Commodore 64
commodore64.jpg
Commodore 64
AceCover.jpg
ACE: Air Combat Simulator

To me the Commodore 64 was not the true breakthrough as for many others. The main reason was that I experienced most of the C64's top games in their original form in the arcade and the C64's capacity could not match the arcade quality at all. But there were of course many great titles originally made for the C64 and some of them had a very different style of gameplay than the arcade games. An example of this was the flight simulators.

ace1.gif
ACE - Runway
ace2.gif
ACE - Dogfight
ace3.gif
ACE - Refueling while airborne

My favorite was "ACE: Air Combat Emulator" and it was a really great game.
What a nice feeling of achievement when succeeding to get the plane into the air for the first time. It had lots of cool features like controlling your landing gear, ejecting the pilot, choose what weapons to load the plane with and even refueling in the air. Your instrument panel gave you really good feedback on what was going on. One nice little feature was that you could play co-op by having one player steer the plane while the other controls the weapons. This was a Combat Flight Simulator and you could shoot at both air, sea and ground targets. All this was a new game experience for me and the C64 made it happen.

The first really good fighting game that I played on a home console was "The Way of the Exploding Fist" from 1985. It borrowed heavily from the arcade game "Karate Champ" which was released one year earlier. Another very similar game called "International Karate" got released 1986 which was even better.

KarateChamp.bmp
Karate Champ - Arcade - 1984
wotef.gif
The Way of the Exploding Fist - C64 - 1985
ik.gif
International Karate - C64 - 1986



Favorite Games
Name Developer Year
B.C.'s Quest for Tires Sydney Development 1983
Bruce Lee Datasoft 1983
Archon Electronic Arts 1983
Boulder Dash First Star Software 1984
Spy VS Spy First Star Software 1984
H.E.R.O Activision 1984
The Way of the Exploding Fist Beam Software 1985
The Young Ones Orpheus 1986
V – The game Ocean 1986
Infiltrator US Gold 1986
International Karate System 3 1986
International Karate + System 3 1987
Wizball Sensible Software 1987
Delta Thalamus Ltd 1987
Skate or Die Electronic Arts 1987
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License