The game can be picked up and understood with little, if any, explanation needed, but true mastery of the challenging stages will take some serious dedication. The purity of the gameplay – which really does closely ape the arcade experience – is key here. Not the only game on the list to come from the prolific and highly renowned Archer Maclean (IK+ – or ‘Chop N Drop’ – as it was known in the US, can be found below!), Dropzone is essentially a clone of arcade classic Defender (cheekily, it even uses very similar fonts to the Williams Electronics arcade game), which sees players flying left, right, up and down at blistering speeds in order to rescue humans being abducted from a planet surface by evil, deadly and very persistent aliens. Though somewhat simplistic by today’s standards, Laser Squad has that elusive ‘just one more turn’ quality that’s found in all of the best strategy games when plans start coming together in the mind of the player – and it still stands tall as one of the very best games on the Commodore 64. Laser Squad is a turn based strategy game in which players take on missions with varied objectives – rescuing civilians or simply killing all enemies in a stage, for example – and has a surprising level of depth for a Commodore 64 title that made it hugely impressive in its day. X-Com was initially supposed to be a sequel to Laser Squad – and you can really see the evolution of the gameplay and visual elements from the earlier game to the new series, even if they did end up going in different directions. #MAGIC ORBZ SLOT MACHINE SERIES#Strategy game genius Julian Gollop was the brains behind the superb X-Com/UFO series of games, which started way back in 1994 with X-Com: UFO Defense (also known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe). It’s more than just a clone of a more popular game on a more technically impressive platform though – and a game that’s well worth playing in its own right. With colourful anthropomorphic mascots being all the rage back in the early 90s, the titular dinosaur (named ‘Mayhem’, as you may or may not have guessed) can move at quite a pace – and he’s not unlike a yellow version of Sonic the Hedgehog from a visual standpoint either. It’s a beautiful little cartoon platformer which really does show what the humble and then-aging Commodore 64 could do. It’s a lovingly produced game which oozes style and that old fashioned thing that we gamers couldn’t quite put our finger on, so we just called it ‘playability’. Arriving incredibly late in the Commodore 64’s lifespan – a whole eleven years after the machine was first released, astoundingly – Mayhem in Monsterland is clearly a game which took advantage of more than a decade’s worth of technical knowledge about the computer to really make it shine.
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