Games That Weren't^®

A neat and almost complete game, where you control a blue penguin type creature that flies around collecting many many objects and sweets for points, before progressing to the next level.

Each colorful level is multi-directional, quite fast and smooth scrolling. The game is fairly simplistic, as you just have to collect objects and then find the exit, but its one of the nicer games which unfortunately didn’t get finished.

The Drugbird preview consists of quite a few levels, a later level being too heavily bugged to progress past (Pool level). Sound is bugged too. However, the Castlepanik version has less bugs and allows you to progress a little further.

Its likely that the game was meant for a mail order C64 games company, or games disk of some kind. With the game pretty much complete, its unknown why this was never finished and properly released.

We hope to learn more about this title some day.

A neat little platformer this one, and something I fondly remember playing from the days of Zzap 64 and their famous megatapes.

Created by Zach Townsend (coder of Batman The Movie and Army Moves) after he had left Ocean, Dreamraider was produced by himself within his new Technodream team and started writing the game in the hope of later finding a publisher.

You control a creature similar to the frog in Nebulus, where you collect coins, and shoot various other creatures around a huge play-area, jump up trees and go down into deep caves etc. It featured good parallax, the graphics were average but the game played well overall.

In fact, when the demo was given away with Zzap 64 (issue 75), it came with a rather intriguing storyline about having to jump into a mad scientist’s dreams to prevent them developing a weapon that could destroy 90% of human life. The scenario, enemies and more would be generated from that scientist’s mind. See scans for more details about this.

After an interview with Zach in Commodore Zone back around 1999, it was found that only the one level was ever made (with a small bit of level two started), then the game was binned as Technodream fell apart. However, the Zzap demo page suggested that level two was virtually completed by Joe.

Zach went on to work on Stun Runner, followed by the doomed Race Drivin’. We may see glimpses of level two someday soon, though Zach informed GTW that he gave all his stuff to his brother, who may have long since sold or binned the disks by now. Tracking bits of level two is highly unlikely.

A nice little platformer, which may have done well…

I’m not a fan of puzzlers, and this game does little to convince me to play more of them.

A typical example of what was saturated onto the C64 scene at one point. A word game which i’m uncertain how it plays.

The graphics are quite weak, and need some work.

Otherwise, the game engine seems pretty much complete, just missing some vital graphics and tweaks.

Did the game ever get finished, and did it ever get better graphics?

A bit boring, maybe someone else will like it?…

A very big thanks to Mauricio Muñoz Lucero for highlighting this one for us. Dr Bazair ’92 is a game which has recently surfaced thanks to the author of Warhawk digging out his unreleased software whilst he develops the new Warhawk game on the DS.

Dr Bazair ’92 is sort of a sequel to both Michael’s other game Tidemarsh, but titlewise a sequel to his game which surfaced on the likes of Your Commodore’s covertape.

This is a great little preview of a game which for reasons unknown was stopped in 1992. It was coming on very well and is a neat sort of Robotron/Spore/Puzzler type of affair with nice graphics and presentation.

It is currently incomplete – as the level sets are not quite complete. There are two versions in the download, one a later version with better graphics and more levels (and easier too). Michael on his forum has said that if anyone wishes to finish things off they can and he has the level editor, some sfx and a highscore bit of code which can be used too.

It would be nice to see someone pick this up and tidy it up a bit, but its great that Michael has preserved things. Hopefully we may get chance to add the level editors and bits to the archive.

We hope to hear a bit more from Michael about the development in the future, but here it is … A great little game!!

More soon on this game we hope…

Two games essentially, but we’ve decided to create just the one entry for this one. Drax – Evilblood was produced mostly for fun it seems in its first instance, developed by Mark Gallagher with Ed Campbell on graphics.

Previously the game was not known about until Ramos gave GTW a heads up and pointed us in the direction of Mark’s website which had the downloads.

The game is fairly simple, and has you controlling a guy who has to kick and destroy various small creatures across a horizontally bi-directionally scrolling game. It reminds me a bit of Chameleon by Electric Dreams in some ways. The early version looks pretty dated, but its the remixed edition which really starts looking very nice indeed.

The remixed edition features most of the titles and intro credit screens of the first game, but contains a set of (we think) previously unheard tunes from Andrew (Drew) Rodger and a vastly improved set of graphics, including a lovely hi-res overlaid main character. Controls (like in the first iteration) are quite clunky and the game is not going to blow you away, but its great to see this hard work preserved. We believe that overall the remixed game is mostly complete, but still in a preview status (Hence why we are listing it as a preview). Ian Coog has kindly done some tidy ups and those two trained versions have been added to the zip.

Surely all of this work was meant for something commercially?…. It seems that this was a game being developed in the hope that a software house (Budget maybe?) would pick it up and release, but Mark confirms it wasn’t and was done purely for fun.

Well worth checking out!….