Archer MacLean‘s seminal Commodore 64 shooter, Dropzone is like a cross between Defender and, erm, Defender, but with more realistic graphics. And slightly different gameplay. But the principles are pretty much the same: super-fast, super-smooth, side-scrolling shooting. Avoid touching anything – or it’s instant death.
Dropzone is just as tough as Defender, and arguably just as good. High praise indeed…
And, yes: I know Dropzone was developed and released for the Atari 800 first, but I prefer the Commodore 64 version. There is something about it that just sings!
More: Dropzone on Wikipedia
The King of Grabs 
Not quite as good as the Atari version, but still not bad.
To quote the Archer MacLean… “The [Commodore] 64 Dropzone is about 46k [kilobytes] long and consists of 15,000 lines of sparsely commented code with around 350 subroutines and around 3000 labels. Those who can reach Megastar status on the 64 should have had enough practice to attempt an Atari supervised Dropzone mission. The Atari, being the Porsche of home computers, is capable of running Dropzone 2.5 times faster than the 64 and can handle any amount of blobs on screen, even when you release a Strata Bomb. It is visually, sonically etc., identical and about 12K shorter. However, the 64 is still a respectable BMW316.”
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A well-known quote (first appearing in Zzap!64 magazine IIRC) that I’ve read/heard many, many times. At the end of the day, though, it’s still just an opinion. Personally, I prefer the C64 version. Which is just an opinion.
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