I won Below the Root with each of the children, if I remember correctly. More than that, I later read the three novels that Below the Root was based on. (Below the Root, And All Between, & Until the Celebration.)
C64 emulators abound. Obtaining software to feed the emulators gets into the gray realm of abandonware, so for the purposes of this thread I’ll refer only to flea markets and EBay as good sources of the old software.
Cosmi, not omni.
Re Forbidden Forest
It was years before I realized that the sudden appearance of Demogorgon’s head in the final stage didn’t mean I’d won. It mean’t he’d eaten me. The shrieking, flashing, disintegrating death of the spectre in an earlier stahe remains one of my favorite video game moments of all time.
There was an FF2. It was scarier. Instead of stages, monsters randomly appeared one at a time. You could move away from or towards the screen in FF2. Standing in the foreground at the wrong time meant being surprised by a monster suddenly killing you.
Re Caverns Of Khafka
I know what you mean. WAG Some of it was intentional. When your character dies, he’s resurrected by standing up wherever his corpse has fallen. This lead to a glitch where the character would stand up inside solid rock and immediately die again. The programmer tried to fix this by giving the player the ability to crawl through rock to an open area and changing sprite collision rules. This didn’t really work. You’d still sometimes ressurect and instantly be killed. You could sometimes crawl through solid rock as a shortcut. You would sometimes (due to a factor I was never able to determine) die while crawling through solid rock.
Due to other glitches, it was possible to jump massive distances. Simply keep pressing the jump button at the end of each jump and the program doesn’t seem to notice that you’re standing in midair, Still a fun game though.
BTW- If we want to share the joy of the Commodore 64 with a new generation, we should probably describe the games or link to a site with descriptions, screenshots etc. Obviously, we must be careful not to accidentally link to sites offering downloads.
Time Tunnel-
Another Cosmi game. When the C-64 market was in its death throes, Cosmi rerealed 20 games in one box for $20. Time Tunnel has you playing a gnome (you look like one of Santa’s elves) searching through time for the pieces of a map that will tell you how to become the new ruler of the gnomes. The instruction manual provided brief hints for each time period. Most of the periods required the use of objects from other eras. Adding to the fun was the simple graphics. It wasn’t alway obvious what an object was.
Re Archon
Remember the chess scene in Starwars (“Let the wookie win”)? Archon is that. You don’t automatically take another piece. You have to fight for it. The forces of light and dark have assembled on a chess board. Light pieces are stronger on light squares, and vice versa. But, some of the squares slowly shift back and forth. Five of the squares contain power points. Control those five squares and you win the game. Each side has a spellcaster who can heal an injured piece, summon an elemental to do battle, or revive a dead piece.
An edition of Archon with better graphics was released for the NES.
In the ninties, Archon Ultra was released for the pc. Each piece now has two powers instead of one. The altitude of flying pieces factors into combat.
Archon 2-Adept
No chessboard. The realms are the elements, plus two Void squares.Instead of a set group of pieces, your small group of wizards can summon various monsters. Four of the powerpoints move from the corners towards the center each turn. Just before they converge, they reappear in the corners and start the trip over.
I never had Adventure Writer, though I played quite a few text adventures. Now they’re called “interactive fiction”, and there’s a thriving underground building and playing all sorts of themes. Have fun!
Yeah! M.U.L.E was my favorite game for a long time. It started my love with civilization building games. Pretty simple but a damn fun game I played for hours. Between that and Utopia(only Intelivision I think) All the elements of the games I love today were present.
Hey I owned the Commodore 64 too !!!
Of course being the frugal, practical (CHEAP !!) Yankee that I am, I never bought 1 program for it. Remember you could program it in BASIC? Well, no sense telling you folks about all the nerdy “geek” things I did with that.
My previous computer was the Sinclair ZX81 (long before it was bought out by Timex). I saw it advertised in “Popular Science” with a price tag of $150 (factory assembled) or $99 (kit form). Being the resourceful, skillful (CHEAP !!!) Yankee that I am can you guess which option I chose?
Heck, I learned BASIC on that very computer. ALso, I broke down and bought 1 progarm for it - CHESS. It was written in machine language with only 16K of instructions (hard to believe that it was possible to do that). It played a good game of chess but it was very unforgiving. No taking back moves. Also, considering the limited amount of memory (16K) it was difficult to differentiate any of the pieces and it was difficult even to discern the white from the black pieces. Still, it was fun.
We have about…I dunno…five C64s at home. Probably more. See, my husband is a “retrogaming enthusiast”, so he’s into all of the old computers and stuff.
He and a few of his friends got a C64 hooked up to our cable modem. It was pretty big news in the Commodore crowd. Of course, to test it, I had him pull up a link to the Master’s website ;).
So, yeah. No nostaglia here; we’ve Commodores aplenty. There’s apparently a club for C64 fans in the Chicago area. The members write new software and modify them for modern use. They’re doing an expo in a couple of weeks. It should be geeky.
Nitpick-They’ve been called that since at least the mid eighties.
Back To The OP
It isn’t just the games. I love the accessories too- tape drives, number pads, koala pads, paddles, magic voice. In the past few years I’ve even found a Commodore mouse, and something called a Super Sketch.
I had the C128…loved Impossible Mission as well as the original Pirates!
Never managed to complete Impossible Mission - what was one suppose to do with all the “recordings” you could pick up? I lost interest after my charater got stuck inside wall as I jumped into a new room far in the game
Ahhh, memories. We used to have pirated games even back then. We got them from my uncle, and who knows where he got them from. Most games you could figure out without the manual, but Impossible Mission sure was tricky. Especially the sequel, I don’t know that we ever figured that out.
Remember that old Epyx ergonomic joystick? I loved that thing. It was shaped like a ball of clay you crushed in your first, and then stuck a joystick on top.
Yes, the KoalaPad. I still have mine. I have about 5 disks full of saved drawings. I should hook the C64 back up sometime and go through them again.
Black with red racing stripes. The ads featured a close up of the joystick in the hands of somebody wearing expensive black leather racing gloves.
I still have a few, and they are superior joysticks. Most joysticks of the time had plastic shafts, and metal bubble switches. After a while, the shaft would snap at a vital moment, unless one of the bubbles became permanently depressed first. The Epyx stick had a metal shaft and toggle switches with plates and springs.
And it looked really cool.
The only cooler looking C-64 joysticks were the Alien and Terminator. I don’t know what year they were made. I don’t know if they were ever released in this country. I just know I want them.
You had to fit the pieces together. Every time you finished a puzzle piece, you got a letter for the password. If you had the password (and my memory is fuzzy here, so correct me if I’m wrong, someone) you went to the room that had the big open door in it and went out the door.
My favorites:
I used to use GeOS to make fictional papers a la the Onion, except with subject matter that would be interesting to a 13-year-old. My cousin was the coolest, because he had the Okidata color printer, but I just had some crappy little black-and-white dot matrix.
My favorite games from way back then:
The Detective Game
Archon
Test Drive (boy, did this game not age well)
Pirates!
Seven Cities of Gold
The Pawn (interactive fiction w/ graphics)
The Sentry (still, one of the coolest and most original games ever)
Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Maniac Mansion
Winter Games
World Games
Card Sharks (the Accolade version)
Chessmaster 2100
People think The Sims are something fairly new. Hell no. I had Little Computer People back in the 80’s.
I’ve done that on my 64. They aren’t very useful though because of the very short lifespan. I preferred the little 476s with their dual bolts.
I don’t know if they were written for C64, but that’s where we played (endlesly) Exodus: Ultima (Series).
I played a “western” game that I loaded off the tape drive. I can’t remember the name or too many details, but you had to “outdraw” a guy by typing really fast.
I also remember typing in a program that came with the manual that made a little balloon float down the screen.
I had a C64 as well. I played a lot of Infocom games on it (Hitchhikers, Leather Goddesses, all three Zorks, maybe some others) as well as Archon, Maniac Mansion, California Games, and a million others that I obviously can’t remember very well. My friend Devin and I began to create our own game called Pirhana [sic] Island. It was Interactive Fiction, but neither of us knew anything but BASIC, so we got rid of the idea of a text parser and just had places where it asked you for specific actions like a choose-your-own adventure book. I think we got as far as three decisions before we quit.
I used it as my word processer up through the first year of college, though.
–Cliffy
Seems like most Dopers are US-based, while I was in the UK during the glory days of the C64. In 1983, Sinclair ruled the home computer market - all of my mates had Speccies, and most Americans over there had Atari 800s or VIC-20s. Pretty soon after that the '64 blew up. We had Zzap!64 and Commodore User, Computer + Video Games started to cover more '64 stuff… great days!
We occasionally got hold of the US magazines but I personally did not have the interest or patience to type in 40 pages of POKE 53281,0 and the like. A friend of mine actually typed in a few and they were quite good!
I don’t remember games as much as I remember the software houses. Ocean, Mastertronic, Imagine, US Gold, Epyx, Melbourne House, to name a few. Some games come to mind, though:
Wizball
Spindizzy
Jet Set Willy (prolly 'cos it was one of the first games I ever played on a home computer - along with Horace Goes Skiing)
Thrust
Yie-Ar Kung Fu
Green Beret
Defender of the Crown
Beach Head II
Of course there are others but that’s my first thought on the best games.
I was also a fan of the music composers on the C64. Anyone remember Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish?
Sure! Rob Hubbard is pretty much a legend. Heck, all three are. There’s still some nutcases out there doing SID music, and releasing them on CD.
There’s even a couple of commercial products containing SID chips out there.
I love SID music! (I used to think Wizball had the very height of cool music - and Spindizzy music was awesome).
I used to have The Music Studio, by Ed Bogas, if I remember correctly. (the only thing I remember about that guy was my father telling me he wrote music for the Garfield and Charlie Brown shows.)