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  • Championship Wrestling (Commodore 64)

    Championship Wrestling (Epyx, 1986)

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/166788662405/suspiciousbehaviorproductions-championship

    Championship Wrestling is a professional wrestling game released by Epyx in 1986 for the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari ST as well as the Commodore 16 and Plus/4. It was originally intended as a WWF license but for some reason that license fell through. This didn’t substantively affect the game, the characters are just more generically named. You can still pick out some resemblance to actual wrestlers of the time.

    The game featured eight different characters and a total of 25 moves. Two players could play at once and up to eight players could compete in the same championship. The game generally got positive reviews and if you are looking for an arcade style wrestling game than this isn’t a bad one.

    There have been no remakes of this game that I am aware of so you will have to pick up one of the originals or find a disk image for emulation. The Commodore 64 version is the one I am most familiar with and it is a pretty decent game. The 16-bit versions will have better graphics but I’m not sure if the gameplay is better or worse.

    All the screens above are from the Commodore 64 version.





  • Commodore 64 Vs. PCjr

    Commodore 64
    It’s not how much you pay. It’s how much you get.
    1984

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/166898035660/vintageadvertising-commodore-64-its-not-how

    This particular Commodore 64 ad compared the Commodore 64 to the, at the time, recently released IBM PCjr. The Commodore 64 was introduced a couple of years earlier and the IBM PC had also been around for a few years. However, the PC was still meant more as a business machine and was very expensive for a home computer. The PCjr was meant to be IBM’s competition for the home. The PCjr failed miserably and it would ultimately be cheap PC clones that brought the PC to homes.

    There really wasn’t any competition here. With the Commodore 64 you got vastly more for your money that with the PCjr. Some of the key points mentioned in the ad:

    Both computers came with 64K of RAM. While pretty much every piece of software in existance for the Commodore 64 (which was already quite a lot by this point) was designed to work in 64K, 64K was not enough for many PC programs. While the PCjr was PC compatible for the most part, the amount of RAM limited what software could be run on it.

    At the time of this ad, the PCjr cost $669 while the Commodore 64 only cost $215. In both cases these prices were for the basic computer only. For the cost of just the PCjr, with a Commodore 64 you could also get a disk drive, monitor, printer and modem making it a vastly more usable system than the PCjr. You could of course get all of these peripherals for the PCjr as well but you would spend thousands doing so.

    The keyboard was also far superior on the Commodore 64. While not the best keyboard in the world and also not detachable like the PCjr keyboard, it was still a much nicer keyboard overall than the rubber chicklet style keyboard that came with the PCjr. For anyone who knew how to type even a little, those chicklet style keyboards were pretty unusable. I suppose if you were more of a hunt and peck style typist then it wouldn’t matter quite as much.

    Finally, unlike the PCjr (and the PC in general), the Commodore 64 had custom sound and graphics chips (the SID and VIC-II respectively). The CPU may have been a little slower in the Commodore 64 than in the PCjr but it more than made up for it with these custom chips. This made the biggest difference in games of course but it also helped with any kind of music or graphics software.

    “You can buy a computer for a lot of money. Or buy a lot of computer for the money.” Indeed.


  • RoboCop (Commodore 64)

    ‘RoboCop’

    [C64 / PC / ST] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1989]

    • Video Games & Computer Entertainment, April 1989 (#03)
    • Uploaded by Sketch the Cow, via The Internet Archive

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/166910109688/vgprintads-robocop-c64-pc-st-usa

    It’s hard to believe that in 1988-1989 they were still publishing games on the Commodore 64 before other platforms. 1989 was probably the last big year for the Commodore 64. After that, the number of games published for the C64 fell off a cliff while 16-bit platforms like the Atari ST and Amiga limped along for several more years. Meanwhile, DOS based games were skyrocketing. But in 1988, RoboCop was published for the Commodore 64 before those other platforms.

    The version of this game I remember most is actually the original arcade game that was published the previous year. For a while, this was one of two arcade games at a store within bike riding distance from my house. I put a number of quarters into that thing but it never seemed like I really made it very far.

    RoboCop was a fairly typical side scrolling shoot-em-up but it was pretty well done and did a fair job of following the plot of the movie from what I recall. As far as movie licenses go, RoboCop was one of the rare ones that was pretty good, at least as an arcade game. Unfortunately, this didn’t carry over as well to the Commodore 64 version. The graphics weren’t bad but as hard as the arcade version was, the Commodore 64 version was even harder. On top of that, you can tell that this port was rushed because it becomes glitchy in later levels. It’s not a terrible game on the C64 but it isn’t the best example of the quality it was capable of either.

    RoboCop was also released on DOS based PCs, the Atari ST, and Amiga, as well as a few other computers and the NES. The DOS and NES versions weren’t really any better than the Commodore 64 version overall. If you are looking for a home version to play, your best bet is probably the Atari ST or Amiga versions. Those look and play a lot more like the original arcade. Of course, if you are using emulation to play then you might as well go to the arcade source.

    Screens above are from the Commodore 64 verion.