Kurt_Woloch

Here are my times for this past week (May 24th through 30th) on classic systems... Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 54 min. in 2 sessions Time Pilot - 11 min. Commodore 64: Space-Pilot II - 106 min. in 3 sessions This week I continued to play Jr. Pac-Man, but I only played 2 sessions of it. Then I tried Time Pilot for a short session again, after which I switched to Space-Pilot II, which is the sequel of a Time Pilot clone on the C-64. Compared to the original, it's much slower, and there are fewer enemies on the screen at once, but they and also your ship are bigger. Also you can't turn very fast, so it's more difficult to avoid the enemies and their fire. They also pester you with shots that rather quickly change direction every now and then. I managed to reach the 6th round out of 8. Like the sequel in the arcade (which I've yet to try) Space-Pilot II displays a solid background instead of the clouds.

Here are some times which actually belong to last week, but I overlooked them when compiling the times for Atariage because they are so short and they are PC games. Anyway, they are: PC (Windows): Catloaf2600 - 2 minutes G-Rally - 6 minutes Catloaf2600 is an ASCII game where you have to guide a cat through various mazes. G-Rally is a 3D racing game which didn't hold my attention for too long.

Here are my times for this past week (May 17th through 23rd) on classic systems: Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 106 minutes in 5 sessions Time Pilot - 9 minutes I mostly continued to play Jr. Pac-Man which still fascinates me a bit. Looking for other games to play, I played 2 games of Time Pilot, and in the 2nd game I reached the UFO stage which was enough for me. Other than that, I actually read something about UFO's and the creatures inhabiting them. They say UFO's are actually living creatures coming from a parallel world to Earth which runs in front of it by at least a few thousand years, so they are much further in their technical development than we. They say the grey aliens in the UFO's are actually bred by advanced men and are specialized in having a very high intelligence. Much of the technology we have might actually have come from them. In some secret buildings on Earth there actually might be some grey ones working as well as other creatures like dinosaurs.

Here are my times for this past week (May 10th through 16th, 2021) on classic games: Arcade: Jr. Pac-Man - 61 min. in 3 sessions Channel F: Pac-Man - 86 min. in 3 sessions Colecovision: Steamroller - 20 min. This week, asides from having another go at Steamroller on the Colecovision, I played 2 variants of Pac-Man - the Channel F version of the original and the original Arcade version of Jr. Pac-Man. For Jr. Pac-Man, it's actually hard to get tired of ir... it's always a challenge to lead the ghosts around in circles and executing a strategy avoiding being circled in by them, and I like the more open space you have for executing your strategy compared to Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. I didn't get farther in the game than usual though... I also haven't played it for some time before this week.

Here are my times for this part week (May 3rd through 9th)... Arcade: Pengo - 14 minute in 2 sessions Commodore +4: Pengo - 31 min. in 2 sessions Commodore 16: Airwolf 2 - 22 min. Airwolf Commodore 16 - 2 min. Airwolf 16 - 40 min. Artic - 36 min. Commodore 64: Action Fighter - 30 min. Super Pipeline - 20 min. This week I took at the look at the C-64 version of Action Fighter which, unlike the Amiga version, offers smooth gameplay at 60 FPS, but I couldn't quite figure out how to beat the 1st "boss" (3 submarines). The home versions are similar to one another, but quite different to the arcade version, where you play on one big map and some air stages unlike the separated levels of the home version. As for the smoothness, there are actually many games which were silky-smooth on the C-64, but had a lower framerate on the Amiga, in part due to them being derived from the Atari ST version which has to do without all the hardware supporting smooth graphics on the Amiga. While at it, I also played Super Pipeline on the C-64. Then I took a look at some Commodore 16 games, which are usually severely watered down compared to other versions because of memory limitations. Those weren't so bad on the VIC-20 which had most of its software on cartridges, but the C-16 software mainly came on tapes, so they had to share the 16K RAM with the screen memory and the character set which doesn't leave to much room for the game, in addition to the fact that the C-16 has no sprites. "Airwolf Commodore 16" is actually written in BASIC and somewhat similar to Fort Apocalypse, but has only one non-scrolling screen. "Airwolf 16" by Elite is set in a cave system comprising 9 screens where you have to rescue men. Sadly, the collision detection is hairy and often leads to multiple deaths without the player being able to do much against it. "Airwolf 2", as on the C-64, is a clone of Nemeis, of course also watered down on the C-16. Artic is a story of its own, it's actually an Italian version of Colosoft's Pengo which was also ported to the C-16. The game actually plays pretty well although it's rather slow and the snow bees are flickering. They also took out the possibility of freezing the enemies by pushing against the outer wall. There is another, newer version of Pengo for that system, but it needs more than 16K, so it's actually for the Commodore +4. It's praised for being very polished, but I found it rather frustrating. I also played the arcade original to compare it to those versions, and the original version has got several points making it less frustrating over the newer version: - The Snow-Bees stop for a split second before changing direction - They also slow down while melting cubes. - After a player death, the game restarts with them being reset to the corners of the map, while on the C-16 they stay where they are, often causing repeat deaths of the player. The Colosoft version solves this problem by entirely restarting the level each time the player dies. The newer version of Pengo also incorrectly builds the maze, which is strictly a maze on the other versions, created by an appropriate algorithm.

Here are my times for this past week (April 26th through May 2nd) on classic systems... Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women (UK version) - 87 min. in 2 sessions ZX Spectrum: Legend of the Amazon Women - 48 min. Tranz Am - 21 min. in 2 sessions This week I managed to finish the UK version of Amazon Women on the C-64. I followed a strategy where, if I beat an enemy prior to passing the next stone, I wait until time is nearly up while the health meter slowly recovers, trying to dodge those arrows as well as possible. I managed not to lose a life by the timer running out, and surprisingly, the last two enemies that appeared in the last section were very easy to beat. After that I revisited the Spectrum version. I said the UK version was similar to the Spectrum version, but there are still some differences... on the Spectrum, there are more different enemies. Also the strategy mentioned above doesn't work because the health meter only recovers during a fight, and in between fights there's a high frequency of arrows flying around. The Spectrum version is also considerably faster, so it's hard to avoid the enemies' attacks. Therefore I settled on letting them go towards me only to attack them while they do. Still I only got about 40% of the way through the jungle done. The Spectrum version, although probably being the original one, has got worse graphics... it's only green on black while on the C-64 the bodies of the fighters are colored. I imagined how the game might have looked on a 16-bit system with more colors... there it would definitely be easier to make out the different enemies and objects. Maybe something like this (only a rough draft): I also tried Tranz Am for the Spectrum, which I think was one of the launch titles for the system. It's actually not as great as I remember it, and it's also not very deep. You drive around with a racing car on the map of the USA trying to collect 8 prizes while dodging obstacles and enemy cars. You drive through the play field rather quickly, but you have a radar. But the radar doesn't show the obstacles. Then you also have a USA map showing the cities and your location. It's easy to crash into an obstacle or get rammed by an enemy car, however. I didn't play it for that long in the end.

Here are my times for this past week (April 19th through 25th, 2021) on classic systems: Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women (UK Version) - 243 min. in 4 sessions This week I continued to play the UK version of Legend of the Amazon Woman and made progress in it. Meanwhile, I reached the 10th and final zone of the game, but didn't manage to complete it yet. Well, maybe next week... This was the only game I played this week.

Here are my times for this past week (April 12th through 18th, 2021) on modern systems:: Browser based: Forge of Empires - 9 min. This week I only played a single session of Forge of Empires in which nothing special happened, other than that there are now often so many game elements waiting to be played that I regularly exceed the time actually allotted for the session.

Here are my times for this past week (April 12th through 18th, 2021) on classic systems:: Atari 2600: Smurf's Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (Prototype) - 5 min. Colecovision: Steamroller - 20 min. Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women (UK version) - 223 min. in 6 sessions This week I played some more sessions of Legend of the Amazon Women, keeping with the UK version. However, to continue last week's discussion, I noticed that the Retrocollector site shows pictures of the US version for the Mastertronic release. I'm not sure if all screenshots on that site have actually been taken from the release shown though. Anyway, I thought I'd get better at this game this week, but in today's session I somewhat topped out at about 70-80% of the way which I seem not to be able to surpass. Actually the enemies are a bit unfair since they do things the player is unable to do, specifically moving towards the player by a fraction of a step and then starting an attack while the player has to complete a full step before starting that attack. Other than that, I played a single game of Steamroller in which I got pretty far, but didn't rack up too many points, and I tried the prototype of Smurf's Rescue in Gargamel's Castle which is only 4K and has got only three screens, fhe first two being different from the final release without moving enemies and the third one being the end screen with Smurfette.

Here are my times for this past week (April 5th through 11th) on modern systems: Browser based: Forge of Empires... 41 min. in 4 sessions This week I continued playing Forge of Empires, but on a low level. Nothing special to report here.

Here are my times for this past week (April 5th through 11th) on classic systems: Arcade: Klax - 6 min. Popeye - 23 min. Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women (UK version, see below)... 203 min. in 6 sessions This week I downloaded a different version of "Legend of the Amazon Women" because the old version I played crashed every now and then. However, the new version was different to the old one in more ways I thought it would be. It starts with the visual representation. Here's the old version: And this is the new version: Apart from the visual differences, the new version has quite a few gameplay differences over the old one, with the obvious ones being: - The timer counts down much slower and from 4:00 instead of 10:00 - The arrows are much more sparse and slower. - You only get a tenth of the points - You can't start an attack on your enemy while you're in the walking animation cycle. This has an effect on which type of attack you can start which will hit your enemy after the cycle is completed. - There is no music - It isn't likely to crash. - If you die by your health meter running out, the timer is reset to the starting time. These changes make the C-64 version more similar to the ZX Spectrum version. The pace seems to be more relaxed, and the gameplay concentrates more on the actual fighting rather than on dodging arrows. However, the game seems to be harder because you don't get as many extra lives. Due to those differences, I actually think the versions should be kept separate from each other when entering the tracker, but the question is what the labels for them would be. One hint is the US address appearing in the title screen of the first version whereas the second version was distributed by the UK company U.S. Gold and later by Mastertronic, also from the UK. Thus I would call the first version the US version and the second one the UK version, though I don't know if that's really the differentiating factor. What puzzles me is that the 2nd version actually removes the music present in the 1st version, but maybe this was done because the music routine tended to crash. Does anyone have an explanation about what's going on with those two versions? Other than that, I also replayed the arcade versions of Popeye and Klax, but didn't get particularly far in them.

Here are my times for this past week (March 29th through April 4th) for classic systems: Commodore 64: Juice - 22 Legend of the Amazon Women - 510 minutes in 6 sessions ZX-Spectrum: Legend of the Amazon Women - 16 minutes in 2 sessions This week I concluded playing "Amazon women" with a big bang... I even cheated a bit when completing it (you don't die until you're upright, so if you stay crouched and let the arrows fly above your head, you can gain points until you get an extra life). I also replayed the ZX Spectrum version a bit, but I can't quite get the hang of it. Then I played a bit of Juice which is a variant on Q*bert.

Here are my times for this past week (March 29th through April 4th) on modern systems: Browser based: Forge of Empires - 8 min. As you may notice, the number and length of sessions on this game has greatly diminished. I guess I'm getting tired of it after playing it every day for about 2 months. To play it in a sensible way, I would have to invest more time, but that would take away too much time for other things I want to do.

Here are my times for this last week (March 22th through 28th, 2021) on modern systems: Browser based: Forge of Empires - 98 minutes in 7 days This week I continued playing Forge of Empires where I exactly met the intended maximum session time of 14 minutes as an average time. Nothing special here except that I completed the Viking town and started the Egyptians, and a new spring event has started.

Here are my times for this last week (March 22th through 28th, 2021) on classic systems: Arcade: Lode Runner - 51 min. in 2 sessions Commodore 64: Legend of the Amazon Women - 96 minutes in 3 sessions Lode RUnner - 59 minutes in 4 sessions This week I played some classic games again. On the C-64 I played Legend of the Amazon Women and Lode Runner, of which I also tried the arcade version. I got pretty far in Lode Runner right from the start since I first watched a Youtube video and already could envision how I would play the game although I actually hadn't played it since back in the day. The arcade version is somewhat harder, and they removed some of the more complex screens. In Legend of the Amazon Women I didn't get to the end, but I got pretty far. I saw a video of the Spectrum version which is a bit different in that not many spears are flying around from the start, and the time limit is more relaxed, but there are additional enemies not appearing in the C-64 version.