Status scoopings Aug 18, 2023
Preliminary: After a brief little playtest, it seemed worth fully exploring--I read people have a lot of nostalgia for it and that it was very adventurous, the biggest barrier being a game-breaking bug on Level 3 which has been patched nowadays. I was worried, because the controls seemed potentially complex--there are 4 items/weapons you can switch between, and there was …
Preliminary: After a brief little playtest, it seemed worth fully exploring--I read people have a lot of nostalgia for it and that it was very adventurous, the biggest barrier being a game-breaking bug on Level 3 which has been patched nowadays. I was worried, because the controls seemed potentially complex--there are 4 items/weapons you can switch between, and there was a bunch of info about Power Food and Water in the UI. C64 manuals/instructions are harder to come by than Speccy ones, I was luckily able to figure out the C64 controls based on the [Spanish] Speccy manual. Item switching is deliciously simple--let's see how it plays!
Wellll, as cool as this could be, and I bet it was worth delving fully into when it came out, it was just tooooo quirky with the power-up-before-use-an-item stuff. I was getting a bit used to it but when I saw no knife, boomerang, nor bomb could kill the Plant Monsters... I didn't have any motivation to find the quirky physics necessary to get to the upper path to get around it ha. If only the jump mechanic were better, or if the Look were a bit more exciting (or a great C64 sid were playing throughout the gameplay?). But as it is, quite passable, not to mention the original English-language release was outright broken :-p