Playing P47 Thunderbolt (C64)

Entry posted by Cybergoth March 28, 2011

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Hi there!

After Psycho Pigs UXB another Jaleco Arcade game got converted to the C64:

Unfortnately though, this one is complete trash. It should be quite a challenge to find a worse C64 programming team than the makers of this conversion. I've never seen a multiload with such horrible, horrible graphics. The ugly mess you see above is one of the best looking scenes of the game already, I swear. What you can't see is the stuttering scrolling and the almost non existent sprite animation.

The gameplay follows suit. Well, it is kinda playable, but fun it's not. That is mostly because it is unbelievably easy for this kind of game. In some part I got so bored, I'd just keep my thumb pressed on auto-fire, activating the warp-mode of the VICE emulator :ponder: Adding to the boredom is the endless repetition of the same enemies over and over again. It goes so far that even all end bosses are repeated at least once, including the final one

Did I already mention the bugs? There's a lot of them. The game crashed the emulator a couple of times and in fact I had to try 5 different cracks until I found one that was fixed enough so the game was actually playable. Besides these occasional crashes and the jittery scrolling there's also issues with the collision detection. Sometimes enemy bullets did just flicker right through my plane without hitting it. Another rare sight on the C64 are slowdown like issues, I can't remember seeing anything like that in a C64 game before.

If you thought after the 8 levels the torture is finally over, you're screwed again: The game will just loop back to level 1 without any hint of an ending...

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Jaleco game in the form of "Saint Dragon", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel

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