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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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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