Hello, and welcome back to another episode of “New games for old computers.” So,
what I try to do once or twice each year is to do some reviews of new games that have
come out for old computers in this particular case, these games are all for the Commodore
VIC-20 and 64. And rather than do a single, you know, 20 or 30 minute long episode on
a single game, I like to do several games in one episode that way you just kind of get
a little bit of an overview of each one. So, let’s get started!
These are some of the games I’m going to be showing you today. We’ve got L’abbaye
Des Morts for the Commodore 64. Fire for the Commodore VIC-20, Realms of Quest V for the
VIC-20, and Mancave for the C64.
Let’s take a look at Realms of Quest V. I was particularly interested in this one
because I was always a big fan of the Ultima series on the Commodore 64. There was never
really any sort of complex role playing game like this for the VIC-20. Sure, there was
a cartridge version of Ultima Escape from Mount Drash, but this game was very simplistic,
and to be honest I never really found it entertaining. Ultima gave you a whole world to explore and
increasingly difficult battles to fight. I suspect the reason the VIC-20 never got any
games like this is due to the need for more RAM. With 5K of built-in RAM, these sort of
games just wouldn’t be possible. And since no game developer dared to write a game for
the VIC-20 requiring a 32K RAM-expander, we would simply never see this sort of game done.
Until now, of course.
Opening the box we find a manual and two floppy disks. This, in and of itself is very unusual
because I don’t think I’ve ever seen any VIC-20 games that come on floppy disk. They
were usually distributed on cartridge or cassette tape. Next, we get a little coin here of some
kind with the name of the game on it. This is also made of real metal, so it’s not
plastic. And last, but not least, we get a cloth map. This is very similar to other games
of the era. So, these are some pretty nice physical goodies that come with the game.
Looking at the manual, it’s quite a substantial manual. Quite a few pages. One of the things
I thought was great is that it has the VIC-Dude, as I like to call him, which is a little guy
that looks like a VIC-20, which was featured heavily in the original users manual for the
VIC-20. So, it does say it requires 32K of RAM, and of course a disk drive or two.
So, first I’ll take care of the RAM problem by using my Penultimate cartridge, which has
a RAM expander option. And according to the manual, the game actually supports dual disk
drives. So, I can put one disk in here, and the other disk in there. However, I may have
to flip the disks around to the reverse sides throughout the game, but this should reduce
disk swapping a lot. Or, I can just use a 1581 disk drive instead. Although the disk
isn’t included, the digital download does include an image for one of these disks, which
can hold the entire game on a single disk, thus eliminating any disk swapping. However,
I’m going to cheat a little bit more than that, in that I’m going to copy the game
to an SD-card and use my SD2IEC to play the game. This is a modern device that plugs into
the disk drive port. And it also gets 5 volts power from the cassette port, so I’ll plug
that in too.
OK, now I’m going to fire up my VIC-20, but since I have the penultimate cartridge
installed, I get this screen first. I’ll need to go down and select RAM to be 32K.
And now, I can load the game.
I’ll start by looking at the introduction. This is a nice intro, especially for a VIC-20
game. It’s got music, narration, and these pretty pictures. These intro pictures are
actually pretty cool. The truth is, VIC-20 games never included full-screen artwork like
this. The main reason is that a full screen of graphics consumes more RAM than the VIC-20
even comes with from the factory. So, without a RAM expander, this sort of thing just wasn’t
possible.
OK, so there are some other things on the main menu, like the book of beasts. So let’s
have a look. So what this does is give you a list of all of the monsters you might encounter
in the game and let’s you view information about them. And dang, there are a LOT of them
here. I’ll just have to pick one. Here’s ghost. So, it tells you a little bit of information
about the ghost, and after a moment it will show you a low resolution picture of one.
I’ll pick another one. Here’s a gnome.
Ok, let’s take a look at the settings menu. So, you can change the game speed between
fast, slow, or medium. You can turn the music on or off. You can select the tiles to be
multi-color or hi-res. And then another interesting feature is font. You can select multiple different
fonts to use. This one is probably the easiest to read, but not the coolest to look at. So
yeah, we’ll leave it on Realms font. And then also you can select 1 or 2 disk drives.
But this doesn’t apply here since I’m using the SD card version.
So, much like any role playing game, you do have to create several characters. It looks
like you can create up to 10. And with each character you can pick all of these various
things. Then, as to be expected, you start with a certain amount of gold and you have
to buy some weapons.
And now, we’re off to explore. The actual playfield area looks very small. However,
it is 11 by 11 tiles, which is the exact same as Ultima, the only difference is the tiles
are much smaller. I suspect this was done to make room on the screen for all of this
other information being the VIC-20 text mode is only 22 columns.
So, I went off exploring, and was almost immediately attacked multiple times by different creatures.
And to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing as this game is surprisingly complex.
I also must admit being a little disappointed that you don’t really get to see the battle
from a top down scene. In Ultima, I could always see exactly who and how many I was
fighting, and could plan my attacks more carefully. This seemed to leave a lot up to the imagination.
In fact, several of my party died pretty quickly before I was even able to find another town
to visit.
So what do I think about this game? Well, for me personally in the year 2019, I think
the game is too complex and requires too much of a learning curve for me to really want
to get into it. However, I’m sure if this game was released in 1981, perhaps bundled
with a RAM expander in the box, I’m sure it would have sold a million copies. In fact,
it may have changed the landscape for the VIC-20 because there would finally have been
a killer app that got people to buy a RAM expander, making other games viable that also
could use more RAM.
The next game I’m going to show real quick is called FIRE. And I’m not going to spend
a lot of time on this game, because honestly it’s not that great. But I do find it interesting
due to a similarity it has to another game I do like, and let’s see if you can spot
it. So, you start off with a little map of the city and there will, of course, be a fire
somewhere. So you have to plot out the course that the firetruck is going to take to get
to the fire. And then, you have to actually drive the firetruck down the street avoiding
obstacles. And once you are there, you have to catch all of the falling people that are
jumping out of the building. And that’s honestly about all there is to the game. It’s
about the same quality of game you would have had from a magazine type-in program back in
the 80s. But did you notice the similarity to another game? Well, I think it closely
follows the formula for Ghostbusters. This is the C64 version I’m showing here. So,
you have to plot your course, and then drive to the location, and of course, once you are
their you have to catch the ghost. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting, but we’ll
move along.
OK, so now we’re going to switch gears and put away the VIC-20 and move to some new games
for the Commodore 64.
Let’s take a look at L’abbaye Des Morts, which is French and roughly translates to
Monastery of the Dead. The first thing I notice about this is that it comes on a cartridge,
which is pretty cool. However, I know it is also available on floppy disk and a digital
download for SD card readers. And also included is some sort of ring, which is far to big
for any of my fingers. It does have a manual, but it is surprisingly thin. It only has a
few pages. And also it includes this fold out mini poster of the game artwork.
I’ll go ahead and insert the cartridge into my C64. And, let’s power it on!
So, being a C64 coder myself, the first thing I notice about this game is that it actually
runs in character mode. And there’s nothing terribly unusual about that, but they are
using the hi-res characters instead of the multi-color characters. This means you can
only have one color per character, along with the main background color, which in this case
is black.
Apparently in this game you are playing a heretic that’s being pursued by the Catholic
Church. So yeah, there they come running after me. Fortunately, there is this abandoned church
nearby I can hide in. They keep banging on the door, but I guess they aren’t getting
in.
So, you grab these little scrolls and they have clues you can use later.
This is where I’m really just stunned by the work they have done on the graphics. Each
room is like a work of art. And I know first hand how difficult it is to make nice looking
artwork in hi-res character mode, since that’s what I used for Planet X2.
Besides the graphics, the music and sound effects are surprisingly good. I also noticed
the music changes depending on what room you are in. For example, when you look out the
window. This is a really cool scene here, I just love this. I also like how every room
has a name, which is displayed on the bottom right of the screen. I don’t know if I’ve
seen that before.
You know what this game reminds me a lot of? Monty on the Run. Not only from a gameplay
perspective, but it also used the same graphics mode as well. This game appears to be a lot
more complex, and dare I say better artwork than Monty on the Run, though.
So, now that I rang the bell upstairs, this room now has an opening in the floor I can
fall into, and now I can go through this giant underground labyrinth.
In some rooms, you may have to push down on the joystick so you can crawl under low areas.
This room has another one of those clues on a scroll. Jump to death and prove your faith.
Well, from experience I can tell you it doesn’t apply to this room you’ll definitely die
in this room. But here in the next room, after you avoid this critter, you can jump down
here, and you’ll fall through where you need to be in the room below.
This room has an invisible platform you have to jump on, so you can get to the switch to
open the door below. So, a lot of little mysteries to figure out. The game is surprisingly hard.
It took me quite a while to be able to make it this far. And I don’t even know how many
levels this game has. But I’m really impressed with this game. It’s fun, it has great graphics,
and great sound and it’s easy to learn. You don’t even need to read the manual to
figure it out. So, I definitely recommend this one!
OK, next up we’re going to have a look at Mancave. Unfortunately, mine got a crack during
shipping, but I think it will be okay. Reading the description here, this is quite an unusual
game premise. I’ll explain it in a minute.
Let’s open it up. I think this piece of cardboard is just for shipping. Inside we
get a floppy disk. And wow. I like that sleeve. That’s quite elaborate! And of course, the
warnings on the back. The jewel case insert appears to also double as the user manual
if you open it up.
This intro screen is bizarre. Even though it is loading from disk, it has an intro that
looks like something that would be loaded from cassette the way the graphics load in
slowly like this. I’m going to fast forward so this doesn’t take forever. I do like
the intro music. It has a very nice melody.
OK, so the premise to this game is that you’re a middle aged man and you just got home from
work. Your two kids discovered your collection of pornographic magazines from when you were
a teenager and they have placed them all over the house. And your wife is about to get home
and discover them. So you have to collect the magazines and put them back in your mancave.
That’s quite an interesting game idea.
So here we are. You have to play the balding middle aged man at the bottom there, who actually
looks surprisingly a lot like me. He might could pass for Techmoan as well. Anyway, I
just collected a magazine and I have to wait for another one to start flashing somewhere.
Now, there are some very weird concepts in this game. First of all, if you run into your
kids, you actually die. Which makes no sense. Also the kids run back and forth on a particular
level. They can go off the screen to the left or the right, but the never go down the stairs.
Your character, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. You cannot go off the edge of
the screen, but you can go up and down the stairs.
So the goal is to avoid the kids by timing everything just right, and getting the magazines.
Once you’ve picked up a few, you’ll have to take them back downstairs and deposit them
in the green bucket on the bottom right of the screen.
On the bright side, this middle aged man must be very wealthy as his house has 5 stories
and you haven’t even begun to see the rest of it yet. The game play reminds me a bit
of donkey kong, or maybe even avoid the noid.
So, what do I think of it? Well, the game is well polished and I like the music and
the graphics are also well done. I feel it lacks a bit in the gameplay department. I
feel like this is a game you’re probably going to get tired of playing after about
20 minutes. It reminds me a lot of a Mastertronic game or some of the other budget games of
the 1980s. Which makes sense because the game is relatively inexpensive and is available
on cassette, disk, or digital download. So if you like collecting, it is cheap enough
you can say, why not?
One last little thing here about it. I like the hall-of-fame setup. It’s a wheel of
letters you rotate to pick your initials. Let’s see where I end up. Looks like I am
taking the number 8 and 9 spot. I have a ways to go to work my way up this list.
Anyway, I have one more surprise bonus game to show here. So yeah, this is called Vegetables
and I just got this a few days ago as a digital download, so I don’t have a box to show
you. I love the intro artwork and the music.
OK, so at the menu here you can decide whether you want your 3 SID voices to be for music
or for sound effects. This first round I’ll do with sound effects.
So, this is your basic match-three game, similar to bejeweled or candy crush. I think everyone
knows how to play these. For joystick implementation, you just select the one you want to move,
hold the button down and pick which direction you want it to go. It’s actually pretty
fun and the learning curve is very short so you can get right into this game quickly.
And if you get stuck it will give you hints as to what to move next.
I’ll start it over and we’ll try using in-game music instead. So yeah, I think I
actually prefer the music over the sound effects. So, much like Tetris, this is a good game
if you just want to relax and veg. That’s probably why it’s named Vegetables.
So that about wraps it up. I was also planning to show this Remute cartridge, which is for
the Sega Genesis. And it’s not so much a game as it is just like a musical album on
cartridge. But, it turns out Techmoan just recently did a full video on this. So, I thought
he did a pretty good job and I don’t see any reason to replicate that, so I’ll just
put a link down in the description for his video. And the next video I’m going to be
working on is actually not going to be on this channel, it’s going to be on my other
channel, 8-Bit Keys, and I’m going to be covering the musical keyboard attachment for
the Mattel Intellivision game console. So, stick around for that and thanks for watching!