My top Commodore 64 games, 21-30

This continues the journey through some of my favourites games for the Commodore 64, chosen from among those games I played on the platform.

21 Elite

A version of this game is still played today, and so Elite needs little introduction. It wasn’t developed specifically for the Commodore 64, but the game ended up coming to just about every platform out there. Elite was and remains a sandbox game of space trading and fighting. You begin the game at a space station with a basic ship and a small cargo. If you can successfully take various cargoes from systems that have them to systems that need them, you can make enough money to upgrade your ship and do it again, only more so.

My recollection is that docking with the next space station caused us young players the most problems of all.

22 1942

The Commodore 64 has been home to many an arcade conversions; good, bad, and indifferent. This is one of the good ones. This ridiculous shoot ’em up translates well to the Commodore 64 and provides many hours of shotty fun, including a two-player option, with players both zipping around the same screen to destroy enemies cooperatively (but with your own score!).

23 Cauldron 2

In this game you play as a pumpkin out for revenge and no I am not kidding. You must bounce around the witch’s castle to secure her demise and your freedom. Fail, and the witch’s cackle will be the last thing your hear. A unique and challenging game that provides lots of fun and some frustration as your pumpkin misses a bounces and starts to ricochet off the walls.

24 Leaderboard Golf

The first a certainly not last golf game, Leaderboard provide popular among players who hadn’t seen a golf club in real life. In this first version of the game, the landscape was restricted to grass and water, so you would frequently lose your ball in a wet plop. Other versions added more variety of terrain, but the 3D landscape of the first was a revelation of what the system could achieve. The turn sequence nature of the game meant that many players could compete by taking turns on the same machine.

25 Gauntlet

Another fun multiplayer game, this time a fantasy arcade conversion. In Gauntlet a group of generic fantasy heroes must battle their way through generic fantasy dungeons filled with generic fantasy enemies. It may not have been creative, but it was fun.

26 Bubble Bobble

Another arcade conversion, and not even the last oe in this section of the list! Bubble Bobble is considered a classic, and it did a great job of transiting the arcade game to the screen, with two players working together to help Bub and Bob.

27 Delta

Stavros Fasoulas is a name that pops into my head from time to time. In the 1980s he designed a series of games for the Commodore 64, and then… didn’t. Later on I found he had to stop work in order to complete his required military service in Finland, and moved on to other things after that. A shame.

Delta was another fun side scrolling shoot ’em up, complete with bonus levels where you have to fly through gaps in pillars with great precision.

28 Nemesis

This shoot ’em up, another arcade conversion remains one of my favourites. I think this is mainly because I bought it with money I saved up and actually finished it too! An incredible achievement when you’re under 15. Trivia time: the US version of this game was called Gradius, so you may know it better by that name.

29 Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future

This game was released on the Spectrum, Amstrad, and Commodore 64 at the same time, but each game was different. Gamers soon noticed this when they tried to compare notes and it was highly unusual for the time. The game on the Commodore 64 was a puzzle platformer that tried successfully to keep the comic book feel of the character. The end part of the game involves aligning mirrors to reflect a laser beam exactly where you want it to go.

30 Auf Wiedersehen Monty

This was the final in a series of platform games involving the unlikely character of Monty Mole. In this one he traverses a series of screens which form a map of Europe (sort of). Accompanied by a sweet soundtrack (which is still on my playlist), this game was a challenging platformer without being ridiculous in difficulty.