Commodore Format Power Pack 9 (June, 1991)

Two full games
Two demos

ZAMZARA

Interesting one, this. Zamzara – which means “go to sleep” in Korean (잠자라) – initially appeared just three years earlier on Hewson’s budget Rack-It label. In ’88, the good stuff was always at full price and “budget” was a byword for rubbish. Zamzara might be the point where that changed. In its ZZAP! review, Kati Hamza and Maff Evans couldn’t believe it wasn’t being released for a tenner.

Zamzara is a left-to-right-and-reach-the-exit platform shoot ’em up which sees you taking charge of a slimy green alien with a cone shaped sort of head. The game’s title refers to the planet you’re trying to save. You know the score here: run from the invaders and then shoot them. Jump a bit, duck, shoot. But it’s the little touches here that make it stand out. The animation is smooth and detailed. If you shoot a laser, they can bounce off walls. There are different sounds on every level, too, and best of all it loads in a single 64K. It’s everything that’s good about budget software, only hampered by a problem that’s all too familiar in games coded and playtested by one person (in this case, the late Jukka Tapanimäki). It’s really, really hard. But the game’s slickness constantly rewards, so you’ll probably keep going until the end.

PACK FACT: Zamzara could have been very different. In fact, version one of the game was rather like Impossible Mission, with the aim of collecting genes and building DNA. Hewson loved it but thought it too complex for a young market, though, and the game was scaled back. More on that here.

BULLDOG

This is the game that had people wondering if Gremlin Graphics had lost their golden touch when it was released to a lukewarm response at Christmas 1986. At almost ten quid, it also had the opposite reaction to that of Zamzara, the feeling being there wasn’t enough of it or sufficient thrills and spills to justify the price tag.

It’s an overhead shooter, seeing you scroll vertically over a well defended landscape the same way you’ll have done many times before. There are at least some power-ups: fly over “S” and you’ll speed up, or “F” and you’ll get extra fire power. The attempts to create tension as bigger enemies scroll into view, to a humming backdrop, must be applauded too. And we’ve got to mention that scrolling: it uses the clever parallax technique the same team used in Bounder, which in itself was later copied and refined to form the basis of Sensible Software’s Parallax. So there’s legacy, for sure. But your journey to the mothership is generally pretty pedestrian, especially if you’ve just been playing Zamzara. It’s fun for an hour or so – at which point you’ll probably never load it again.

PACK FACT: The best thing about Bulldog – some might say the reason to load it up – is the atmospheric music by Ben Daglish.

FIREPOWER

Both of this month’s demos are also reviewed in CF issue 9. The first is Micro Illusions’ FirePower. It’s a justifiably loved game on the Amiga, particularly in two-player mode, but it hasn’t transferred to the C64 especially well. FirePower was initially released to the press for review before CF even existed, in the winter of 1989, with ZZAP! awarding it just 36%. What we’ve got here is a demo of a slightly improved version. CF scored it this month at 68%.

Whether with a friend or against the computer, this game is always head-to-head: you control a tank, with an overhead view, and your task is to capture the flag and take it back to your base. You’ve got five lives to withstand enemy fire, which includes hails of bullets, helicopters and soldiers. You’ve got the same, and there are neat little ideas like being able to pick up your wounded and take them back to hospital. Save 15, get an extra life.

The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the C64 execution. There just isn’t enough action, and running over your soldiers by accident might be funny once but soon becomes infuriating. Still, some people do find enjoyment here.

PACK FACT: The lack of two-player mode in this demo and the limited fuel actually make it more fun and frantic than the finished game,

HEROQUEST

Here’s what Gremlin got in return for giving CF the full version of Bulldog: the chance to show off their brand new Commodore version of the 1989 board game, Heroquest. The problem with the physical version was that you always needed two people to play it. No such issues on C64, of course. The action was otherwise transferred to the microcomputer perfectly, with an infinite number of adventures possible and the added advantage, said Andy Dyer, of “chucking out your mates at midnight and continuing adventuring on your 64 ’till the early hours”. There’s terrific lastability here, and even on an 8-bit in murky Commodore browns and greys, the atmosphere is captured in a way the board game could never manage.

PACK FACT: Gremlin followed this in 1992 with a convo of their futuristic board game, Space Crusade.