Clyde Radcliffe cartoons

Commodore Format followed the making of Thalamus’ Creatures 2 – Torture Trouble in a monthly diary.

The game infamously featured “torture screens”, which were a bizarre combination of the cute and the hideous. The hero, Clyde Radcliffe, had to stop his fellow “fuzzy wuzzies” from being chainsawed, frozen and barbecued to death by a variety of the weird looking creatures from the game’s title. Whether things turned out cute or hideous depended on how well you played!

If you abandoned the C64 for an Amiga in the late 80s or early 90s, it’s really worth having a look at this game. What sort of witchcraft programmers John and Steve Rowlands used to make the beige box do this, we’ll never know.

CF’s diary of the game began in issue 14, and it’s still a cracking read. From the bitchy (“don’t you think the font in Last Ninja 3 looks a lot like the text in Creatures?”) to the insightful (John and Steve were so adept at squeezing the most out of the C64 that they thought the game’s incredible snow graphics effects were “easy” to do) it is fondly remembered as one of the magazine’s strongest series ever.

Occasionally, the column was illustrated with a Clyde Radcliffe cartoon strip. It was drawn by Steve Rowlands, and we’ve reproduced the set for the first time in full for you here. CF