Creatures, a late release from publishing house Thalamus was well received from the press at the time of release, coming as it does toward the end of the life of the C64, however, this review simply looks at the game on it’s own merits.
A well-defined horizontally scrolling platform game, with good collision detection, and some interesting sections (Broomstick flying, Underwater swimming) as well as standard enemy negotiation and power-ups; this game followed a somewhat formulaic path, but this means that it is easy to pick up and play.
Creatures, a late release from publishing house Thalamus was well received from the press at the time of release, coming as it does toward the end of the life of the C64, however, this review simply looks at the game on it’s own merits.
A well-defined horizontally scrolling platform game, with good collision detection, and some interesting sections (Broomstick flying, Underwater swimming) as well as standard enemy negotiation and power-ups; this game followed a somewhat formulaic path, but this means that it is easy to pick up and play. It introduced single screen puzzle screens after some of the platform levels; more on these later.
The scrolling sections used parallax scrolling to great effect, and this was possible the best use of that graphics feature on the Commodore 64. Several
sections required pixel perfect negotiation, but combined with the good collision detection these areas tended not to infuriate as badly as some other platform games of the period. In fact, overall the graphics are very good, and the different levels are full of character and varied enough to feel like isolated areas despite the repetitive nature of these games.
The torture screens were single screen puzzle games which had to be completed in a set time limit or one of our hero’s (Clyde Radcliffe) friends/relatives would be dissected/eaten, etc. and these areas used bitmapped backgrounds and clean sprites to inject humour and even more character into the games. So successful were these levels that the sequel was compromised mainly of these levels.
The developers of this game (The Rowland brothers) invested a lot into the sound in all of their games, and used the qualities of the sound chip (SID) to good effect, although most of the memory of the computer was used for the graphics and the music won’t play for a full level.
Not quite Mario 3, but still a very good platform game, and one of the top 8bit home PC platform games ever in many people’s list. It certainly hold’s it’s own against the likes of Robocop, Dizzy, and some other 8bit titles, but personally I feel there are other titles which top it on the Commodore 64. The likes of the Rick Dangerous and Turrican titles as well as Myth mean that it had a lot to content with, and of course this was the era when Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands were fresh in people’s minds and fingers. Also, as mentioned earlier the difficulty of some section’s put a lot of people off. Overall then, I would say eight and a half out of ten.
