The 1986 Commodore 64 port of Nintendo‘s famous Donkey Kong was developed by Arcana Software Design and published by Ocean Software. And it is a decent port of the arcade game.
Arcana also made the superb Amstrad CPC Donkey Kong port for Ocean, so it’s no surprise that this one is good too.
Designed and programmed by John Ferrari, with music by Barry Leitch, Super Dragon Slayer is a platform shooter first published for the Commodore 64 by Codemasters in 1988. In many ways this game reminds me of the early days of C64 software, with unforgiving gameplay and instant death if you put a foot wrong. That said, this is still a pretty good game. Just a very difficult one.
The Commodore 64 version of Marble Madness was developed by Will Harvey and published by Electronic Arts in 1986. It has something unique that most other Marble Madness conversions don’t have, which is: a secret extra level that is accessible from the first stage. It also has the two player mode from the arcade original, where both marbles can race to the goal simultaneously.
The Commodore 64 version of Castlevania was converted by Unlimited Software, Inc. and published by Konami in 1990, and it’s not a bad port overall. It’s arguably better than the dodgy Amiga version.
Set on an uninhabited spaceship, Chimera is an isometric adventure/puzzle game where you control a robot* that must destroy the ship before it crashes into Earth. The game was written by Shahid Ahmad and published by Firebird in 1985. The music is by Rob Hubbard.
*= The player character looks like a robot, but does in fact require food and water to survive, so there’s a bit of a contradiction going on in the story, as far as who or what the player actually is.
The Commodore 64 conversion of Shadow of the Beast was developed by DMA Design and published by Ocean Software in 1990. And it’s a reasonably good port of the scrolling fighting game, with decent graphics and atmospheric music.
Paradroid Redux is a fan-tweaked version of Andrew Braybrook‘s classic Commodore 64 shooter, Paradroid. The Redux version includes bug-fixes, enhancements and additions, and runs faster and smoother than any other Paradroid version that preceded it. It also includes all of the three previous versions of Paradroid in one package.
I’ve already covered the re-made “Paradroid Metal Edition” on this website, but haven’t yet featured the original Paradroid – the highly-rated scrolling action game designed and programmed by Andrew Braybrook and published for the Commodore 64 by Hewson Consultants in 1985.
The Commodore 64 version of Paperboy was written by Neil A. Bate and Chris Harvey and was first published by Elite Systems in 1986.
Martin Walker‘s classic scrolling shooter, Citadel, was released exclusively for the Commodore 64 by Electric Dreams in 1989. The premise of Citadel is quite interesting – as is the gameplay.
The King of Grabs 