Boulder Dash, Commodore 16/Plus4

I don’t know for sure if the Commodore 16/Plus4 conversion of Peter Liepa and Chris Gray‘s classic Boulder Dash is official or a homebrew port (my guess is that it’s a homebrew port because I can’t find any reliable information about it online), but it unfortunately has a number of issues.

On the plus side (no pun intended), it’s a fairly accurate port of the brilliant Commodore 64 version. The only real difference between the two – at least visually – is that it uses a slightly different colour palette. All sixteen of the classic Boulder Dash levels seem to be present (although, to be honest, I didn’t see them all, but the ones I did see where authentic).

On the negative side: there is a distracting visual tear (a graphical corruption line) just above the play area, and underneath the score panel. The game also runs too fast in certain places. Sometimes Rockford (the player character) even runs ahead of the scrolling screen and disappears off the side (which is poor programming in my opinion). The music and sound effects are also really bad; the music on the title screen is terrible, and some sound effects just seem to play a constant tone, which is annoying. These issues lead me to believe that this is an unfinished homebrew conversion and not an official release. If anyone has any concrete information about this particular Boulder Dash conversion, please let me know in the comments below.