Blind Man's Bluff

[tamakun]

If there's something I definitely enjoy recalling from my childhood, it's playing all those Commodore 64 games. I had an uncle who gave me a shopping bag full of copied 5-and-a-Quarter Floppies, many of which still work today due to my packrat skillz.

A game that I didn't have, however, was one that I played at a friend's house, and it was called Under The Root -- no, that one I never really understood. I've been told it's a classic and that I really should try it again sometime. No, the game I went looking for was Blind Man's Bluff.

Try to find some information on that game, I dare you. :P Most likely you'll find information on the child's game, which has no bearing on this game at all (well, aside from the 'blind' part, I would stand to reckon).

The game is kind of hard to describe without actually seeing gameplay. The author himself was looking for a copy of his game on the Lemon64 forums, and he described it as a maze game mixed with Qix. The screenshots really don't tell much about the game, but the idea is that you are in an invisible maze populated by all these spherical enemies, and your first objective is to travel all the pathways, making them visible. There is a little help by watching the enemies as they travel the invisible pathways, and as you walk along the pathways , you see little flashing squares to note that there is a pathway there. Once the pathways are visible, your next objective is to use missiles to fill in the boxes - after firing four missles to hit the four corners of a box, it's filled in. Once all the boxes are filled in, your bonus objective is to touch all the coloured enemies for points.

While running through all these objectives, the enemies are wandering about pretty much randomly. If you touch one, it changes from a coloured enemy to a white enemy. If you touch a white enemy, you lose a life. What really creeps me out about this game is how they seem to change over the course of the level. At first, they look like amorphous blobs with legs and two eyes. In the second phase, they have crooked noses, hats and four limbs, but still with a bulbous body. Then finally, they look just like you, but in different colours. It's like you're playing a game with multiple versions of "The Thing" which are slowly trying to emulate the human body. When you touch one initially, it disappears with a strange descending tone, then they reappear elsewhere in the maze with an ascending tone (as their white counterpart), but all the other enemies suddenly look human while that disappearing/reappearing act occurs. This is fine when you touch your first one, but what you'll notice is that when you touch a second one, the first white one temporarily shifts into its next "phase" of being, with the crooked nose and limbs, flailing about. It's really hard to describe. Maybe the storyline is that these creatures are former crewmates and you're trying to return them to normal?

Of course, there's no storylines in Commodore 64 games. No space for story unless you had a manual. :P

Another game I was a big fan of back in the day was E.D. Dragonfly. Again, hard to find on the internet, and even more difficult to find the other games on that disk, as it was part of a collection called "The Entertainer". What set this game apart from all the Centipede clones was that there was a wide collection of enemies which only showed up on certain levels (ghosts would appear on every second level, the dragon every fifth, queen bee every fourth) - and every one of the enemies had humourous ways of killing you - the Queen Bee would smash you flat, with a grin on her face. The dragon's fireballs would make you explode in a mushroom cloud, to which it would then snicker. The army ants (which made up the Centipede-like "goal" in each level) would simply beat you over the head with their swords. One of my favorite parts of that game was when you hit the dragon, all action would pause as he would explode in a bright flash, then, his body gray and ash-covered, limp off the screen. That game had a lot of odd humour and I wish I could thank the creator for such a great game.

And quickly to mention that I finally found some footage of a game I had long remembered, but forgotten the title - Seesaw, which was on "The Entertainer" disk along with E.D. Dragonfly. I thought for the time that game was quite well-developed - heck, the blocks even looked like they were flipping and rotating.