Wait. It had an ending? The C64 version didn’t. It just warps you back to the first screen with increased difficulty. Originally, the game was supposed to have a boss fight against Montezuma – and I seem to recall the Atari XL has an unbeatable final screen with a giant statue of him, and then there’s nothing to do.
No, the loop is what I’m referencing. You reach a treasure room where you collect a bunch of gems and then he drops back through the beginning again. Each time, more of the opening area is pitch black until you find a torch.
Infocom’s Trinity was only for the C128 (and Amiga) for the Commodore. Which seems a little odd for a text adventure but so it goes.
Edit: Also Beyond Zork which, again, text adventure. Maybe the C64 couldn’t handle a more developed language parser?
Yeah, I forgot to edit my thought when I remember Elite and Bureaucracy two sentences later. I don’t remember Trinity at all, on any platform. But there were so many Infocom games. Oh, Beyond Zork as well? Missed that one. (I never really got too into the Zork series, though.)
ETA: Looking up Elite 128, apparently it did require a C128, but it was run in C64 mode. Weird.
Video link here, don’t think it requires an in-line video. Actual start of gameplay starts at around 3:25 with a “GO64” command.
Heh, I was just having a “Oh, wait, I remember…” moment. I think remembering four games with 3/4s of them being text adventures versus the thousands of varied C64 games is an “Exception that proves the rule” situation.
I don’t remember any commercial sprite-based games for the C128. Maybe some existed in Compute! Gazette for manual entry.
I definitely remember typing in some 128-only games, as Commodore BASIC 7.0 made for more compact and readable code for simple graphics, sprites, and sound. The one I specifically remember typing in was called “Smokebusters!” and was a game where you had to put out the cigarettes of people smoking in a building. My memory is hazy, but it was like there was a graphic of a building and then six windows you could shine a spotlight on, and if there was a person smoking in that window, you hit a key or fire button to put it out. Something like that. Looks like it was in the April 1987 edition of Commodore magazine.
“C64 mode” on the C128 does not stop the programmer from kicking the clock speed up to 2 MHz 
Even if you only do it when it is not drawing the screen, that’s at least a 20–30% speed boost for free. Obviously, the program will not then work on on a C64.
The C64 can play all of those games. The problem is the disk capacity. Infocom could have easily supported the C64 for all of their 8-bit titles had they gone with a multi-disk scheme (or required a higher-capacity drive like the C1581, but those were expensive so casual gamers would not have had one).
I remember playing the first Phantasie game on the Apple II and thinking it was a big step up from Wizardry.
Just remembered Herzog Zwei, which a buddy and I used to play split screen multiplayer all the time on the Sega Genesis. I mentioned earlier in the thread Populous as a precursor to RTS games since you could play multiplayer over a serial port I think. Herzog Zwei was the earliest one I remember that involved combat. The split screen made it much more accessible, but of course introduce the concept of screen watching.
Beyond Zork had advanced pixel-based formatting including stat bars and an in-game “map”. I don’t know if that matters, though.
True. Feels like something that could have been done on the 64 but I forgot that those were features in game.
Yes, well, I built a Beyond Zork disk image and tested it on an accurate emulator, and it runs fine, stat bars and map and all. Annoyingly slow, but fine.
Personally, I loved that game… often played it at the grandparents house around age 6-8.
~Max
XF5700 Mantis Experimental Fighter. Space fighter game in the 90’s using Newtonian “physics”. Number one in my library for “hard as hell and never going to be finished”, it more or less just kept ramping up the number of enemies. I got it on a CD mixed with the original Civilization.
Another one was Descent and the sequels. Six degrees of freedom, 3D environment, and blowing up robots in tunnels around the Solar System? Sign me up.
Back in the very early oughties, a friend of mine had a Sega Dreamcast. Once he figured out how to run games he downloaded from newsgroups, he downloaded all manner of crazy games. The oddest was a bus driving simulator. Want the excitement of having a job driving a bus? They have you covered. Nothing exciting happens, and it dings you for being bad at driving a bus. If you go crazy (say run over a pedestrian), the game ends.
Way of the Samurai - became a series with 4 games, but not all were released in America. It didn’t sell well here. Mostly popular in Japan, unsurprisingly.
The gimmick is you are a ronin who wanders into a remote town, and you have complete freedom to pick a side and get involved in the local conflict, or completely ignore it and just go about your business, or anywhere in between. I found it to be quite brilliant at the time (2002) and even today you rarely see that sort of gameplay.
To be fair, driving a bus in Tokyo looked different than driving in Toronto. Maybe there could be versions for Tehran or Turin?
There was a comedian commenting on the stereotype of Asian drivers. He said he went to Vietnam and saw a dude on a motorcycle with two other passengers and three heavy suitcases, overtaking a bus only doing eighty on a curvy roundabout, without losing the inch of ash from the cigarette he was smoking. His theory was Asian immigrants get bored easily.
I used to have some PC game c.2000 called Enemy Nations that I never hear mentioned or discussed. Though it wasn’t very good in my experience. It was a standard RTS type game with multiple alien races trying to conquer the last available untouched planet. The AI would randomly switch which race it was supposed to be throughout the game, and eventually just give up trying at a certain point, no longer building new units or structures.
Amusingly, the manual bragged about how current hardware at the time couldn’t possibly run the game at full settings so it would be a masterpiece for generations to come. Then it failed to run on the next iteration of Windows (from 98 to XP) even in compatibility modes so forget blazing it on your RTX 4090 these days. Then again, you’re not missing much.
me neither but my brother could play the hell out of it on the colecovision …
the pawn sounds like a poster child of why text games fell out of favor for point-and-click games only for the P&C games to fall for the same reason a decade later