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Lemon 64 has it for download. The VICE emulator runs it flawlessly, and it's available for every platform you could imagine.

Try Lemon64.com, look for the forums.

Getting the top score in Stroker was definately the high point of all my gaming experiences.

And of course there is this game from 1985 (BBC version is original, by Orlando M. Pilchard a.k.a. Nick Pelling).

With all the girl-geek comments going around, has anyone checked to see if Stroker is on the C64 joystick?

http://www.lemon64.com/reviews/view.php?gameID=74 maybe you mean Airborne RAnger?

I suspect it's a different game.

This is the game I was talking about:
Ghostbusters (1984 Activision)

How I miss the EA of old, before EA Sports, before the dark times.

Back in the days of home computers, EA proudly called themselves a group of "electronic artists," and produced innovative titles like Hard Hat Mack, M.U.L.E., Realm of Impossibility, Archon, Battle Chess, The Bard's Tale, Modem Wars, Neuromancer, Wasteland, Project Firestart, etc. Now they're crank out sequel after sequel, and treat their talent like oxen. EA needs a wake up call.

Classic EA games
C64 EA games

Laugh at will, but Colossus chess 4 used to beat me constantly on my C64; it had a surprisingly good AI for the time. No match for a grandmaster, enough to frustate an amateur player.

I miss my C64 :(

Well the eidolon (1985) was almost an FPS, and rather pretty for a c64/atari!

Remember LCP for the C64? (http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemo n64.com/reviews/view.php%3Fid%3D77). Think of a Tamagochi inside your C64 and you'll have a pretty nice description of it.

I was a boy back then, but i remember people flipped over this one. I never saw what the great deal was.

Check out this box art! Yes, this is a real game.

-Isaac

Sorry, make that http://www.lemon64.com/!

All the tedium of canvassing in one flash game. And they wonder why voters are so cynical? ;)

What would be more interesting is if they'd avoided the obvious arcade-style game and created something that made the player think about the consequences of voting yea or nay on a particular issue. There's an old edutainment (yuk) title called Hidden Agenda that puts you in the role of a newly-elected president of a South American country, giving you the chance to appoint your own cabinet, influence policy and make decisions affecting your country. The game is exceedingly difficult, and is thought-provoking precisely because it's nigh-impossible to "win" - every decision angers someone.

In the same vein, the old Yes Prime Minister game showed how policy can be distorted and seemingly innocuous decisions could become controversial in a much more thoughtful manner than these Flash efforts.

Okay, so the games are probably a gimmick to increase site hits more than anything, but I'm disappointed they didn't see the scope for doing something different.

What about the billions of other classic games for the C-64? What about Mail Order Monsters, Seven Cities of Gold, Auto Duel or M.U.L.E.?

What about the billions of other classic games for the C-64? What about Mail Order Monsters, Seven Cities of Gold, Auto Duel or M.U.L.E.?

What about the billions of other classic games for the C-64? What about Mail Order Monsters, Seven Cities of Gold, Auto Duel or M.U.L.E.?

What about the billions of other classic games for the C-64? What about Mail Order Monsters, Seven Cities of Gold, Auto Duel or M.U.L.E.?

I sure hope you can somehow hook two units together to multiplay. Anyone remember Wizard of Wor? It was actually the first computer game I ever played, in 1983. Damn those were some good times, back then... I still play it with Vice sometimes, though you want to play it co-op multiplayer for maximal fun.

If you would like to get stuff for Vice, check out Arnold. It seems they have every C64 title I've ever heard of.

Found it, Heavy Metal Paradroid.

One of the most entertaining games had a plot and game play, the gfx didn't have to be top notch if the game play was fun. Qix, wasnt exactly the most eye catching game, but the game play and idea was quiet Interesting.

I'd love to see the C64 games make a comeback, even if java on a mobile phone.

Are you looking for Paradroid?

I'd like to see for classic c64 games, Skate or Die, Bruce Lee, Karataka, Trolls and Tribulations, Exploding Fist, Last v8, into the eagles nest, green beret, turrican, archon, attack of the mutant camels.

I'm forgetting a game, the battledroid game I think. I couldn't find it on Lemon64.com.

The 64 had some pretty good games, and in the later years when they started pushing the hardware, some good gfx and sound for an 8bit system.

I loved the C64 game PHM Pegasus base on real hardware; A.
Missle equiped hydrofoils

If the USN wants to bust terrorist/pirate bad guys in the costal shallows or the open seas this is a possible weapons system that met an untimely end.

For more info on the PHM program

do you feel lucky

Project: Space Station was an excellent game. But it doesn't seem too similar to this one. The C64 game focused a lot of it's time on the ground managing all kinds of NASA resources, financial, human and equipment. Also launching satellites and manually launching and landing the space shuttle.

This game seems more like a sandbox environment. Still very cool looking and probably much more fun but not like the NASA-sim. (That's what they should have called it, instead of Operation: Space Station.)

Back in my day, we had eight bits, and we liked it!

This sounds just like the game I've been waiting for since the end of the 80s: The Last Ninja 4.. First releasedate was sometime in 2000, then the releasedate has drifted about half a year every 6 months... It was supposed to be released for the Game Cube Q4 2003, but I haven't heard a single word about it for a long time now...
SimonSays still says "September 2003" for the X-Box version but no more news there... Amazon says February 2004...
The story continues... ;)

And before then, in 1988, Interplay's computer game Neuromancer (yes, based on William Gibson's novel) included (a lo-fi, short, looped sample of) Devo's "Some Things Never Change".

"Frodo, the free Commodore 64 Emulator for your Palm Pilot. I can't wait to get this running so I can ..."

... play the old game of Stroker.

Never had a C64 myself, but saw this once on a friends computer and pissed myself laughing.

Man, that brings back memories... about 1/3rd of the guys in my class back then (early eighties) had micros - and just one had an Atari 400. Boy, we (ie; the other protogeeks) used to give him hell... we all had a 'real computer', the allmighty Commodore 64. Back then I used to rule them all, beeing the only one with a 1541 floppy (single side, single density 51/4" disks, connected to the motherboard via a serial cable), meaning I just had to wait five to ten minutes to load the games...

Good times, good times... I think I shall go connect it all up again - been a couple of months since I had a good game of Defender of the Crown.

Bah, Assembly'03 is nothing compared to what the real old-school people are up to: The world's first C64 LAN party! At the LCP2003 party arranged in Sweden this summer, Adam Dunkels showcased his Commodore 64 Contiki OS on a bunch of C64s connected in a LAN using specially built Ethernet cards. The three C64:s connected to a LAN made this event the world's first C64-only LAN party!

I'm sure there's bad box art for every system out there. Check out this one for the old Commodore 64. I don't think the problems with this one end with the box art though...

Okay, then, children of the modern age (where we live in a world so tied together with wires that Pangaea ain't goin' nowhere!), you tell me if this is a predicament or not.

In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64, hours after purchasing it, with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the pattern of notes spewing from the speaker grille in an endless loop. You were part of the movement to help machines sing! You were a programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC. They know what I'm talking about. And the TI-994A guys don't need to say a word, because the TI could say it for them!

The old machines don't compare to the desktops of today, or to the consoles of today. But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages. And what's a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog? Forget coding for XBox. Requires registration in the XBox Developer Program. Otherwise, you gotta crack the sucker open. GameCube? GameBoy? Playstation 2?

Coding Just Isn't Accessible

Yes, there are burgeoning free SDKs for many of these platforms. But they are obscure and most children have no means of actually deploying or executing the code on their own hardware! This is obvious to us all and likely doesn't seem such a big deal. But ask yourself what might have happened had you not had access to a programming language on an Atari 800 or a Commodore. You tell me if this is a predicament.

It turns out, most of the kids in my neighborhood are exposed to coding through the TI calculator. A handful of languages are available on the TI and its processor is interesting enough to evoke some curiousity. But this hasn't spread to its PDA big brothers, where young people could have more exposure to programming. And undoubtedly the utility of a language on the Palm, Pocket PC and others would be useful to many.

So what's the problem here? We have no shortage of new languages, but they become increasingly distanced from the populace. Are the companies behind these platforms weary of placing the power of a programming language in the hands of users? Is there not a demand any longer? It's got to be some kind of greed, power, money thing, right?

Perhaps this is just another reason to push Linux and BSD on consumer systems. Still, are scripting languages easily accessible to beginners on those systems? OSX has made several scripting languages available (including Ruby and Python), but most users are unaware of their presence.

I should mention that Windows is equipped with its own scripting host for developing in JScript and VBScript. But the use of the scripting host is (I believe) under-documented and limited for beginners. Try doing something useful in a script without using Server.CreateObject. Let's not let kids touch the COM objects, please!

The Christmas List

I'm thinking a toy language for consoles and desktops alike could be monumental. I'm not saying it needs to be cross-platform. A language for GameCube that took advantage of platform-specific features could be more appealing to GameCube users than a language that used a reduced featureset, but could execute on a handheld. Really, we live in a world where both choices should be available.

As for essential features:

1. Transportable code.

On my TI-994A, I could make a little, animated Optimus Prime from pixels. Insert cassette. Record. Pass aroun

The game I've really been waiting for is The Last Ninja 4! What's really cool about it is that the developers have been very active in Last Ninja fan-forums, asking fans of the classic Last Ninja 1-3 games questions how they should do this or that to keep the wonderful feeling of the old games. It's been in development since 1999 and the current planned releasedate is set to "end of 2003". Their attitude is also "if it doesn't have the same state-of-the-art gameplay and atmosphere (compared to today's games) as The Last Ninja 1 when it was released in 1986, we won't release it."

Ok, not the same genre of game, but the game I've really been waiting for is The Last Ninja 4! What's really cool about it is that the developers have been very active in Last Ninja fan-forums, asking fans of the classic Last Ninja 1-3 games questions how they should do this or that to keep the wonderful feeling of the old games. It's been in development since 1999 and the current planned releasedate is set to "end of 2003". Their attitude is also "if it doesn't have the same state-of-the-art gameplay and atmosphere (compared to today's games) as The Last Ninja 1 when it was released in 1986, we won't release it."

So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?

I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?

Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.

The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.

Maybe a game like Valhalla could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.

Although very cool, this does seem like a waste of bandwidth (yes I'm a hypocrite listening to it right now). You can just download a c64 "sid" player here and grab a load of tunes here. You can even play these sid files in winamp using SidAmp. Enjoy

I loved playing M.U.L.E., maybe because it was the first time I tried a 4 player game on ye olde C64. I remember playing the game even after I got myself a Amiga, and after selling it as well. Anyway for those not knowing M.U.L.E. take a look here. Review included.

Studio 3 (former System 3) is working on Last Ninja 4 since 1999! It will be released for XBox and probably also PS2 and Windoze. They have been working VERY hard on research and they have been active in Last Ninja-fan-mailinglists. The Last Ninja-series is IMHO the best games ever released on any platform, together with Monkey Island 1+2 (Disclaimer: You may think otherwise) Check this page for more info (and screenshots):
http://lastninja.lemon64.com/ln4.htm

Personally, I'm anticipating the release of The Last Ninja 4. oooh...

Rocking good fun!

Also -- for a bit of well crafted flash reminiscence -- check Lazarus

rcmiv

On a whim I did a Google search for a more recent version (kinda like what these two great guys did with Xscorch). Someone seems to have liked it enough to make a GNU version, although there's not a lot there yet.

-B

If you're interested in doing bizzaro stuff with your C64, you might want to check out these links:

LUnix (Fully functioning SLIP-TCP/IP stack for C64)

GeckOS/A65 (Multitasking Unix-ish OS for C64s)

Lemon for a good stockpile of C64 warez. :)

I don't know about "Master of Magic", but Mail-Order Monsters rocked... :P

Need I say more? :-)
Oh well, Daley Thompson's Decathlon
Remember that game?
Get ready for som serious headshaking/banging.
--------

M.O.M. haven't tested it, but there's a link, thanks to Google. Click on the YES to the right of Downloadable. Best of luck!


--
Chief Frog Inspector

They bought The Sims. That was innovative.

Thad

That's right! I found out a few months ago that Studio 3 (former System 3) is working on THE LAST NINJA 4! It will be released for PS2 and PC(windoze duh)...

For some reason they removed all info from their homepage but make a Google-search for "last ninja 4" and you'll find plenty of info...

It's really looking GREAT and I can't wait for this one! The Last Ninja series was some of the best games ever! I remember back in 1986 when I spent months in a row and almost no sleep playing The Last Ninja...

Beautiful screenshots!!
Studio 3 homepage