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Favorite Commodore 64 game?

bob_arctor

Tough_Smooth
The C64 was responsible for my long time love of fighting games with Karate Champ. That's where it all began for me. That, and Karateka.
 

Crystalkoen

Member
I grew up on one of those machines.

Montezuma's Revenge, The Dark Tower, Giana Sisters, and Raid over Moscow (probably my favorite Zaxxon-esque game ever) all got a lot of play.

There are three, though, that I cannot recall the name of. The first was a graphic adventure style game. You were some kind of mutant in a post-apocalyptic world.
The second, a bike racing game that I could swear was made by EPYX, but I cannot recall. EDIT: Super Cycle, mentioned later in the thread.
The third, a flight game that had a shop-style screen with a robot that would hold its arms in a steeped position while it waited for its computer to process stuff.

This whole list was pretty much my childhood, with Raid over Moscow getting the most play of them all.
 

Hanmik

Member
Memories...

One of my Dad's favourites (#1 was Bruce Lee)...

Way of the exploding fist 2 (aka Fist 2)
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this game had the most amazing music... LOVED it.. but the game was fucking hard.. like Souls hard.. You had no lives, just that energy scroll .. and when you died.. back to the start ...
 

Currygan

at last, for christ's sake
Zak McKraken and Defender of the Crown. I spent, like, two years playing only these two...amazing times
 

Velinos

Member
The Commodore 64 was a great computer and provided lots of fun before I got an NES as a kid. Some of my favorites.

Air Rescue

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Aztec Challenge

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Boulder Dash

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California Games

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Choplifter

Choplifter_Animation.gif
 

Vazduh

Member
Other not already named favourites of mine (and my friends):

Hunchback
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Bruce Lee
Bruce_Lee.png


Yie Ar Kung Fu
Yie_Ar_Kung_Fu.png

Yes to all these. Those were one one of my favorites, too.

I also loved these:

Squish 'em

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Stop The Express

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Snoopy

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Miner 2049er

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Shane

Member
I have a working C64 at home.

I have an adapter to allow the use of two Dualshock 1 pads.

If only I had friends who cared for old videogames enough. Boo hoo me.
 

Hanmik

Member
I have a working C64 at home.

I have an adapter to allow the use of two Dualshock 1 pads.

If only I had friends who cared for old videogames enough. Boo hoo me.

I could be that friend.... that live 1000 of miles away on some Islands...
 

Sintoid

Member
The Sentinel - By Geoff Crammond
Zak McKracken
Maniac Mansion
The Last Ninja (1 - 2 - 3)
Myth
Delta
Armalyte
Hunter's Moon
Paradroid
Epyx Super Cycle

Not in order
 
As a devout Speccyhead i say "PAH!" to the C64... as a gamer some of my fondest memories are of popping round my mate's house when we were in 6th Form and getting a couple of cups of tea and games of Leaderboard in during our free time.

Yeah, it was slow but damn, we LOVED it. Good times.
 
Too many. Last Ninja, Saboteur, Commando (when I heard the arcade music, it feels wrong, as in the commodore 64 version is much better :). Labyrinth, Zak McKracken and Maniac Mansion were my first entries into graphic adventures.

I have a nice memory of Antiriad, even if I could only get the armor a few times.
40797-rad-warrior-commodore-64-screenshot-starting-a-new-games.gif
 

spekkeh

Banned
Gorf and Ghostbusters......... the latter took about an hour to load (not kidding) on my Commodore 64.... Gorf was pretty fast (it was a cartridge)
Ghostbusters 2 took an hour to load and when you died it would boot you out of the game after which you had to run it again. Ah good times. Dark Souls is for pussies.
 

Hanmik

Member
man how could I forgot this guy

LCP_Animation.gif


my worst best friend ever... he never did what i wanted him to do... but damn I wasted much of my youth with him.
 

jett

D-Member
A lot of the C64 catalog is filled with inscrutable, inexplicable and/or unplayable games (more than half the time I was playing something I seriously had no idea what I was doing), but there were some true gems in there, some honest to goodness good-ass games. These are some my faves. I really regret selling my C64 way back when, an emulator is just not the same thing.

Karateka
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The Great Giana Sisters
GianaSisters_Animation.gif


Green Beret
GreenBeret_Animation1.gif


Commando
Commando_Animation.gif


Pitstop 2
Pitstop2_Animation.gif


Bruce Lee
Brucelee_screenshot1.gif


Barbarian
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Montezuma's Revenge
MontezumasRevenche_Animation2.gif


Zaxxon
Zaxxon_Animation.gif


And of course, the C64 experience just isn't complete without that amazing SID sound chip.
 

Shane

Member
I always considered getting one of these; http://www.1541ultimate.net/content/index.php

The '1541 Ultimate' is a storage solution for your Commodore C64 and C128 home computer. This piece of hardware implements a 'real' 1541 diskdrive for Commodore computers. There are two versions of this board; the 1541 Ultimate-I and the 1541 Ultimate-II. The 1541 Ultimate-I uses an SD-card or MMC-card to store the floppy disks, while the 1541 Ultimate-II uses MicroSD and USB pen-drives. Both the 1541 Ultimate-I and the 1541 Ultimate-II contain a replica of all the necessary hardware to be fully compatible with a real drive.

The '1541 Ultimate-II' is basically a cartridge for the C64/C128. With a simple press on one of the buttons, a menu will pop-up on the Commodore screen, allowing the user to view the SD-card content, and 'mount' .d64 or .g64 images into the floppy drive.
 
Literally the only thing I ever remember playing on a C64 wasn't even really a game. It was this thing called Ranch. You'd basically use shapes to build little wild-west scenes. That was it.

Hours. Fucking hours.
 

Santar

Member
Ahh, the C64, the first gameing machine I owned myself.
So many great games.

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Bubble Bobble I got with my C64, it was on a compilation collection called Taito Coin Op hits. It also had Renegade, Rastan, Slap Fight and Arkanoid to name a few.

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Rainbow Islands was such a great port, so colorful and wonderful music too.

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Super Wonder Boy was a great adventure platformer with lots of secrets and memorable music.

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Buggy Boy was a very playable little racing conversion.

Just too many too list, the C64 really was such a great machine :)
 

Doomedfool

Member
Pool of Radiance for me. I loved the Gold Box games.

Honorable mention goes to the Bard's Tale 2. It was the first crpg I ever played, and that's still my favorite genre today.
 

bishoptl

Banstick Emeritus
Sid Meier's Pirates.

Ghostbusters.

Falcon Patrol II.

Lazy Jones.

Radar Rat Race.

Summer Games/Winter Games.

Temple of Apshai.

Sea Wolf.

Satan's Hollow.

Bruce Lee.

Bard's Tale II.

I could go on for days, but I've got work to do.
 

Herne

Member
I can't just name one... it's impossible. Instead I'll list what games I can think of, in no particular order -

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Champions of Krynn

Ah, the good old SSI AD&D games - a golden age in western RPG's. I spent six months on this game, mostly because of the cities and dungeons I traipsed through had identical walls and what-not. I still remember when my Knight of the Crown became a Knight of the Rose through a series of challenges that proved incredibly tough - only one member of the party could choose to complete a trial, and if it was anyone but the knight, they would die... until the end, where they would all magically come back to life.

Years later, when people were raving about this game on the PlayStation called Final Fantasy VII, I managed to rent both the machine and the game out and I was not, to say the least, impressed. It had exactly the same random enemy encounter gameplay I'd seen in Champions of Krynn almost a decade earlier. Talk about your next generation...

Flimbo%27s_Quest.png


Flimbo's Quest

This was one of four games (the others being Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun, Commodore International Soccer and Klax) that came on the C64 GS cartridge. When the GS failed, Commodore got rid of their surplus by releasing the GS cartridge with regular C64's, and I managed to get one from a friend. My sisters adored this game, and played it as often as they could - in fact, I still have a C64 today (with a 1541 Ultimate II, naturally) and at a recent family gathering I brought out my C64 and they were delighted, playing Flimbo's, Fiendish Freddy, Mayhem...

A fantastic little game with some of the loveliest tunes the SID chip ever produced, it was a platforming game whereby you had to kill certain monsters that carried scrolls - each scroll carried a letter which you brought back to the shop... once you had enough letters, you progressed to the next level. Inside the shop you could also buy upgrades to your pea-shooter alike weapon, such as a faster rate of fire, a longer range before it dissipates, extra time, invulnerability, even buy the next letter. Great little game.

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Bubble Bobble

God, who didn't love this game? Bub and Bob, the boys turned into adorable little dinosaurs, would go on to star in two sequels (Rainbow Islands and Parasol Stars, the latter of which would sadly never come to the C64 due to, of all things, a spousal disagreement), as well as be used in the Puzzle Bobble aka Bust-A-Move games in the last decade. A simple concept, it was very fun to play and could become infuriatingly difficult in the later stages. One of the best multiplayer games on the system.

Guild_of_Thieves_1.gif


Guild of Thieves

Ah, text adventure games. I didn't like most of them, as they usually had dim or non-obvious parsers, and many of them didn't have very good stories to tell. Along comes Rainbird, a subsidiary of the once-famed game company Firebird, with the highest quality text adventures I've ever seen. They did have a lot of disk access time, but this was due to one of the most intelligent parsers I'd ever seen in such a game.

There were others that came before Guild, such as The Pawn (which I didn't own) and Jinxter (which I did), but this was the first of the series I'd played and it left a definite mark on me. You should've seen the extras that came with these games, too - full size newspapers with hints for the game, nonsensical stories, images and the like... I used to show them to my parents once every few years, tell them I'd found these papers in their room, and what the hell were they? Just to confuse them. The looks on their faces as they read through them... Even with today's special editions, you don't get this sorta stuff anymore.

rodland_04.gif


Rodland

Like Bubble Bobble, another platform arcade game, Rodland was probably my first encounter with anime/manga style character design long before I realised it. You played as Rit (and a friend played as Tam, her sister, if you played multiplayer) who was out to rescue her mother, and she did so by bashing enemies heads in using a magical rod, which also allowed you to create ladders you could use to reach platforms. Levels would end either when all enemies were dead or you collected all the flowers. Again, simple in concept, fun to play, bloody difficult in the later stages.

Ghostbusters_%28Spanish%29.png


Ghostbusters

I can't do a favourite C64 games list without mentioning this, the game that got me to want a C64 in the first place. I didn't have much exposure to computers and consoles as a child - the recession in 80's Ireland had hit us hard and very few people had money. The only computers I experienced were the Apple IIe at school and the Atari 2600 people were still using and buying in the late 80's and early 90's. I wanted an Atari 2600 for Christmas, I remember, but one day our parents took us up near the city to visit some friends of theirs, that we as kids had never met before. As the adults wanted to talk, we were directed to their son's bedroom, where he and his brother were playing a boring looking shooter on a computer.

After a while he let us play, and he loaded up several games, though I can only remember two - this and Yie Ar Kung Fu. Both games wowed me - but it was Ghostbusters that made me wanted to get a C64. Ray Parker Jr.'s excellent tune instantly recognisable coming out of the SID, buying additions to my arsenal, driving through the city in ECTO-1 and capturing ghosts (and not crossing the streams!). I never did beat it, for some reason, but my memory of that day is very strong, thanks to this and Yie Ar Kung Fu. That year I did get a C64 for Christmas, along with a 17" black and white television all to myself. I was in heaven.

477618-mayhemd.gif


Mayhem in Monsterland

Oh, this game. The Rowland brothers had previously wowed C64 users with Retrograde and their famous Creatures and Creatures 2 - Torture Trouble, and with this they really brought their A-game. Everyone loved Creatures, and I was no different, but the little guy you played as, Clyde Radcliffe, moved in a somewhat stiff way - he wouldn't jump and run, he would jump or run, so there was a lot of stopping and starting. Compared to Mario and Sonic, he seemed somewhat pedestrian. And then along came Mayhem.

Mayhem was designed to be, as C64 magazines called it back then, more "console-esque". This was in the early 90's when 16-bit platformers were all the rage, and they were being made by seemingly every developer under the sun - the market was flooded by pale Mario and Sonic imitations. The Rowland brothers, John and Steve, decided to create their own game that would match the 16-bit console games' speed and fluidity - Mayhem would be as fast as Sonic, they said. And not only that, but it would look like no C64 game - it would look just as good as those 16-bit platformers on the SNES and Mega Drive. How?

There was something on the home computers back then (and still today) called the demo scene. Demos were a group of collated graphics and music and effects, which were designed to show off a programmer, graphician or musician's skills. Groups would challenge each other by doing things that hadn't been done before, like taking advantage of bugs in the VIC-II graphics chip to remove the borders, or mix colours to get more than the 16 the C64 could output. These techniques had been done in demos for years, but hadn't really shown up in games yet. Thus the Rowland brothers took advantage of many of these tricks, such as the ones I mentioned, to create a game that would at least match the 16-bit platform games.

The result was magic. Magazines gave it extremely high scores - 97% from Commodore Force, and even a very foolish 100% from Commodore Format. It deserved the former, at least - Mayhem is a very, very good game. It does indeed look like a game you'd expect from that era on the Mega Drive, at least. And with the lightning bolt power-up, Mayhem sped up to run about as fast as Sonic did, at least in the original game (and Sonic scrolled in eight directions, Mayhem only in two - hey, there's only so much an 8-bit machine running under 1MHz with only 64KB of ram can do!). A classic, it was released on the European Virtual Console store on the Wii, and I believe a mobile version was also produced a few years ago.


God, so many more I could list... maybe I will, later.
 

SmokedMeat

Gamer™
Most played games...
- California Games
- Epyx's Movie Monster game starring Godzilla
- Kung Fu Master (until the NES version hit)
- Pac-Man
- Bop n Wrestle
 

Silent D

Neo Member
Literally the only thing I ever remember playing on a C64 wasn't even really a game. It was this thing called Ranch. You'd basically use shapes to build little wild-west scenes. That was it.
I can relate to that. I guess back then to be able to create something wasn't exactly common. I remember spending hours in Mr. Robot's create-a-level mode. I didn't like the actual game that much, but had fun designing my own "kill rooms".
 

Zimbardo

Member
Most played games...
- California Games
- Epyx's Movie Monster game starring Godzilla
- Kung Fu Master (until the NES version hit)
- Pac-Man
- Bop n Wrestle

i owned that one ...was pretty terrible, but i still played it because of my love for wrestling at the time and that being the only wrestling game i had.


some of the games i played a lot were ...

Spy vs Spy
The Way of the Exploding Fist
Defender of the Crown
Aztec Challenge
Ghostbusters
Aliens
Summer Games
Winter Games
Bop n Wrestle
 

2+2=5

The Amiga Brotherhood
My memory is failing :\
The only game i remember i loved are Last ninja 2, Bubble Bobble, Mario Bros(the one with static screen), some Batman, Kung Fu Master, a skate or ski game(Skate or Die maybe?) and others.
I always wanted Chase HQ 2 and Creatures :(

I remember a game i had lots of fun with, it's top down driving game with lots of obstacles(going against them you crash) and people on the street(i don't remember what happens when you kill people), the more you drive correctly the faster you go.

Another one is a game where you are in the top of a castle and you need to stop the invasion of orcs dropping their ladders or using boiling oil.

Another one is a game i didn't understand at the time, it was back and white, it looked like a sort of top down table game but i didn't understand how to play at all, i'm sure it was not Archon.

Anyone remember these?
 

NervousXtian

Thought Emoji Movie was good. Take that as you will.
Sid Meier's Pirates.

Ghostbusters.

Falcon Patrol II.

Lazy Jones.

Radar Rat Race.

Summer Games/Winter Games.

Temple of Apshai.

Sea Wolf.

Satan's Hollow.

Bruce Lee.

Bard's Tale II.

I could go on for days, but I've got work to do.

Damn, such a great list.. so many freaking memories pouring back in.
 
Blue Max and Raid Over Moscow were my favorite games that I had no idea how to play. I couldn't take off in either of them, but I couldn't make myself stop trying either. Spy vs. spy was one of those as well.

There was this game that I played only once. You controlled a group of characters, and you were able to switch between them at will. I believe one of them was an armored lizardman or some such beast. It was an SF game, I think, maybe post-apocalyptic. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
 

Terrified

Member
Creatures
Creatures 2
Dizzy, Prince Of The Yolk Folk
Mayhem In Monsterland
Camelot Warriors
Bubble Bobblr
Football Manager
Dizzy Dice
Attack of The Mutant Camels
Street Fighter II
Ghostbusters
Loki
Jack Attack
Jack The Nipper

Probably more... too many to list. Curse my lost youth.
 

Schrade

Member
I played the SHIT out of Gunship.

My first game ever on the C64 was Congo Bongo in cartridge form. I didn't have a disk drive back when I first got my C64 and all we had was Congo Bongo + the programs I would type in from the gaming mags.

Finally got a disk drive a few months later.
 

Lasty95

Member
Gorf and Ghostbusters......... the latter took about an hour to load (not kidding) on my Commodore 64.... Gorf was pretty fast (it was a cartridge)

I remember it having a Space Invaders thing on the loading screen didnt it?

It was truly awful, but I loved it.

I had loads of games, but can't remember much of them.
 
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