1 out of 5 – Games & Tech with the Sarkologist

Publisher: Mastertronic

Designer: David Jones

Type: Platform

Platform: C64

Release Date: 1985

Rating:

This game was actually rather annoying. You basically play knight and are given a mission by the king to, well, do something, and the next thing you know you are in a dungeon full of nasties. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not some role-playing game or anything, but rather a platform game, that in part also transforms into a maze game in sections.

Well, the story is that you have to go and get a present for the princess, and if you succeed, well, you can be admitted to the royal order of the knights of the polygon table. Yeah, it sounds pretty silly, and honestly, it really did seem to be pretty silly as far as I was concerned. Okay, it was pretty popular in its time, but that probably was because it happened to be an el-cheapo game. However, when I played it, well, I wasn’t all that impressed.

Apparently one of the ideas was that you had to manipulate objects (though I couldn’t figure out how to do that) and of course avoid nasties (which I also couldn’t figure out how to do either). You could also sell the items to collect gold, which no doubt you needed to do to be able to get that present for the princess.

Yeah, with all the other quality games out there, this one is definitely missable.

Though, if you really want to know more about it, well, you can always go to Wikipedia, or just jump over to Lemon 64, which seems to have the heads up on pretty much all of the Commodore 64 games.

Airwolf

Publisher: Elite Systems

Designer: Neil A Bate, Chris Harvey (Graphics)

Type: Arcade-Adventure

Platform: C64

Rating:

Difficulty: Impossible

In a way nothing has changed over the years, though I have to admit that I haven’t really been immersed in the world of video games of late, so my expertise (for want of a better word) really only extends to the 90s and beyond. Then again, for most of my life I have really only been interested in a limited number of games, and I have to admit that this game really wasn’t one of them.

Back in the 80s there was a movie, and a subsequent television series, about a high end military helicopter, and the team that would fly it. The name of the helicopter was Airwolf. One could probably describe it as a more science fiction version of the Apache Gunship, though I believe that the thing that set this helicopter apart from its contemporaries was stealth capabilities (and I’m not all that sure if you can really suppress the noise that those rotors happen to make). Apparently it could also fly much, much faster than your typical helicopter, though of course the wikipedia article will give you the full details.

However, what I am writing about here is the Commodore 64 game that was released on the tail of success of the series, and I have to admit that it is really, really bad. The reason I say this is because of its playability. A good game is a game that is challenging, not impossible. This game is impossible, though I suspect that if you implemented the cheat codes then you could actually get further than I did, but that sort of defeats the purpose in a way. Yeah, I would end up being killed within 15 seconds, and honestly, that would have been an incredible waste of money. I’m not entirely sure what the computer magazines thought of this game back in the day, but now, I would simply call it terrible, and would recommend not wasting your time with it (even if it is only 15 seconds, namely because that is 15 seconds you will not be getting back).