by knocking over a schoolmate, and then using the catapult to bounce stones off their head and up to knock the trophy down. Knocking them over in the right spot was a real challenge and then hoping a teacher didn't spot you and also doing it within a set time limit before the knocked over schoolmate got back on his feet and came chasing after you. Most of the humour came from being able to rename all the kids and teachers to your own and your mates with your actual teacher’s names. It was a great school simulator in that you could skive off lessons and write on the chalkboard when no one was watching. The game did get a sequel which added extra elements and more variety, but was still a big game and again was just fun to play regardless of whether you won or not. It did get converted to the Commodore 64, but it was an exact copy of the Spectrum and ultimately pointless.

Druid II from Firebird Software on the Commodore 64 was a one or two player Gauntlet clone which benefited from added variety and an optional second player controlled golem. I have always been fascinated by asymmetrical multi-player games where each player is involved with a different element of the game or uses a different control system, or where each player has a different role to play within the same game. Druid II, Silkworm, SWIV and Wizball are just a few 8 bit examples. It was a much slower paced game than Gauntlet and consequently a more difficult game that only had eight levels. You collected magical boxes which increased the number of magic spells or bullets you could fire. There were four different types of spells, water, fire, ice and electricity. Each enemy could be only killed effectively by one type, and be slightly wounded by any other type. The only way to find out was pure experimentation. We only ever saw the first two levels because the game was difficult, and when you lost all your lives you started from level one again. The first level had several safe areas you could camp at and get your gameplay and strategy sorted before making your attacks and slowly advance to the exit, whereas the second level seemed to have no safe areas and required intense combat. It also had a lot of enemies and required you to learn which spell worked best. There was unlimited enemies like in Gauntlet until you destroyed the monster generators. I always played as the Druid, while my brother waited to be the golem I'd summon. The golem was an incredibly clever addition and also had immense amount of hit points, meaning he could clear the way for your weak wizard. In one player mode you could give the golem three options, attack, defend, or go that way, obviously in two player mode he was under direct player control and far more effective. The golem’s only power was huge hit points and hand to hand which would easily kill the enemy. It took a lot of power to summon the golem and left the wizard weak until he could build up his magical powers again. Another way to play the game in single player was to find somewhere for your wizard to hide, and control the golem yourself or with your feet. It was several years later that I would find out that it was Peter Molyneux’s new company Taurus Impex (later Bullfrog Productions) who did the rather excellent conversion on the Commodore 64 for this game.

Thanatos on the Spectrum was a beautiful game and with a haunting piece of music opening the menu of this majestic game released by Durrell Software. I think that is a lost classic. You played a huge dragon creature as it flew across the screen and the background incorporated parallax scrolling. You really did believe you were a majestic dragon and wielded immense power, but more remarkable was how they got this to work on the simple Spectrum. You flew across the land trying to save the witch who was about to be burnt at the stake by peasants. Once you freed her she would mount on your back and you would then ride on to take on knights and castles. My friend Alan bought this for my eighteenth birthday.

Durrell Software had an incredible reputation for producing big sprites and stunning games, and they continued this with the release of Saboteur 1 and 2 on the ZX Spectrum as well. I played the first game extensively, but because of the slow nature of the game and its progress I didn't really explore any of the levels or missions other than the first one. The second game added new elements, like dogs, but was bigger in scope. A lot of the mission was looking all over the map for an invisible security key to open a door to get a security card to unlock a safe to key a code to open a door to get the secret papers and then escape. There was a lot of backtracking, which I got bored of very quickly.

Uridium for the Commodore 64 was a tough shoot em up game that truly enabled you to demonstrate your skills as a player. The ship was a shameful clone of the Millennium Falcon, but apart from that everything about the game was original. The ship was incredibly responsive, you got to fly it both left and right, turned sideways and straight. A game where you really could fly with style and for the first time show off your piloting skills. Andrew Braybrook would later release Uridium+, which was a faster running version of the game which had a higher frame rate, and at the beginning of the game the mothership would drop off your craft much quicker meaning you got into the game quicker. The games always had sixteen levels, and the highest level I managed was level seven or eight. Each dreadnaught was given a name after a rare metal.

Paradroid also for the Commodore 64 was another difficult game that combined shooting and strategy as well as talent. A shoot-em-up with heavy amounts of strategy. The transfer game added extra layers of skill. You started out as a lowly 001 droid with little power and defence. The initial game had you destroying and taking over lesser robots in the hope you would take over the master 999 droid. But the strategy was about ensuring you left enough low level droids to make your way up to the powerful droids later in the game. I loved all of Andrew Braybrook’s games, including Gribbly’s Day Out, but the only game of Andrew’s I failed to understand and enjoy despite my best efforts was Morpheus, which is a shame as I am certain its a game I would love if only I knew how to play or was shown how to play. He was responsible for some impressive Amiga games, but after he left the 16 bit era behind he was never heard from again.

Kickstart II by Mastertronic for the Commodore 64 was a truly brilliant and value for money game. I played the original Kickstart many years later and glad I didn't play it first. A one pound and ninety-nine pence budget game that came with twenty courses, two player mode, random level select and a track creator. This was as much fun as Pitstop 2. It was a side scrolling split screen motorcycling game which required skill and control as it wasn't just about speed. Shaun Southern would later go on to form Magnetic Fields Software and produce the brilliant Super Cars series on the 16 bit computers. The music from the television series, Kickstart even played in the background, and despite its repetitive looping sound, never got old.

Impossible Mission was the perfect definitive Commodore 64 platform game. The random nature of the levels and location of the secret codes made this game brilliantly replayable and nerve-wrackingly difficult. It was as challenging and tricky as Manic Miner, but mixed in with the puzzling made this a classic. Your job was to find the old fashioned computer punch cards which when combined like pieces of a puzzle gave you the password to exit the game. The puzzle element really set this game apart from anything else. You could rotate the cards, flip them, mirror them or change their colour (you could only combine cards which had the same colour). So you played the game until you felt you had collected enough to start to decode the puzzle.  They released a sequel which used musical notes instead of punch cards, but while brilliant, didn't outshine the original. Its incredible to think that every element of the game was right. There was very little room for improvement. Some of the rooms were impossible unless approached from a certain angle, and some of the jumps required you to be pixel perfect. And that voice at the start from Alvin Atombender the mad scientist, “Stay a while, stay forever” was prophetic in that the game was so good you really did want to say forever. In both games you had unlimited lives, but playing the game the time counter counted down, and each death reduced your time limit down until you ran out of time and the game ended. It perfected the existing platform genre as well as introducing stealth elements and gameplay that would become standard.

Battlezone was a progressively difficult three dimensional tank battle game by Atari that got ridiculously difficult very quickly by smothering your tank with too many enemy tanks too quickly to defeat. It came from the arcades and was a deliberate attempt to milk you out of money to keep playing. The home versions didn't change this aspect. Encounter was different as it had far more variety and really used the sound to great effect, and the game was more balanced and got slowly harder. It also had some terrifying sound effects and ambient sounds as enemies approached you from a distance and got faster as they got closer. You got to hear the enemies before you saw them which added to the panic effect. I have first played this game on the Atari 800 and enjoyed it equally on the Commodore. The game’s magic was in the speed, and simple filled polygons made it move extremely fast.

Crazy Comets on the Commodore 64 was the first game where I was blown away by the music. Rob Hubbard literally made the Commodore sing, I felt the game was nothing special but the music was legendary. The actual game itself was pretty average and also fairly difficult. The game got a sequel but I never played it called Mega Apocalypse. Both games were about shooting planets against a swirling background until they exploded. The issue I had with the game was the sheer number of hits required to finish off each planet, and the screen would sometimes have four or five of them at any one time. Part of the audio problem on the first game was that one of the sound channels was given over to the weapon sound, and every time you fired your weapon it interrupted one of these channels and made the music sound empty. I remember just having this game loaded onto the title screen to listen to and enjoy the music.

Crazy Comets did get a sequel, but it never really took the gaming scene by storm as did the original.