Official Sword of Fargoal Website

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj5YfZ8wCJc

10 POKE 646,1
20 PRINT "C64 IN FLASH!"
30 POKE 53281,2::::::::::::::::::::POKE 53281,10
40 GOTO 30

Note that you need the latest Flash Player PlugIn (9.0) to see this. Either way this is exciting stuff and shows how powerful AS 3.0 and Flash Player 9 are going to be. Additionally the current beta player is a debug-only version that throttles the speed down several times. The final Player might be quite a bit faster.

Videogame violence anno 1984 - Jack The Ripper (C64) ...

Sex and violence was a topic in video games since the early days of computer game history. Some people might not have realized it but there was always an urge to use forbidden topics in a virtual scenario not just since recently. Even among the first text adventures were subjects with quite a lot of (fictional) violence and blood. Remember The Lurking Horror from Infocom, a horror text adventure or Jack The Ripper which already introduced some graphical images of violence.

… and The Lurking Horror (C64).

In Friday The 13th the player could slash the other characters with an axe or other improvised weapons and was rewarded with a shocking digitized scream and sometimes bloody skulls. In Mad Doctor, a game of a very similar style, the player walked around as the designated doctor to find victims which he had to abduct and kill to eviscerate out their guts to create something like a Frankenstein monster.

Pardon me lady but I need your heart (Waxworks).

The wave of virtual violence continued through the decades of various platforms. On Amiga there were games like Elvira I & II and Waxworks by Horrorsoft to name a few who brought you explicit visual gory violence on the screen. I don’t wanna cut on the violent Beat’Em Up games here too much but the most popular probably were Barbarian and Mortal Kombat. In Barbarian you could hack of the opponents head with a battle axe, after which a fountain of blood evaded from the torso (quite similar like in GTA: Vice City when using the Katana to decapitate passerby’s). And in Mortal Kombat one could throw the opponent into an abyss with deadly spikes for example. It was one of the climaxes of game violence during the nineties!

Are you alright sir? (No One Lives Forever with blood massacre patch) ...

The Tour de blood continued on game consoles like the Playstation with games like Thrill Kill (which I think was not officially released) where the player could rip limbs off from the opponent and beat them with just these. The game was without a doubt one of the most gory fighting games of it’s time!

Blam, headshot (Half-Life).

Today the amount of R rated games has increased to a multitude with highlights like the Grand Theft Auto series (or pretty any other game from Rockstar) and for many games there are mods which will increase the gore level or uncover other “not-for-indexing-offices”-determined content. Like so in the excellent No One Lives Forever where you could download a massacre mod to increase the amount of blood when shooting down an enemy exponential. While in Half-Life there was always a gib mode (corpses splattering apart and only leaving bones and bowels on the ground), in it’s sequel Half-Life 2 things went more realistic. Corpses behave more like realistic corpses which is often called rag-doll effect, meaning that the body is not stiff but moves and bounces when hit. To many fans disappointment the level of blood was reduced a lot in this part.

I don't know why these rollerskaters all rolled into my katana. (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City).

The newest popular offspring of virtual violence jocundity is without a doubt GTA: San Andreas which continued the amok tour of stealing cars and massacring passerby’s and added new aspects to it. It also for the first time (in such a popular game) features a mode which allows of interactive sex with the ingame girlfriend without any censoring. This mode (which is currently is stirring up the US authorities) however was locked by the developer but was unlocked by the player community shortly after the PC conversion was available. Today’s game entertainment market is controlled by the demand of consumers so the industry has slowly established and conformed over the years to the needs of the people who pay. For a second I believe commerce is not a so bad thing after all! Either way, games will be games!

One of my very favorite games back on Amiga was the space RPG Hard Nova (to be reviewed in a while) which took me long cozy winter nights to solve. The predecessor of Hard Nova was a game called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic which was released in 1988 by Electronic Arts and had it’s success under science fiction RPG videogamers. Me – PC-less – always looked enviously over to the PC crowd. But that only until decent DOS Emulators were developed, like DOSBox.

A cozy bedroom on a cozy yacht ... with a cozy surprise.

In the year 2996 the government of the Caldorre system is seriously concerned about tradeships who want to approach the four planets who are getting attacked by space pirates. A whole fleet of defense ships is being ordered to stop the pirates and you have to control five crew members to care for peace around the system. Sounds like a shoot’em’up but it’s actually a space roleplay game with neat EGA (16 colors) graphics and sound which isn’t too bad for an early DOS game. Until around this time generally only fantasy roleplay games were popular and solely. That had to be changed from now on with this great game!

Arnold, err, Bnold is also on the party.

Your crew consists of a pilot, a navigator, a communication officer, an engineer and a medic. Everyone of them has special skills which can be improved during the game. You can buy new equipment and weapons at shops and fight enemies on the planet surfaces or fight in space with your ship and it’s even possible to enter other ships. There are four planets which can be orbited and where you can land on and drive around with a special terrain vehicle. In many buildings you meet NPC’s to whom you can talk to. It’s also possible to search for minerals and sell them or to improve your ships systems. Shortly said you have to collect information and solve quests to get into the secret behind the space pirates.

With our ATV we meander over the planet surfaces.

While Future Magic’s graphics only really looked so colorful on PC’s with EGA cards, nowadays such hardware of course is long forgotten and most old DOS games even doesn’t run anymore in a DOS prompt on Win2k/XP. Therefore the more lucky it is to see some decent emulation developments recently that make playing abandonware DOS games no lesser fun on recent OS systems. As mentioned before one such DOS emulator is the highly praised DOSBox which in it’s most recent version now even supports XMS and EMS and thus games like Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games can be emulated.

After the DOS version another version of Future Magic was released for the good old C64 which doesn’t need to hide at all behind it’s DOS cognate. The C64 graphics looking almost as fresh as on the PC and the gameplay is still acceptable, well except for the floppy disk changing.

The C64 version ...

The games half title is Sentinel Worlds 1 which let’s one come to think there are more parts of the series but unfortunately for some reason the creators doesn’t developed a second part but published the famous Hard Nova which could be seen as the sequel to this game and though with a different story and improved graphics it has the similar engine and gameplay. I’m going to review Hard Nova later so check back in a while for it.

... looks nice as well.

As a conclusion I can say that playing this game now after a while it’s even more fun than many modern up-to-date RPG or adventure games and I can only recommend anyone who’s into such type of game to snoop into it. That means check your local dealer (abandonware sites like The Underdogs) for the game. I don’t think you will get the game anywhere now except for the second hand market or auctions. The C64 version fixed for emulators is here (with kind regards of the makers of Girls of 64).

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This brought up some moods of nostalgia remembering the ‘good old’ days of computing and playing 8bit games. I even found some old 5 1/4″ floppy disks with old tools and games and tried to code some assembler which is even fun in a special way compared to the today’s luxury of coding applications.

There’s also now – as you might already have found – a new category named downloads in which I will put various stuff to leech down from time to time.

Besides there are still some draft entries on hold and unfinished yet on the authoring side. I’m going to finish them when I think it’s time!

After finally having the change to access some of my over ten years old C64 floppy disks relics with the XE1541 cable, I’ve found some neat rare tools which we used back in the old days and which you might want not to miss for your D64 file collection …

So here are the two SMS tools disks which contain various useful tools from my time on the 8bit era.

SMS-Tools 1:
--------------------------------------
DIR MASTER V1.0
DISK DOCTOR
RESTORE
GDM V2.2 (Geos Disk Monitor)
S-MON(C000) NEW
S-MON(9000) NEW
EXMON V2.0
EMON V2.3
CRACKER TOOL
MDGPACKER/LINKER
SMS COMPACKER
AUTOSTART V2.0
AUTO-START V3.0
ACCELERATOR V1.0
C64 SYSTEM-TEST
MSE V1.0
AUTO-CODER V1.2
FILE-CODER V1.0
HIDE (49152)
UNCOVER (49664)
SPEEDCOPY V2.0
SUPER COPY V1.5
SECTOR BACKUP V3
ULTRABYTE NIB.
NIBBLE HACK'EM
BURST NIBBLER V1
TURBO NIBBLER V4
FILE MASTER V1.0
FILECOPY C64
FILE HACK'EM
FAST-BACKUP

SMS-Tools 1:
--------------------------------------
CHARSET MIXER
CATCHER V1.1
PICTURE-ROBBER
PICTURE-ROBBER 2
SPRITE-FINDER
DATEC V3.1
KALENDER
HAUSHALTSKASSE
MINI WRITER V2.0
MINI INSTRUC.
THE MAGIC WRITER
YIE AR SOUND

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Review: Project Firestart (C64)

We enter!

Time for another classic game review: today it’s one of my very favorites back on the C64, the space horror action adventure Project Firestart!
It was back in July 1989 when I was reading the game review of PF in the cult and now abandoned German game magazine Power Play written by Michael Hengst, I was instantly hooked and had to buy the game!

Let me tell you that the game’s pixel blood level is very high. The story is about a research ship near Saturn that doesn’t answer anymore on the space radio. So you jump into your fashionable green lined bodysuit to be sent to the ship to look if everything is OK.

Just a storage room!

Shortly after entering the ship you will encounter the first splattered corpse which shows up in a very shocking atmospheric scene. The developers managed to get a lot of claustrophobic feel into the game design and to me this game still causes shudders on my back when I play it. It’s like this ‘you don’t know behind which corner the next alien jumps onto you’-feel!

... what the??!

Truly the atmosphere on the vessel with all it’s corridors and lifts and it’s complex structure is very dense! You have to run half through the ship to the terrarium support room to do something there to get on in another part of the ship! While that of course crossing a lot of mean monsters. And weaponry is very few what makes the mission a hard challenge!

The plot thickens

In the firestart labs.

While the Gameplay proceeds, the plot of the story takes it’s branches. So you are going to find out that there are some survivors, a woman in Cryo sleep and a villain agent who is making things more tricky. Not to mention about a super alien breed that starts to slip from his egg soon.

You have to think actually how to get rid of that beast because it cannot be killed by usual weapons. But there are some areas on the ship to lure the creature into. You know extreme radiation or cold are not very healthy!

The Cryo Chamber is being breached by a creature. About time to rescue the damsel in distress.

There are a lot of things to take care of before you can leave. I don’t want to spoil it for ya but you can’t get back, the way you came along! And will you rescue that chick in the cryo chamber or not? It’s up to you! Yes this game already offered some more non-linear plot!

Let me calm you down a bit! Until the game ended you kill the beasts, save the girl, blow up the ship and payback the villain! ….. well unless you didn’t became tripped fodder in between!

Corpses are paving your way!

The game graphics are great for their year and the dramatic music adds a frightening mood! There are several rooms to discover on the ship, some of them which I still wasn’t able to enter because I got killed immediately … perhaps that one special room ends always up in a kill scene then?!?
One minus thing about the game to mention is the slow disk loader and the floppy DJ’ing, but then again a C64 emulator with speed-up option becomes magic!

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C64-Paradroid played on GBA (a study)

it looks tempting! the author of splam.emuhq.com is working on a *C64 emulator* for the Gameboy Advance™! He’s already busy since a good amount on time and it seems writing a C64 emu for the GBA is more than a challenge!

Promising however that there already is a c64 music demo rom for d/l from his site which has a truckload of c64 tunes included. hopefully soon we can ask splam: are we happy? and if he answers yes, there seem to be no limits anymore to take your collection of c64 games to where you ever want to go and play in a 8bit style!

Let's see what is in that barn!

Aaah Friday the 13th! What relaxation, what pleasure! The day when nothing’s going wrong! I remember when I was a lot younger (around 14 that means) I’ve played the game Friday the 13th on my trusty Commodore C64 often on this special day! It grew almost to a tradition!

Luceey! ... I'm home!

Though most people marked that game as being boring and dull, I think it was one of the most frightening games ever. You ran around on that 16 color crystal lake camp on the search for Jason who was decreasing your friends at the same time.

When you encountered the black man it was all just a question of the right weapon! I found that the only true weapon for defeating him was the big axe. All others like the spikes or the chainsaw were more or less useless and you were cut into pieces by Jason before you could say ‘Minced Meat’!

Ouch, that hurt! Jason did his dirty deed!

Aaaah, the terror, the frightning! I watched the first movie part of Friday the 13th recently and I was almost falling asleep because it wasn’t too shocking. The game however presented a very abstract form of horror … well, then like most games did on the C64 in the one way or the other!

In the church. Neither a place to be safe.

Good that there are trustworthy C64 emulators like VICE64 or CCS64 nowadays on that you still can play all these golden classics even without the good old bread bin! From time to time it’s an enjoyable refreshment! be honest! Todays modern games are all to complex for a short minute-play!

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