Games That Weren't^®

The title may not suggest that it feels much for itself, but this isn’t a bad early preview of a Combat-style clone with space ships in a maze.

Who Carez looks nice and sounds nice, and could have been a nice game overall had it been completed. Well, we assume it was never completed and that this was ultimately as far as the game had got.

With developer credits, we hope to learn more in the future and see if there is potentially more to be discovered.

Not too much to say about this title just yet.  War Deal has you controlling a jet which can drop bombs on boats (with a cute “Ouch!” speech bubble), but seems to be mostly just advertising that the game is coming soon.

Interestingly the music has been borrowed from Ace of Aces too, which would have had to been changed. Perhaps it was a pitch to CP Verlag?

With the developer name known, it is hoped that more can be learnt about the title soon and if it ever got any further than this simple demo.

An intriguing title this one. Nothing much to it at this stage, but quite an impressive early Gyruss clone – with no enemies, but a nice effect when you rotate round the screen.

You’re oddly controlling a car instead of a ship, and there are letters flying around the planet. There’s also shot sound effects, but no actual bullets.

Was this for an actual planned game, or was it perhaps a demo part? Early days, but worth a quick look for now anyway.

Our next entry is a simple puzzler, where you must replicate the pattern on the right side of the screen before your opponent does.

Nothing much to it, but can be some simple fun if you have someone to play against.

This title was being done way back in 1994 for Direct Design, but seems to have stalled for reasons as of yet unknown. We’re not sure if it ever got any further than this and hope to learn more soon.

Check out the preview for now to see for yourself what you were missing.

One of the things I love about the Commodore 64, is where developers try and convert titles from 16-bit+ platforms onto the machine, and this is another attempt at doing just that, with conversion of the classic Amiga title.

This focuses on the tunnel section in particular, which is very impressive overall. It doesn’t work on a stock C64, and requires a REU to be able to run, but it is still seriously impressive to look at.

There isn’t actually much to do in the preview at all, apart from move your ship around and admire the movement of the background. So, its a technical demo at best, and we can confirm that it never got any further than this. On CSDB, the developer had the following to say:

This requires (at least) 512k REU pre-loaded with the supplied ssd.reu image! Simple re-creation of a tunnel sequence in AGA Amiga game “Super Stardust”, without meteorites, enemies, ability to shoot, or basically anything else than animated pre-rendered tunnel & ability to move around with a ship.

Not trying to break any limits, or “doing something that was considered impossible until now” with this release. Was just looking for a simple project to try REU transfers in practice. Each frame, every screen row is copied from REU according to sprite position onscreen. If the sprite Id has changed since the last frame, new contents (for all 6 sprites forming the ship) will be copied over the old. The screen is also double buffered (as I wanted to try that).

Last but not least, I’m NOT going to do a “full Super Stardust port” or even “full tunnel”.

A huge shame, but who knows, maybe with the resurgence of new C64 games of late, this could get picked up again and finished – but it seems unlikely now after all this time.

There have been many abandoned attempts at bringing Super Mario Bros to the Commodore 64 over the years, and thankfully we got to see a proper and accurate conversion in 2019.

This however was yet another potential conversion that was being played around with, but featuring enhanced background graphics and shading to suit the C64. The outcome is a pretty decent looking game.

It isn’t really playable at this stage, and its more of a proof of concept, with a Mario that can move around and jump, but with no enemies or block interaction.  It is one large map that scrolls and loops round.

Overall, an interesting curiosity to see another person’s interpretation of Nintendo’s famous game.

Not too much to say just yet about our next title, as it is so early in development by the looks of things.

Sigma Wing is a sideways scrolling shooter we assume, mainly because there is little else going on apart from a single controllable ship across a scrolling set of buildings. There are no attack waves or anything else to do.

Details about plans for the game are similarly vague too, with no information at present.

Did the game get any further than this, or was this merely a technical demo that the developer became bored with?

Our next entry is a very good graphic adventure which is controlled with a joystick to move around different rooms and interact. Similar to games like BAT and Crime Time.

This was a relatively late C64 game in its commercial life, being developed back in 1994 under the label of OTHIS Software BT.

The preview we have here comes on around 3 disk sides in total, so quite a fair bit had been done on the game before there was a decision to cancel it.

As for the reason for cancellation – our suggestion early on is that it may have just been down to the dwindling C64 market at the time.

It is possible that more work was done after this, but we need to locate the developer to learn more about what happened and if more could exist.

A neat Minesweeper clone which was being worked on during the 1990s in Poland, and seems to have come quite some way.

Unfortunately, for reasons currently unknown – the game has seemingly been abandoned long ago and it wasn’t polished and finished up for release as far as we know.

It seems to be pretty much there, and just lacking some polish. Hopefully we will get to learn more soon about this title and if anything more existed of it.