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Very strangely its not one of the really fondly remembered arcade games of our time, Time Pilot 84 is the forgotten sequel to Time Pilot. Where the original had you changing from a plane to a rocket as you went through time, Time Pilot 84 had you in the same ship and flying across some very detailed planet landscapes in 8 directions.
Time Pilot 84 - first level
A more familiar title from my childhood compared to Hudson Hawk (Which I only recently got playing). Think ‘Zaxxon‘ with a aeroplane flying across WW1 Germany, and what you have is Synapse Software’s ‘Blue Max’.
Blue Max on the C64
This is a game from way back in 1983 released on the likes of the Atari, C64 and Spectrum and which I have a bit of a soft spot for, as its one of those titles which I grew up with as a kid.
A few months ago I borrowed a bundle of disks from ex-C64 developer “Matt Young” who took on the daunting task of converting Ultimate Play the Game’s “The Bubbler” from the Spectrum.
The big problem which eventually killed the conversion was Ultimate’s insistance that they replicated the same draw routine as the ZX Spectrum (Which was about 1mhz faster than the C64 in terms of processing power).
The C64 version - level 1
23 years later, we helped to salvage all of the sources and a combination of Matt, David (A colleague on GTW64) and Jani (A C64 developer) pieced together everything to form a fully complete conversion.
You can read more of the recovery story at: http://gtw64.retro-net.de/Pages/t/Review_Thebubbler.php (Complete in the very outdated template – which I *WILL* eventually rebuild).
I had a question posted through GTW the other day from a chap called Bruce who wanted to know what happened to the missing levels from the C64 conversion of Salamander. The conversion itself was superb, but it was missing a number of levels overall – which posed the question from Bruce to find out what happened to them.
Luckily I have been in the past in touch with the converter himself, Pete Baron, who helped us the other year to resurrect his “Devious Designs” project on the C64, and now the up and coming “Starglider 2“. So I fired the question off to him, and a few hours later we had the reason why. As its always interesting to hear stories behind some of the games we grew up with, I thought i’d share it here…
The original plan was to convert the entire game, however after I fed £10 into a Salamander machine in a horrible cafe opposite Kings X Station in London, I realised that it was going to be a really big job. I made a ton of notes (which earned me some funny looks from the paying customers and staff…) and went home to write up a schedule.
Turned out that the time allocated for the game wasn’t going to be enough to do the whole six levels, so I picked what I thought were the four most interesting levels and put a big warning at the start of the job estimate saying (in effect) “if you want the other levels, I need another four weeks”. The company (Nemesis at that point) decided they didn’t care and told me to go ahead with it as scheduled.
So there we have it… Had Pete been given more time on the conversion project as a whole, then we could have potentially (well, no doubt actually) had a more awesome and complete conversion to savour. You can just see from the love and craft put into the conversion that Pete and Bob were more than capable of doing just that.
Pete also gave an interesting side-note about the game’s development which is a testament to the skill of the team…
Slightly interesting side-note: the big brain at the end of level one was considered technically impossible by at least 3 other programmers before the job was offered to me. It’s 4 sprites wide, 3 sprites high (so a plexer was needed to even draw the brain) and it has a 6 (or is it 8?) segment arm and claw which can project horizontally in front of it, plus you have the ship itself and the ‘multiples’ it tows behind it — all potentially on one sprite line.
I solved the problem by writing ’software sprites’ using the user generated character set and dynamically masking the graphics into characters overlapping each segment with the one behind it. Even so, the frame-rate in that section drops to half the usual (I doubled the movement offsets to compensate) and the ‘multiple’ shooting globes are drawn on alternate frames making them flicker like a NES game. I think that’s the most heavy duty hack I’ve ever used in my career… 2 weeks of work to draw an arm!
And if you haven’t by chance seen the conversion, you can check it out by downloading a copy from Gamebase 64.
Something i’ve always wanted to do (but always been too busy) is to occasionally do a blog post of any particular games of interest during my retro gaming travels to share with others. Quick and short blog posts just to quickly highlight the game with a brief background/overview and then allow others to go off and check it out for themselves (Hopefully on more obscure titles). Now I have a bit more time, here’s hopefully the first of many starting with Ocean’s “Hudson Hawk”…
Box art (various)
“Hudson Hawk” was considered a bit of a flop on its movie release back in 1991, but Ocean Software had at the time decided that there was a decent game to be created from it. It was found out recently from Ocean’s supremo Gary Bracey that the actual film script he was sent depicted something far better than what eventually surfaced, with a script which was described as fantastic.
The Vatican level (C64)
Unfortuntaely things were tweaked and the film bombed badly; as a result the game went under the radar a little – although it is quite a superb little game created by the ‘Special FX’ team.
Summarizing in brief, the game is a platform/puzzler affair where you must avoid tripping up alarms and steal particular artefacts from the likes of Rutherfords and the Vatican. Enemies range from guard dogs, to guys on pogo sticks – all very bizzare and comical throughout (Throwing a ball will send one of the guard dogs running after it and swiftly jumping off the roof after it). It is a sort of a mix of Bruce Lee (C64) and Addams Family (SNES) , with that typical NES platformer feel to it (Which is ironic considering it was released on the NES).
Of course, my version of choice is the C64 conversion which is very well done – but notable versions include the Amiga and NES versions (Though all platforms of the time are well covered). One other version that I have been playing a lot is the Gameboy version that was picked up from a charity box.
Gameboy version (Level 1)
Although its been dumbed down a little (with some of the puzzle elements from the first level removed compared to the C64 version), it’s an enjoyable conversion of the game and some people will find it less frustrating compared to the C64 version (which isn’t very forgiving at the best of times.)
Now I have an urge to watch the film just to see if its as bad as people have made out…
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