Games That Weren't^®

Terminus has some nice graphics, but the actual gameplay is very simplistic and doesn’t offer hardly any playability at this stage.

You simply have to shoot the incoming enemies, which follow a very monotonous waveform – so much so that you are reaching for the reset switch quickly after admiring the graphics for a short while.

Gaz Spence has confirmed that the game is a sequel to Terminus, which you can find in Gamebase64. It is very likely that the developers were part of the Raiders of the Lost Empire group. Hopefully we will get to hear from their members soon to find out more.

If you know anything more about this game – please do get in touch.

"Technodream" is a fair "Lightforce" clone, with average graphics and gameplay.

Although only just less than 10 years old, the game looks a lot older.

It’s not known why the game was incomplete or who it was to be released under, as information is severely lacking for this one. No credits in the game at all.

So until more is found out, this one has to be put on ice.

More information needed for this one…

Another unfinished Lepsi game, and unfortunatly another tried and tested theme, based on Galaxians.

Controlling your space ship, you must blast attack waves of alien lifeform, all over the top of a set of nicely drawn bitmaps.

The attackwaves are very simple, and the playability does not last for too long. The game would need a lot more in it to be that playable.

Lepsi don’t seem to have ever completed this game, and for what reasons is unknown. Lepsi had a period around 1996-1997, where they could not stop producing for the C64, and then suddenly it stopped gamewise. Maybe they had enough of not making money out of it, but who knows.

We need to find the people behind the game to actually find out more, otherwise this one may never be laid to rest.

Not much new, but maybe a later version tells a different story…

An odd entry this time, covering something which I was actually involved on :-)

Tanx was to be an enhanced version of a game called Tanx written by David Ponting for Your 64 magazine as a type-in. The original game was a BASIC artilery duel clone which was a good little game for what it was… http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=17440&d=18&h=0

Back in around 1996, Vinny Mainolfi was heavily into a great PD Amiga game called Tanx which was much more sophisticated than Mr Ponting’s 80’s effort, but Vinny found the type-in in Your 64 and thought it would be good to do an enhanced Hackersoft edition with plenty of Hackersoft humour included. Work was being done, but sadly not a great deal in the end up until the point that Vinny lost interest in the conversion and it started to gather dust.

In 2000, I picked up the game from Vinny with the hope of finishing it off and doing some enhancements myself. I had always wanted to see the Tanx game which Vinny spoke of many times in the likes of Commodore Scene fanzine and through mail contact. It wasn’t quite my plan to do a Hackersoft style set of enhancements, but to get something looking quite jazzed up on the same scale as the Amiga version. The update was to still be on a static screen, but with some nice multicolour and shaded graphics.

I started some initial graphics and score panels, which were looking ok as a starting point in Jon Well’s Multiscreen Construction Kit. Also knocked out a few sprites too. Richard Bayliss kindly produced some music for the game, as well as some sound effects.

My main trouble was going to be getting the MSCK graphics hooked into David’s code, though I was making some headway. I had Richard’s music and sound effects playing in the game and was in the early stages of relocating sprites and starting to plonk them in. However, at somepoint in 2000 I got caught up in college work and all my current C64 projects were cancelled (Including a glut of SEUCK games which have slipped out gradually in some shape or form on my website). I also felt that I wouldn’t do the game any justice apart from some graphical enhancements, and really it needed to be a Machine Code game to really impress. I was still trying to work out how I could still make the backgrounds generate randomly for each level with multicolour shading and looking good still. I had worked out the blocks I would have needed to create and all the pseudocode to produce the maps randomly, but they never got to be programmed or implemented in the end.

Now all that exists is a demo of the original game containing Richard’s music and sound effects. To load it, you must first load Richard’s music, then the latest Tanx file. The graphics are separate, but you can check these out from the screenshots and the original files with the zip image.

Check it out!… Case closed…