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SB Recommends Commodore 64 Games
Recommended
Agent X II
wourme: I'm not sure whether there was an
Agent X I. This is a fun scrolling shooter with
great spacy music. The second stage I remember being kind of like Elevator Action, and I never beat it. I wonder now what the third stage is like.
Battle Through Time
wourme: Kind of like
Moon Patrol but more elaborate, this game takes you through various wars in history and beyond. After World War III, you (representing humanity) are reprimanded for destroying the world with nuclear weapons. The game explains that if
Commodore 64s were running things, sprite collisions would be the only violence.
B.C. Bill
wourme: A prehistoric man hunts dinosaurs and other odd-looking creatures, with the goal of amassing and supporting as many wives and children as possible. The children eventually leave, and the wives sometimes attempt to.
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wourme: You play a drunk guy trying to walk home from a bar every night. Anyone you touch will beat you up (including the old woman with a cane). I used to play this game quite often.
Cycle: I used to play Bozo all the time. I loved how bizzare the park was. It seems to me he was trippin' on acid, not drunk on beer judging by the things you encounter! Also, you start seeing pink elephants when you're really pissed.
Bulldog
wourme: A pretty good scrolling shooter with excellent
title screen music.
Castle Wolfenstein
wourme: Sure, you've played
Wolfenstein 3D. But have you played the original game?
Demon Stalkers
wourme: An
Alien Syndrome-style game. This and Gauntlet were the two 2-player cooperative C64 games I spent the most time playing with a friend.
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Donald Duck's Playground
wourme: In this game, Donald Duck works different jobs to buy playground equipment for his nephews. You can also play as one of the nephews and use the equipment. I guess this is kind of an educational game, but it's a good one.
Flimbo's Quest
RobotRocker:
Flimbo's Quest was damn close to
NES quality, shame it doesn't hold up today as it is really repetitive and the movement is sticky
Frogger 2
wourme: A more elaborate version of the original
Frogger game, if you like that sort of thing.
Ghostbusters
wourme: I sure wish
David Crane still made games. His were always so excellent.
Goonies
kthorjensen: Very, very difficult puzzle-platformer where you control two Goonies on the screen, switching between them with the Space bar. This game required some insanely precise timing.
droog: I loved that game as a kid, and a huge Goonies geek. The only problem with it was the length.. once you got good at each of screens you could blow through the game pretty quickly.
Great Giana Sisters
Cycle: Well, we all know the story here, right? Shortly after being released, the publisher was forced to remove it from shelves due to legal pressure from
Nintendo (the game was an obvious knock off [of
Super Mario Bros.], and although it had some original aspects and levels, some parts were directly ripped from Mario […]), preventing the release of a complete
Spectrum version. It ended up being one of the most pirated games on the system and physical copies are highly prized. The music is also quite famous, and was pretty much my favourite part of the game.
Gyruss
wourme: A classic by
Konami, set to Bach.
H.E.R.O.
wourme: This game carries a feeling of constant danger, with the poisonous walls, the delicate use of bombs, and the possibility of being stranded forever.
International Karate + (also on: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, ZX, ST, Amiga CD32, GBA, PlayStation, WiiVC)
vamos: still brilliant, from the inventive move list to the animations in the background to the ball-repelling bonus game.
Bennett: Don't play the C64 IK+, play the Amiga one which is even more fluid and playable.
Jammin'
wourme: When you carry an instrument, you play the level's music. When a monster grabs an instrument from you, it plays a distorted version of the music.
Loki Laufeyson: […] pretty and poetic. it had some kind of spiritual effect on me for some reason.
Little Computer People
wourme: Not exactly a game, but something very interesting and ahead of its time. You watch and interact with a little guy in a house. You can talk with him, play cards, or just tell him to do different things. If you run him out of food and water, he becomes sick and eventually bedridden.
Lode Runner 4
wourme: All of the numbered
Lode Runner games are basically the same, but I always liked the colors used in
Lode Runner 4. I spent a lot of time using the level editor. I did so with just about any game that included a level editor.
Lode Runner's Rescue
wourme: An odd spinoff of the
Lode Runner series. I always thought the protagonist looked like Lewis Carroll's Alice. Like the other Lode Runner games, this one has an editor.
Manic Miner
wourme: Speaking of frustrating, I never had any of the Jet Set Willy games, but I had Manic Miner. I kind of disliked it, I think, but I'd play it anyway when in the mood for an unreasonable challenge.
Mayhem in Monsterland
vamos: A speedy console-style platformer with great music, level design packed with secrets and cute dinosaurs.
Tulpa: definitely worth it, it's a great game.
Mission Elevator
Adilegian: […] the most evocative of any of the elevator games for the C64 thus far discussed (for me, at least). And it was so brutally hard. I tried playing it again recently, but I couldn't figure out how to get my USB Dualshock-clone mapped to the controls for the game. Owing, in part, to being unable to find out what its original keyboard controls were. Come to think of it, I don't even know how I found them out in the first place when I was a kid!
Mr. Do's Castle
wourme: A worthy spinoff of
Mr. Do.
Mr. Robot
wourme: This is somewhat similar to
Manic Miner, but the difficulty is more reasonable and it includes bombs, magnets, and a level editor.
Pharoah's Curse
wourme: As frustrating as this game was for me, I always found myself loading it up again. I liked to imagine entering a hole in the ground and finding all kinds of strange colorful places. Only without all the the danger, I suppose. As irritating as the bird was, I always felt guilty shooting it and hearing it cry as it slowly fell.
The Pit
wourme: One of the first
Commodore 64 games I ever played. The whole game takes place on one screen, and I like that about it.
Pooyan
wourme: Another classic
Konami game. I'll bet anyone who has played this even once can instantly recall the theme song.
Popeye
wourme: As I understand it, this is the game that inspired
Mario Bros. In fact, I think that
Miyamoto actually wanted to use Popeye as his protagonist, but
Nintendo couldn't get a licensing agreement so he used Mario instead.
Rags to Riches
ApM: In which you start off as a smelly bum collecting empty bottles off the sidewalk and supposedly can end up a millionaire. Drink cheap booze to stay alive during the cold nights! Scrounge up enough money to get a haircut! Have a completely unavoidable random encounter with an IRS agent who takes all of your goddamned money just as you'd finally collected enough to go to college and have to fucking start all over! Still, though, look at that lovingly rendered hobo! It looks like a game that an early Simpsons episode might have made up.
Realm of Impossibility
wourme: This is a pretty interesting 2-player cooperative game. You drop crosses and cast spells to slow pursuing monsters while exploring many mythological mazes, some of which are optical illusions. I always liked the way the player-controlled guys wave at you before you descend into a new dungeon.
Spiderbot
wourme: I bought this game blindly (for $5) just because it was in the same “series” as
Boulder Dash Construction Kit.
Spiderbot is actually one of the more interesting video games I've come across, though I didn't get all that far in it. I'm still waiting for someone to post a longplay video. You capture different creatures with the nets you throw, and then you release them in strategic places. You're supposed to collect all the parts you need to convert your robot into the Spiderbot. And then . . . ?
Spy's Demise
Cycle: An addictive little action game where the player must collect items between floors while avoiding the elevators. After you completed a level succesfully, a floor would be removed, so the elevators would have less space to go up and down. This game was cloned several times (
Elevator for DOS and
Social Climber for Mac), but this version probably has the best gameplay.
Super Mario Bros.
wourme: A strange unlicensed version of the game. I just realized that
Enigmario kind of reminds me of this.
dessgeega: that mario appears to be
great giana sisters (a pretty neat mario clone in its own right) hacked so that it actually stars the super mario bros.
Survivor
wourme: One of my very favorites. I've always liked video games in which you break pieces off something large as you fight it. (See also
R-Type stage 3.)
Toy Bizarre
wourme: A fast-paced platformer that's a little like
Mario Bros. Exciting music introduces each level.
Trashman
Cycle: Originally a
speccy game, the
C64 version of this game is probably the more famous one. Well, it's the one I'm familiar with anyway. I've always enjoyed games that make mundane things entertaining, and this is one of the first! Well, there was
Hovver Bovver and apparently
Minter felt
Trashman was inspired by his title, but the creator denied it. Anyway, you have to grab the trashcans from people's houses and put them in the truck before it drove off. You got bonus points for talking to residents and had to avoid stepping on the grass (though it could be a shortcut) and avoiding cars, bikes and the like. I always thought a remake of this game in GTA:SA would be a fun extra job players could do!
Ultima IV
Felix: I always thought the C64 version of this was the definitive one. Playing it today is veeery borderline – there are wrappers to make the DOS version run properly on modern computers, and if you're accustomed to roguelikes, you'll find it cohesive enough, but combat isn't balanced well and it takes a lot of patience to find many of the quest items. That said, there are very, very few games with a better take on morality.
Wavy Navy
wourme: A
Galaxians-type game that I used to play quite a bit.
Wizball (also on: Amstrad CPC, ZX, Amiga, ST, DOS)
kthorjensen: Wizball is really excellent and easily emulated, go for it.
cake: Wizball is my favourite game of all time.
vamos: It's interesting, but I've given it a go several times and never found it to live up to the hype. It has a
nice remake.
Zorro
wourme: Another game by the creators of
Bruce Lee (and based on a lot of the same code, as far as I can tell). Slower-paced and more puzzle oriented than Bruce Lee, though. My uncle bought me this game from a clearance rack in a shopping mall.
See also
Commodore 64 - The wiki's hardware page, including emulation information.
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