Blasts from the Past - The Commodore 16
May 24 '04 (Updated Jun 23 '04)
The Bottom Line Ever own a C16? Relive some memories here!
Blasts from the Past - The Commodore 16
Many, many years ago, I owned a wonderful little computer called the C16. (Well okay, it was my dad that owned it.) Though it never quite reached the dizzying heights of popularity of its cousin, the C64, this was a great little computer that actually had a colour display! (Believe me, after the ZX81, that was quite something!) I can’t really remember the software houses that released them (I’ve tried…), but here are some of the games I remember on the C16:
Millionaire (?Mastertronic) – one of the best ever text-based management games, IMHO. You ran a software house and controlled everything from buying blank cassettes (yep, these were the days before DVDs, CDs, and even diskettes!_ from “Honest Jo” to marketing your product. Okay so it was simple but it was still challenging, and it even had decent graphics! (If this description stirs up strange feelings of nostalgia, check out my review of Director’s Chair)
Sabateur A game I later played on the Speccy and that is in the process of being remade for PC (see
www.retrospec.com), this was a platformer with genuine atmosphere. You had to infiltrate a warehouse or something and blow it up – or something… look, it was a long time ago! But it was good. (One thing I do remember is being hugely impressed by the graphics on the C16 4 (32K – I think), where the little man became something you could actually see the arms and legs on! WOW!!
Indoor Soccer - if anyone used to FIFA 2004 (or even FIFA 2000 - hehe) played this they’d probably be sent into paroxysms. It’s hard to imagine, looking back, that we didn’t view the graphics as primitive even at the time but, of course, we didn’t.
Roboknight - a platformer that looked really good for the time, very colourful and even quite detailed. Of course, I could rarely complete even the first level, but still…
Bandits at Zero (?Codemasters) Perhaps the best-known C16 game ever, this game is still hugely playable now (there’s a java version at this URL: http://plus4.emucamp.com/minus4j/b/banditsatzero.htm – though the tiny screen area there is a bit annoying…), and was always much more than just a shoot ‘em up thanks to the tricky mid-air refueling section. For the time the graphics were pretty good, and the transition from day to night was really cool – the first game I ever remember seeing something like that in. The explosions were also pretty impressive for the time and check out the sea for one of the earliest known attempts at parallax scrolling!
Kickstart (Mastertronic – I’m fairly sure about this one…) – remember the TV series Kickstart? I don’t know if it was ever aired outside the UK but it involved kids riding motorbikes round obstacle courses. The game was a little more adventurous – it had you jumping over buses! Great fun, I started writing a remake on the ST years ago… I didn’t get very far with it though. (I remember playing Kickstart 2 on the speccy – a split screen affair – but it just wasn’t as much fun as the original game on the C16.)
Winter Events (I’m 80% sure this one was Anco) – I don’t remember too much about this one but I remember playing it a lot. We had multiplayer games with six of us and I always won. :-D
Timeslip - This one was notable because it had three separate games (one in each time zone) that you swapped between – all on screen at the same time, so it could be pretty tough seeing what was going on! Never did complete it…
Trailblazer (Hey, I remember this one! Gremlin Graphics.) Amazingly enough, I have owned this game on C16, Spectrum, and Atari ST – and have played several remakes on the PC. So I guess you could say that this is the most enduring game I’ve ever played! Basically, you control a ball that’s racing down a track for no particular reason – well what’s a bored ball to do? – and try to go on the good squares and avoid the bad squares (different colours may speed you up / slow you down / make you jump / make you reverse / etc. The worst one of all reverses your controls… aaauuurrrggghhh!!!), and jump over the chasms. Sounds easy enough? Try adding a limit to the number of times you can jump. And give a time limit for each level. And, of course, you have a limited number of lives. Oh, and just for fun, let’s make some of the levels (i.e. every one after level 5…) fiendishly difficult. If I remember rightly, Trailblazer was one of the first 2-player games I ever had on the C16. I forget though – was “Cosmic Causeway” a sequel or a remake? (Try http://www.btinternet.com/~Allan.Bentham/blazingtrails.htm for a very good PC remake)
William’s Berg Adventure - I remember this text adventure for four main reasons – 1/ The primary school I went to was actually called “William Berg School” (and my C16 years and primary school years collided), 2/ It was the first game I ever had that came on a cartridge (EPROM) rather than tape, 3/ When you bought a meal a message came up saying “That hit the spot!” (for some strange reason I have never forgotten this…), & 4/ It had one of the most annoying parsers ever devised by man or beast.
Monkey Magic (I have a feeling this was also Gremlin Graphics) – take one freaky looking oriental guy. Add one flying carpet. Then zap the hell out of whatever happens to be around…. Fun, but not intelligent fun.
Airwolf - good grief, I remember this but not fondly. I never really saw the TV series but all I remember about the game is crashing. A lot.
Hectic! - a Lode Runner clone of sorts – you run around digging holes, monsters fall into holes, you hit them on the head. Evil, yes – but very, very fun. (Anyway, they’re out to get you, remember?)
So there we have it. Just about everything about the dear old C16 that my ailing memory can dredge up from the deep recesses of what I laughingly call me mind. I’ve tried one or two C16 emulators, there are a few of them around, but I can’t find any that seem to work very well. (I even saw a reference to a new. C16 game being produced – marvels will never cease!!)
Thanks for reading, it must have been hell for you.
CaptianD
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Other Blasts from the Past
Coin Ops
The Speccy
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Websites to check out
www.remakes.com
www.retrospec.com
The CaptainD Award for Inappropriate Gratuitous Overuse of Punctuation goes to…. CaptainD!!! (All rejoice.)
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