Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - The Action game

I decided to play through Indiana Jones and the Last crusade on Commodore 64. I own two copies, both on cassette. One in big jewel case and one in a collection box with Robocop, Ghostbusters II and Batman, called Hollywood Collection. Both I've had in my collection since I was a kid.
I played this a lot as a kid. Never beat it, so this was my mission as I started it.

The game has 5 stages. The first stage you are in a cave trying to find The Cross of Coronado and is one together with stage 3 the hardest stages.
Second stage you run atop of a train and this is by far the easiest level.
Third stage you are in the Catacombs in Venice also the stage ends with you going up the wall of Castle Brunwald.
Fourth stage you are on board a Zeppelin and needs to find Indy's dads diary and escape the Zeppelin.
Fifth and last stage you have to get to the Holy Grail before the time runs out, to save Indy's father, and try to avoid all the traps.
Each of the stages needs to be loaded after completing the previous stage.
Indy has 5 lives but you are given unlimited continues up until the last stage. If you die and get game over you need to load the game again.

It follows the movie pretty OK. Although you are adult Indy for the first two stages where in the movie it was young Indy that was in the cave and on the train.

I must say I really like the graphics. Very good for C64, I think. The thing that bothers me most is the controls. It's very easy to miss a simple jump sometimes.

I had to play both of my copies. First one I played, in the jewel case, had a bug when I tried to take the Grail in the end. Nothing happened.
The one in the Hollywood Collection was a bit different. First you load the title screen and get a message to reset the counter, probably so you can load first stage faster if you need to restart, then load the first stage.
Also in this copy I experienced a bug. Second stage was totally messed up, but the later stages was good and it was possible to grab the Grail in the end.

I'm also missing the copy protection for the jewel case version, so need to find that some how, but I have it in the Hollywood Collection.

After beating this I decided to try out the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis version, which I never had played before.

The settings of the levels are the same, but level design is different, except that level 3 is just the catacombs and level 4 is Castle Brunwald and there is no Zeppelin level.
Also every level, except the 5th have a boss fight.
This games is also much harder, and you only get 2 continues.
But after some frustrating hours I finally was able beat it.

I liked both versions. Even though I hated the Mega Drive version while playing it. But after beating it I sort of liked it. It gave a challenge.

Down here you can see videos of me beating both versions.

Commodore 64

Sega Mega Drive

Making a game

Yes I'm trying to make a game for the Commodore 64.
When I was a kid I loved making programs and games on the old C64, and also on DOS, but sadly I left that part behind. I really wished I stayed with it and learn more about programming, so now I'm back to basic.
Have forgotten most of what I knew back then so I have to learn again.
I decided to try and make a text adventure based on an adventure for "Drakar och Demoner", a Swedish version of "Dungeon and Dragons". I choose to adapt an existing adventure so I could concentrate on programming and not on the story.

At first I wanted to do an test adventure with RPG elements, experience points and a level up system, but it seemed to be a little to advanced for my limited programming knowledge.
So I went with a simple text adventure.

I decided to go with the adventure "Svart Duell", which was an adventure I had as a kid and I knew it was quite short.
My first mistake was I wanted to jump right into programming and didn't plan out the adventure beforehand.
So it quickly grew to big and I started to add new things I wanted in the game and complex attributes which just made me have to redo code I had already written.
So I decided to do start over, and write down everything first on paper, and not add new content while programming.

And that's where I'm at now.
Carefully planing out each section of the game.

I also got a new game idea, which I probably will do after this game. It's a more math based game and I need to work out a good formula to do the math so the game will work. Not gonna say much more about this game but hopefully I will comeback to it in another post.

*pictures from riotminds.se

Football Manager for the Commodore 64

I decided to play some Football Manager. Not Football Manager 2015 on PC but Football Manager on the old Commodre 64.

It was first released in 1982 by Addictive Games and designed by their founder, Kevin Toms, for the TRS-80 and ZX81 computers but was later ported to the Commodore 64 in 1984.
My copy however is a 1987 re release tape version, it was also released on disk, in which you could have won a trip to the 1987 cup final (English FA cup I guess), but sadly to voucher is gone.

One of the first things I notice when I look at the back of the cover is that the game play pictures is not from a C64 but from a Spectrum computer. This is not unusual, it was often the case back then. Sometimes the pictures was from a superior computer, so you was a bit tricked when you bought a game and the graphics wasn't as good as on the cover. But in this case the C64 graphics are better then the showed Spectrum graphics.

Another thing that stand out on the back is the list of features like "Matches in 3D graphics", that pretty impressive considering the game is from 1984, and the last line "You can even be sacked!" I find to be a bit humorous.

The instructions are well written and easy to understand. But one thing had me worried, "Loading time is approximately 20 minutes", but gladly it wasn't that long. Just about 3 minutes.

Let's talk about the game. First you get to choose your team. There are 64 teams to choose from, all from the English league system, and the team you choose will start off in Division 4. There are 16 teams in each of the four divisions and you will fight to gain promotion and eventually win the 1st division.
There's an option to change all the team names anytime you want during he game.
You also get to choose the game difficulty. There are 7 different settings, starting with beginner up to genius, and you can change this any time setting during the season and also after each season you get to choose again.
There are 24 real life players, from the 80s, in the game's database. Players like Peter Shilton, Ian Rush and Bryan Robson. And, as for the team names, you can also change the players name during the game.
You get 12 of these players in your team when you start, and later you will get offers to buy one of the others after each game. You can have a total of 16 players in your team and you can also sell players you don't want.

The players are either defenders, midfielders or attackers. No goalkeeper which is a bit odd, he counts as a defender I guess. And the players have a skill from 1 to 5 and energy level 1 to 20.
Before each game you choose our team and try to out match your opponents stats. The defenders skills adds up, the same goes for your midfield and attack, and you get an average of your players energy points.
You also have a moral stat, which starts at 10 and gets higher after a win and lower after a loss.
The energy of the players will drop 1 point each game, but the players that rests gain 10.

After each season the players skill level and energy changes, so if you build up a great team, the next season the skills are no longer the same.
This is where the game gets a bit difficult. Even on the lowest difficult setting. Because it's hard to win the first games of the season. You have players with low skill and low energy and the when you lose, the team moral drops.
Each season you play 15 league games, you only play each team once, and also FA cup games.
I have played 3 seasons and haven't been able to gain promotion, but I won the FA Cup the first two seasons. The higher league teams are not so much different then the other teams.

When you start a game you get to see match highlights in, as the cover stated, "3D graphics".
So how are these amazing 3D graphics?
Well, it's not really 3D, as you can see in the photo.
More of a tilted side view of the pitch. But that can be what they thought of 3D back in the day.
Still I think it's pretty good graphics for a game like this. I've seen ordinary football games with worse graphics than this.

So what's my opinion about Football Manager on the Commodore 64?
It's a pretty decent game. Fun and addictive. And a great feature is that you also can save your game.
I will play more of this game and try to win the 1st division.

I score this 3 out of 5