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REPLYADDR psychonaut@nothingisreal.com
REPLYTO 3:770/3.0 UUCP
MSGID: dc6819e8
PID: SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
Dear all,
I've just posted to YouTube two longplays of relatively obscure C64 games:
First, there's Tombs of Xeiops by Peter Gerrard and published by Romik
Software in 1983: This is a budget-priced
text adventure game in which your goal is to raid archaeological
treasures from an Egyptian tomb.
This was the very first game we got for our Commodore 64 back in 1985!
I remember it came on a disk with a light blue label, with dark blue
lettering in an LCD-style font. There's very little information on this
game on the Web, and seemingly none on the disk version. (Scans of the
cassette version are available on MobyGames and elsewhere.)
Programmer Peter Gerrard was the editor of Commodore Computing
International and wrote a number of other games and books, mostly on
computing. The most recent book of his I'm aware of is "Around the Tube
in 80 Pubs: A Guide to Some of the Best Pubs in London", a 2017
collaboration with his brother Mike.
Six-year-old me found Tombs of Xeiops far too difficult and buggy and so
I gave up after a few weeks. (The game's two most annoying bugs are its
tendency to drop characters that are typed, and specious error messages
about your inventory being full when it's not. Probably one or both of
these flaws are evident in the playthrough video.)
I created today's playthrough with the help of a walkthrough published
around two decades ago by Dorothy Millard:
Dorothy's walkthrough has a few errors in it; I reported these to her
back in 2012 ago but I don't think she ever updated her walkthrough
website, which has since disappeared. But Dorothy herself is still
around as far as I know; she's posted to Facebook as recently as 2017:
Next is SuperTrek 64+ by Don Lekei: This
is a conversion of Star Trek, the classic 1971 strategy game originally
by Mike Mayfield and later popularized and extended by David H. Ahl, Bob
Leedom, and others. I believe Don released the game as freeware in
order to promote Sysres, a programming tool he designed and used to help
convert the game, probably from Bob Leedom's well-known version. Don
developed Sysres while director of engineering at Solidus International
Corporation in North Vancouver, BC. Don's got a LinkedIn profile which
has seen activity as recently as 2013:
SuperTrek was and still is one of my favourite C64 games, no doubt
because it's fairly faithful to the tried-and-tested text-based classic,
yet wisely spruces things up with colour, sound, animation, and a custom
character set. The game does have a few minor bugs, however, ranging
from rampant spelling errors to faulty logic in the phaser firing
mechanism. Perhaps one of these days I'll release a patched version!
Regards,
Tristan
--
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Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
https://logological.org/
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