Be Excellent To Each Other

Good choice! Loved that game.

Wasn't Stunt CAr Racer on the Amiga/ST? Don't recall a C64 version.

One game I haven't seen mentioned is Druid. Top down Gauntlet like game where you can summon a Gollum and a second player can control it. Used to LOVE that.

Some of the better arcade conversions:

Pooyan
Zaxxon
Ms. Pacman (absolutely brilliant, this one)
Jr. Pacman (this one too)
Donkey Kong (There are two official versions, a really old one and one made somewhat later, both good)
Dig Dug
Wizard of Wor
Gyruss

Edit: Oh, and Defender was pretty good, too, although much easier than the arcade version.

Slightly off topic, but when I was young my cousins used to have a C64, although I didn't see them very often, so didn't get to play on it very much. The only game I remember is a Manic Miner style game, and the only distinguishing feature I remember is that one of the levels had one of those plunger-type things (that would squash you when you walked under them) all the way down the right hand side of the screen.
Does that mean anything to anyone?

Umm.. you've made me doubt it now. But no. Must have been on the C64. Can anyone confirm?

It was on both formats.

There was a speccy version of SCR. I remember it well.




And, yes, there was a c64 version

Here

Yes there was a C64 version. Although it probably ran at about 1 frame per year.

Psi-5 Trading Company ("Sci-fi", geddit?)
Thrust
Paradroid
Master of the Lamps
Park Patrol
The Sentinel
Sentinel (Not the same as the previous, it's a 3D shooter)
Dropzone (The very best arcade game on the C64)
Encounter
Poster Paster
Super Pipeline
Super Pipeline 2
Rock'n Bolt

Yes to everything on the lists except



No , no , NO !

Dropzone is an Atari game http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropzone

This is on my to do list. Best thing I ever did for my Amiga was putting a compact flash in the hard drive bay followed by the extra memory and accelerator.

This has piqued my interest. Any links? Presumably it would only work with games that were originally published on cartridge, or what?

You would be incorrect.

And I don't have a link because if I did find one I'd probably buy it straight away.

thread of the day...

i always really liked helicopter explorer Eindeloos ("endless", dus game) and fort apocalypse..

I was always rather envious of the C64 version of Power Drift. It had the proper undulating courses of the arcade original and looked pretty good compared to the Spectrum version.

Action Biker was a weird one too - the C64 and Spectrum versions were completely different games. I did enjoy the Speccy one (with Clumsy Colin going house-to-house for bike parts or something.. all a bit hazy) but the C64 was a lot more fun if I remember rightly.

So, as a result of this thread I've discovered 1541 Ultimate. Oh dear. I need this in my life, I need it so very badly.

I was looking around and found this one instead

http://store.go4retro.com/products/uIEC%7B47%7DSD.html

Cheaper but not available , however looking at the background I found this thread

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0

Which suggests that the problem was a component that the manufacturer stopped making and the person who builds them has found a replacement so they should be available 'soon' (the website says 'today' - the thread says sometime this week)

Other alternative seems to be a custom cable and you hook it up to the parallel port of your PC (if it still has one) , run some customer software and your PC pretends to be a 1541 drive.

(Although i'd love the retro feel of this stuff i'm happy with just emulating them on a normal computer - for anyone viewing this thread and feeling a bit nostalgic grab VICE from http://www.viceteam.org and go to http://www.gamebase64.com to download virtually any C64 game).

Both would have been in Retro Gamer if we'd been able to track down the programmers. Great games. Same also for Blue Max.


It was on the 16-bit machines and better on them, but the C64 version was impressive, fast and handled really well. If you had a room with a bunch of machines, including an Amiga, there'd be no point in loading the C64 game, but if you just have a C64, it's one of the very few 3D racing games that still plays well today (another, perhaps, being Power Drift).


Monty On The Run? Dynamite Dan?

I think that if it had been on the Spectrum, then I'd have hunted it down for myself, so I'm assuming it was a C64 game only. I've looked at all the single screen platformers on Lemon64 and nothing really sticks out, it didn't help that it was hooked up to a black and white tv.

Both Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back have plungers which kill you but they are 'flat' bottomed rather than rounded.

I don't think so, I remember the graphics as being very 'Manic Miner' like, as opposed to the fairly chunky graphics which seem to make up most of these games. A bit of googling has turned up Blagger, but it doesn't seem very familiar (and I'm rubbish at it).

A few more fondly remembered:

BC's Quest for Tires
B.C. II: Grog's Revenge
Crazy Comets
Dino Eggs
Frantic Freddie
Gunship
Hideous Bill and the Gi-Gants
High Noon
Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory
Paratroopers
P.O.D.
Raid on Bungeling Bay
Save New York
Space Taxi
Split Personalities
The Way of the Exploding Fist (IK+ is a better game, but this has so much charm)

And another set of decent arcade conversions:

Burger Time
Burnin' Rubber
Frogger
Mario Bros
Popeye
Qbert

Edit: Oops, I see P.O.D. was already mentioned up there in Craig Grannell's list. Oh well, it deserves to be mentioned twice.

Okay - for all this 64-love right now - would anyone be up for a "C64 challenge" season - about 5 or 6 weeks (since any longer and no-one other than me and Chinny play) - 5 or 6 'arcade style' games chosen from the various lists on here with a download bundled so anyone interested (who's running windows) could play ?

I'd be up for that.

Indeed. Especially since I've not had any time to organise anything proper of late.

I'd give it a pop. I loved my C64...

Fist was one of the last properly designed classic block-and-parry fighters. If only they'd made the leg sweep less realistic (and therefore less powerful). I still prefer the game to IK, though, if not IK+.

In. Except it must be played on a real C64

It should be a condition that if you own a C64 and the game in question, you must play it on the real machine.

To date I think I am the only person who has played any challenge game on the original hardware. And I think it was indeed a 64 game.

I never really got on with International Karate. IK+, though, and especially the Amiga version, is just a glorious game.

I'll mention Robocop, Last Ninja and Zamzara as games worth playing. That last one isn't easy to find online though

http://gamebase64.hardabasht.com/games/ ... 842_02.zip

From http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=8842&d=18&h=0

New thread is up viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7452

We had Bruce Lee in the 8 Bit Challenge vote once, possibly twice. Was surprised it never made the final cut.

One of the problems I think with Bruce Lee is that it only has 2 difficulty levels , the first time round everything is at one speed , the 2nd time round it speeds up , but it never changes after this.

It does mean if your good enough to go round twice its more an endurance test for how many times you go round (there are also the 5 extra lives you can pick up on your first time round).

My brother and I used to play it 2 player with the first time around Player 2 helping Bruce , and then the 2nd time battling to try and stop him (2nd time around the Green Yamo was twice as fast as Bruce).

It is a real classic though and if you've never played it then you should grab it and it definitely belongs in a thread like this for best C64 games.

I loved Bruce Lee, but I had it on the Atari 800XL. I think they were pretty much identical though

Now there's a remake waiting to happen. Bruce fights off the lawyers, software pirates and "snakes with tits".

Cept the Atari one was better :-)

I had the Atari first , although I did eventually get a 64 , and the 64 got so many more games / had better conversions of a lot of arcade titles there were a few games every so often which really stood out on the Atari.

Unfortunately this was not the norm and we did have to put up with a lot of shoddy stuff - the absolute worst was the Atari conversion of Green Beret which I remember buying brand new for about £10 on cassette from John Menzies on Argyle street and wondering if i could take it back afterwards :-(

We had a Speccy and I was never really interested in the C64, and have no nostalgic feelings towards it. However, thanks for this thread, MrC!

Al-fail-bet.

Huh?

Wait. MrD?!

HUH!?

Don't we have a MrC? What's going on?! ARGH!"

edit: I'm a proper belm.

We had a C64 back in the day and this is some of the stuff we liked / can remember from back then.

Pacmania
Terrys Big Adventure
Cuddly Cubert.
Jack The Nipper 2
Herberts Dummy run.
Kickstart 2 Especially the Construction editor.
Manic Miner.

It wasn't exactly smooth, and the input lag was stunningly horrible - but I still played it and played it and played it.

On the tracks with the worst slowdown you had to move the joystick about 3 hours before you actually wanted the car to turn.

When I played the Amiga version I nearly came in my pants.

It sounded like a dead chipmunk farting through a hedgehog. Even passed to a decent speaker system it had no bass, no decent drum effects, no synth effects, it was bloody horrible compared to the C64.



Well it couldn't do much in 16 colour mode IIRC, it certainly couldn't handle fast scrolling and lots of sprites in that mode, or if it could, no one seemed to code like that for it.

Single screen games like Dr Destructo looked really good though, I'll give it that.

Maybe it just suffered from dodgy Speccy ports since it had the same CPU, a lot of games I remember ran in crappy 4-colour mode and were clearly just using Spectrum sprites and stuff.

I'd like to mention;

The Last Ninja
The Last Ninja 2
The Last Ninja 3

And, um:

Myth
Tusker
Vengence

And, er, Hammerfist. Truth be told though Vengence was gash.

(FYI to the fella on the 2nd page - I'm sure Monty on the Run was squashed by a boot when you lost all your lives. Brilliant music too. One of my favourite C64 tunes.

Assuming you mean me, it wasn't a Monty game. I had a spectrum at the time and I'm fairly sure it wasn't something that was on the spectrum as well. Of course, I was probably about 8 or so at the time, so take everything I say with a pinch of salt (I'm not even sure it was a C64).

I remember it as being a single screen platformer that was like Manic Miner (that's the 8 year old me saying it was like Manic Miner, I can't really remember enough about it). All I remember was that one of the levels (for some reason I think it was the 4th one) had one of those plunger type things that killed you and it took up almost the whole of the right hand side of the screen, but you had to get past it, from the top to the bottom (or at least we thought you did, this kind of implies that you didn't die from falling from a great height and possibly that you could move while falling), but couldn't work out if you were supposed to fall under the plunger while it was above you, or fall alongside it.

I think it's hard to overstate just how stunning these were back in the day, there are extensive videos of all of them on YouTube and even now the soundtrack gives me goosebumps (and I can still remember the paths to jump over the horrible stepping stones bits ).

I recall a chum of mine getting an Atari ST very early on in its life when I still had a C64 (probably 1987/88 I would think), and whilst the games certainly looked very pretty we were like, 'Why is the music so shit?' - yeah they could cheat with samples to an extent, but there was no getting away from that fucking abysmal YM sound chip.

Defender of the Crown on the C64 had higher fidelity music than the Atari ST version.

I stuck with my C64 for quite some time and then went to an Amiga, because it too had epic sounds and music, indeed the best Amiga music absolutely stands up today in its own right.

As for Myth, bit of a dodgy game in some regards but you could almost forgive it because it looked and sounded so gorgeous.

Honourable mention must go to 'Dominator' - by System3 of The Last Ninja fame.

A four stage shooter which alternated between vertically and horizontally scrolling stages, with a multi-load for each stage.

Looked and sounded absolutely wonderful, and was a fantastic game too, but fuck me it was brutally, relentlessly difficult, and when you lost all your lives you just went back to the start, as was the fashion of the time. You simply had to learn every single stage, it was almost 'Delta-esque' in that regard.

I got a proper boxed copy from a market down in Chelmsford, (I spent a few years living with my mum down in Essex when I was a teenager), for what I thought was an incredible price of £2.99 (it was £9.99 in the shops).

After weeks of play I finally got to the end of the third stage, and I realised he must have got a job-lot of reject tapes on the cheap, because the fourth stage wouldn't load! I took it back and he gave me another copy, exactly the same problem, went back the next week (he was only at the market on Saturdays), he gave me another copy, same bastard problem. Fair does he let me keep the tape and gave me £2.99 off another game, but I never did get to see the fourth stage

To appreciate the majesty of the C64's SID chip, just listen to this from the 3 minute mark, and this was playing whilst it was loading the fucking game. Amazing stuff.



And the game itself:

You can add Sabre Wulf to the ever growing list. Loved that game.

Manchester United the game - first sports game I ever played. The sequel was better in many respects but bug ridden.

Also, Rockstar ate my Hamster, for no other reason that it was the one game that was as technically excellent as the Amiga version. And my mum tried to stop me playing it.

Swoon.



Cybernoid 1 and 2 were actually really good games on the Speccy too, but the C64 version brought an extra slickness and smoothness to the proceedings, and by golly, that soundtrack.

This was definitely one of the games that sounded better on the old C64 rather than the later C64C, apparently there was a physical difference between earlier and later SID chips. I noticed this back in the day, when my old Commodore 64 broke and it was replaced with a Commodore 64C, and I was horrified to find that quite a lot of music and sound was worse on the newer computer.

The dudes were actually using a manufacturing defect in the chip to squeeze out a 'free' extra channel and effects!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID

Huelsbeck's version of the R-Type soundtrack often sounds better than the arcade stuff. Love the st6 and st7 themes.