Old European Computer gaming

[bVork]

NeoZeedeater named a lot of cool games that I missed, though I was trying to restrict myself to games that are either exclusive to or clearly superior on C64 and Amiga. I must disagree on the Last Ninja games. I thought they were horrible uncontrollable messes only partially redeemed by the excellent graphics and music.

Impossible Mission is a great game, though I'd be surprised if you haven't played a version of it by now. It's apparently coming to Wii VC.

Cybernoid 1 and 2 are nearly impossible, but they're still fun. Some of the best music on C64 as well - Jeroen Tel is awesome. The ports sucked, but be sure to listen to his arrangements of Afterburner and Outrun.

Ghetto Blaster is an interesting game. It takes a while to understand how the street layouts work and the actual goals of the game, but it's fun once you get the hang of it. Groovy music, too.

Monty On The Run is a typical stupidly hard nonscrolling platformer. With the best music on C64.

Centauri Alliance is a first-person party-based sci-fi RPG. It's a lot of fun, and includes the strange ability to import characters from Ultima and Wizardry games. The combat system is a hex-based affair vastly unlike many other RPGs of the day.

Mercenary is a really deep and complex nonlinear first-person adventure game that uses the same vector style as Elite. There are two sequels on Amiga, using filled polygons instead of vectors but retaining similar gameplay: Damocles and Mercenary III: The Dion Crisis. Damocles was apparently going to be ported to PC with even better graphics, but Novagen went out of business before it could be completed.

Le Mans is a simple Monaco GP clone made by HAL... the same HAL that later created Kirby. There are a lot of similar games on other systems, but I can't think of a better blob-dodger on C64. It supports the 2600 paddles for analog control.

I don't like Spectrum. I think the graphics and sound are an absolute mess, and the gameplay suffers because of the limitations of the machine. That said, there are two Spectrum games that I love: Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge. They're complex strategy/RPGs that are absolutely huge. They came out on C64 as well, so I thankfully don't have to use a fucking Spectrum or emulator to play them. PC versions were also included with the third (and PC-only) Lords of Midnight game - the only redeeming feature of that mess.

[sedition]

The 1v1 character battles in GI Joe for the C64 was the awesomest two player game back in the day.

[NeoZeedeater]

I don't like Spectrum. I think the graphics and sound are an absolute mess, and the gameplay suffers because of the limitations of the machine.

I do like the Spectrum but yeah, it's not in the C64's league overall although it did tend to have smoother 3d games (look at stuff like I of the Mask or Fat Worm Blows a Sparky). The Amstrad line offers more stuff I want to play than the Spectrum since so much good Spectrum stuff was ported near perfectly to C64.

Speaking of Amstrad, last night I completely forgot to list CPC games that are either exclusive to it or noticeably better than the other versions. Here are some of those:

Cosmic Sheriff
Frost Byte
Dan Dare III
Psyborg
Equinox (not the same as SNES game)
Bactron
Demon's Revenge
Future Knight
Bunny Bricks
Xyphoes Fantasy
Burnin' Rubber
War Machine

[gamevet]

I plan on dusting off the old C-64, and looking through the couple thousand games I have, to see if I've missed anything.

I also have an Amiga, but most of what I have has been done better on the PC, or its been ported to consoles. I will say though, that Golden Axe on the Amiga, looks much better than the Genesis version. There's only one problem though; the game freezes up at the final boss.

Reading through several of the UK Amiga magazine, there was high praise for Cannon Fodder. I believe there is also a Jaguar version of the game, but I've played neither.

[gamevet]

I've waded through about 40 titles and came up with 2 that are notable.

Have you tried Broderbund's Spelunker?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelunker_(computer_game)

Interplay's Borrowed Time, is a graphic adventure game that was highly praised back in the day. The title appeared on both the Amiga and C-64, plus several other formats.

http://home.flash.net/~rayearle/Bfiles/BrwdTime.html

[Frogacuda]

Spectrum is no doubt a piece of shit piece of hardware. There are... workarounds to emulate them with new graphics and such, though.

[Wildkat]

I never did see why the Euro-kids were so into thier speckys.

I still to this day laugh every time I see an Apple II as well.

Nothing beats a real C64 for these games though. The Emus never get it right. Load times are horrific, so either get a epyx fast load off ebay, or get one of these when they start selling them again..

http://jderogee.tripod.com/project15..._How_to_order:

its the "1541-III" a SD card based drive emulator you connect directly to a real C64/128.

[Dyne]

And if you think Amiga load times are bad, try a real C64 - the 1541 is the slowest consumer-level disk drive ever released.

true that. ,8,1

[NeoZeedeater]

C64 disk load times were not a problem with this [edit - Wildkat beat me to it, I somehow missed his sentence]


I don't know why the limeys loved the awful cassette format.

I still to this day laugh every time I see an Apple II as well.

At least the Apple II has the excuse of being much older. The Spectrum came out the same year as the C64.

[bVork]

Cassettes were really cheap. And loaded even slower than disks. When I played cassette games, I'd often plan it so that I would start the loading, go eat dinner, and then come back and play.

Too bad the fastloader doesn't work with some of the more creatively programmed C64 games - it often runs into errors designed to annoy would-be pirates.