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Jeff Plays Some C64 Stuff

Jeff embarks on a solitary vision quest to play a random assortment of Commodore 64 game tapes.

May. 30 2014

Cast: Jeff, Alexis

Posted by: Drew

152 Comments

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raezul

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Hey now, this is my childhood you're playing with. Wish I was in on this livestream chat. Jumpman and Great Giana Sisters are amazing, but...

How about some Forbidden Forest? Beyond the Forbidden Forest? Prince of Persia? Karateka? Mario Bros? The Way of the Exploding Fist? Bruce Lee? Summer Games 2? Winter Games? Knight Games? Lode Runner? Championship Lode Runner? Impossible Mission? Archon? Battle Chess? Commando? Fort Apocalypse? Boulder Dash? Crossfire? Paperboy? HERO? Pole Position? Spy Hunter? Moon Patrol? Enduro Racer? Zaxxon? River Raid? Raid on Bungeling Bay? Blue Max? Qix? Miner 2049'er? Krakout? BC's Quest for Tires? Shamus Case II? Kickman? Lunar Leeper? Black Thunder? Zeppelin? Super Dogfight? Squish 'em? Hunchback? A Journey to the Centre of the Earth? Bad Blood? One on One: Julius Erving and Larry Bird? 4th and Inches? Hover Bovver? Escape the MCP? Kid Grid? Buck Rogers? Pharoah's Curse? Dino Eggs? Kong Strikes Back? Congo Bongo? Oils Well? Slinky? Floyd of the Jungle? Joust? Tales of the Arabian Nights? MicroLeague Baseball? Pakacuda? Sammy Lightfoot? Seafox?

Test Drive II: The Duel, the last good Test Drive game ever?

And oh yes, Spelunker and Robotron 2084.

Well there's always another C64 livestream.. right?

Damn, this makes me wish I still had my C64 with Fast Load, Action Replay III, Excelerator+.. Maybe someone will put a C64 emulator on PS Vita. /wrists

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oppai2

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Edited By oppai2

@tehpickle: Zx 81 all the way (until the spectrum came out...)

It blew our innocent minds.

And I'm even German.

Friends had a C64 though and 7 cities of gold was astounding.

Still ant attack had the best first 3d ever.

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sub_o

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Edited By sub_o

Weirdly enough, I think Foot bag looks really great, and also looks very good for a C64 game.

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hawkinson76

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MOTHERFUCKING JUMPMANNNNNN!!!!!!

(I played that shit on an atari 800, but its the same shit)

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Keichan

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That C64 rendition of the Transformers theme was pretty rad, shitty game aside.

Also, Jumpman reminded me of Lode Runner, and Paradroid made me realize where the hell Droid Assault came from, if anyone's played that.

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Cootsnoop

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"If I ever need someone to blow..."

That was fucking funny.

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Sinusoidal

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He looks so sad and lonely sitting there all alone.

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SinKing

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Funny thing with C64 stuff is that different people remember it differently. My brother, who had an Apple 2 before the C64 remembers it for games like "Lode Runner", while I am much closer to the Amiga 500 generation and remember the C64 for stuff like "Pitstop", "G.I. Joe", "Rambo II" and "Zaxxon". I never enjoyed a lot of the oldschool games like "Jumpmen", because I wanted the hawt gfx of more recent games ^^

One system - several dimensions of games and generations of players. I think the C64 will always have a special place in my heart.

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TinyGrasshopper

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The Android version of San Andreas just hit the Fire TV with controller support. In case anyone was wondering

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RonnieBarzel

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@xxnbxx said:

O man, that SF port is utter trash.

Yeah, but considering the programmer(s) had only about 38K to work with, I'm impressed something even playable was produced.

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Hailinel

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"game tapes."

Tapes. Why do people call them tapes when they are not tapes? It's like saying "DVD cassette."

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Capstan

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So, Paradroid is only okay. Hey, don't kill the messenger robot!

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RageGoblin

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This video is so terribly lonely.

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ectoplasma

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rox360

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@hailinel said:

"game tapes."

Tapes. Why do people call them tapes when they are not tapes? It's like saying "DVD cassette."

This would be why. The C64 used actual cassette tapes. There's also some evidence to support the idea that the NES was designed to be reminiscent of a VHS player, to help familiarize new users to the concept of a system that plays the things you put in it and you can buy new things to get new experiences. Tapes were the most prominent type of media storage at the time.

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fisk0

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Edited By fisk0  Moderator

In Sweden we had the ABC 80 and later the ABC 800, which was marketed with the effective 1981 marketing campaign "Who needs IBM compatibility?". There weren't a lot of computer games around until the Commodore 64 though.

No Caption Provided

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CaLe

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Edited By CaLe

It's weird how memory makes games look much better than they actually were.

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ectoplasma

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Edited By ectoplasma

@fisk0: I was wondering how they created the songs for the games back then. Do you have any idea? I assume they had to save a bunch of midi data somehow and send it to the sound card. But how? Could you use a hardware sequencer and somehow export midi files or sth.?

edit: btw. that first song sounds amazing. I'm amazed by the fidelity of the sounds. They're not flat at all.

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raezul

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@ectoplasma: The C64 (and others) used the SID (sound interface device) chip for all sounds and music. It was an amazing piece of hardware for the time, and the sounds were so distinctive and rich that many musicians track with SID-chip samples today.

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fisk0

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Edited By fisk0  Moderator

@ectoplasma said:

@fisk0: I was wondering how they created the songs for the games back then. Do you have any idea? I assume they had to save a bunch of midi data somehow and send it to the sound card. But how? Could you use a hardware sequencer and somehow export midi files or sth.?

edit: btw. that first song sounds amazing. I'm amazed by the fidelity of the sounds. They're not flat at all.

Early on they programmed directly to the hardware, sequencers and tracker programs and MIDI support (by inserting a MIDI in/out cartridge) started appearing a few years later, but I know Rob Hubbard, Matt Gray and some of the other well known musicians of that era were programmers themselves and wrote the music using machine code or assembly (which is only marginally easier than machine code itself) or in some instances BASIC. Some of them wrote easier to use music sequencers for others to use too.

Here is an interview with Rob Hubbard where he talks a bit about programming music for the C64: http://www.c64.com/interviews/hubbard.html

And Codebase 64 have some examples of music code written in Assembly, such as this:

http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=magazines:chacking5#rob_hubbard_s_musicdisassembled_commented_and_explained

http://codebase64.org/doku.php?id=base:256_bytes_tune_player

In time very easy to use software like GoatTracker (also available on PC with emulated SID sound) came around, but all the early ones had to do everything from scratch, hence the widely varied quality of the music in those early games. Most could only get it to play bleeps and bloops, but geniuses like Hubbard, Huelsbeck and Gray quickly learned how to control the SID's sound filters and how to create crazy new sounds by rapidly changing the waveform and stuff.

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fisk0

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fisk0  Moderator

@raezul said:

@ectoplasma: The C64 (and others) used the SID (sound interface device) chip for all sounds and music. It was an amazing piece of hardware for the time, and the sounds were so distinctive and rich that many musicians track with SID-chip samples today.

On this note, many musicians even spend upwards of $2000 on the SID based Elektron SIDStation or Monomachine (despite the fact that a real C64 would be much cheaper).

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buzz_clik

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Edited By buzz_clik
No Caption Provided

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Sagalla

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I used to envy some friends that had a C64 while I just had an Atari 800, was so happy when I got an Amiga - great to see these old games. Would love to see a C64 collection on Vita or something, Epyx and/or Activision could put a good package together. Never saw Temple of Apshai trilogy before, that looked like a really bad follow up to Gateway to Apshai, that was to RPGs like Jumpman was to platformers. And now I finally get Paradroid, I'd give that a go but the emulators are so fiddly

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Silver-Streak

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@jeff I loved my C64 a ton. However, how do you go through an entire C64 stream and not show Ghostbusters? It was the best version of Ghostbusters that came out. (although, obviously the game wasn't fantastic, but you showed Transformers so quality wasn't a requirement)

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fisk0

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Edited By fisk0  Moderator

Come to think of it, I think Street Fighter II on the C64 was the first Street Fighter I saw. So obviously I thought Sango Fighter on PC was the superior fighting game series, and didn't look back at Street Fighter until the PS2 era, when I picked up some of those Capcom Classics Collections and Street Fighter II Alpha.

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skunkdragon

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oh my god transformers id forgot all about that game. thanks jeff

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Psykodoughboy

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They should do more streams

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Bezieh

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46:00 Thats a s a d b o y sbeat right?

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SkankinPacman

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@fisk0: Oh rad. Thanks duder.

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Jennifyre

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Edited By Jennifyre

I love these looks into gamings past

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jakeh

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THE NEW ERA OF GIANTBOMB

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MachoFantastico

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I love when Jeff hits us with some gaming history, why I loved Game Room.

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nasedase

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I'm pretty sure the song in that Karate game is supposed to be "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence"

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Chummy8

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CONTENT!

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fisk0

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fisk0  Moderator

@nasedase said:

I'm pretty sure the song in that Karate game is supposed to be "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence"

Like Doom's composer Bobby Prince, Rob Hubbard had a habit of taking a bit too much inspiration from existing works. His music for Delta is pretty much straight up a song from Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi, and Zoids and Master of Magic got music that sounded very similar to stuff by Synergy.

Wikipedia has a list of the music he was inspired by, and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is mentioned there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Hubbard#Compositions

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ProfessorEss

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Edited By ProfessorEss

Regardless of whether he liked it or not I'm so happy Jeff finally learned to play Paradroid. Kinda.

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drew327

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I think in Flying Disc you can catch it while standing. I used to get right in front of it, running right, and make slight adjustments left until the height matched my hands. At least I think, its been several years.

Also, Wow that sound in Bubble Ghost.

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shtinky

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Is Jeff mostly negative and jaded on this? Not going to watch if so; "don't like it, don't watch" and all that.

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fisk0

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Edited By fisk0  Moderator

@shtinky said:

Is Jeff mostly negative and jaded on this? Not going to watch if so; "don't like it, don't watch" and all that.

Not really, he plays two awful games where he rightfully complains about them, other than that he seems to genuinely enjoy his time with most of the games. He even puts some real effort into learning Paradroid, which I think he has dismissed in the past.

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moonwalksa

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Please feel free to do any amount more videos of Jeff playing old games alone, or with others.

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matatat

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Oh shit I was trying to remember what this game was that I played on the Genesis a long time ago where they had weird roller skating and some weird hackey sack game. Turns out it was California Games. I'm glad that game was brought out to jog my memory.

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vonsoot

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Dem California Games memories. Sweet memories.

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mathkor89

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this is pretty much how my friend predicts the podcast going to be, but with a soundboard, and beef. SO MUCH BEEF you can feed a country

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antime

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@drew327 said:

I think in Flying Disc you can catch it while standing. I used to get right in front of it, running right, and make slight adjustments left until the height matched my hands. At least I think, its been several years.

Yes, you just have to make the frisbee hit your hands. You can keep your hand level, raise it above your head, or dive. You get points based on the difficulty of the catch, with most points awarded if you catch the frisbee while diving left (towards the thrower).

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Aufaber

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Neuromancer Endurance Run!

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DustoMan

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I played a version of Giana Sisters where the Giana sprite was swapped out with a "Mario" looking sprite.

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BuddyleeR

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If I recall, if you sit on the flying disc intro screen without throwing the disc, the person that is supposed to catch the disc is abducted by a UFO.

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radioactivez0r

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This is the stuff I grew up on, we didn't get an NES until much later. We even had parties around California Games/Summer Games. Good stuff.

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Alek

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Paradroid looks fucking incredible. I have to play it now.

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joelalfaro

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@blair: I believe the opposite of everything you believe :)