In the 80s, 2000Ad comics were gritty, harsh, and somehow fun. A bleack view of the future world in light of the current world seethed from each book. The levels of bleackness and parody varied within each title. Judge Dredd, for instance, explored both literary ideas of justice ala Crime and Punishment while taking less than literary potshots at Western (and specifically American) hypocrisy. I'm not judging the quality of the chiding - only saying that much of the inspiration seemed to come strait from the gut.
Much of the John Wagner, Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra and Mike McMahon's works are visceral reactions to a cold world. They're expressed with a sense of humor hardened by maniac times. Getting any game to carry even a little of this fierce mojo would have been quite an accomplishment. The Nemesis the Warlock book is based on a freedom fighter (bordering on terrorist) alien who fights a tyrannical overlord. This seemingly stock plotline is colored with many greys, pixel-shadeding a living planet of grit and fear. The planet of Termigt is an overcrowded nightmare. It looks like an american super-highway with hover-cars (hover-SUVs?). Reading the book, you want to smash it just for being so complex and suffocating, but also laugh in spite of yourself at
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the confused and frazzled inhabitants. Is smashing and laughing right? Nemesis fights for himself, for some greater sense of justice, for the thrill of throwing a wrench in the works - his motives aren't fully clear. His morally ambiguity is one obvious element of the series. But also - the book has alot of fast-paced, dark action.
Nemesis on C64 captures some of this dark humor, oppressive atmosphere and wild action. But enough. The game pretty much has one level. A bunch of platforms and some pits. This level is repeated with different arrangements of platforms and palettes. The dead simplicity is a turn-off at first. Exploring the game, you will find that there's enough crazy things happening onscreen to induce that precious 8-bit action-zen. To beat a stage, you have to kill a certain number of enemies and then walk out of the screen. You sometimes have to create bridges between platforms, or make forts to protect you. And what do you construct with? ENEMY CORPSES. Yep - this game makes functional use of the persistently lying bodies of your dispatched foes. I made a big "N" with bodies once. You use a sword, laser and special acid-breath attack to create these bodies. Each attack has a different effective range (the gun has a minimum range!). The game keeps the pressure on you by running a timer that, as it runs down, makes the possibility of your enemies exploding (bloodily) into zombies more likely. The fun of this game is figuring out how to kill a certain amount of enemies as quickly as possible given the layout of a level. With one life and no continues, save states are a must (and work great on this single-load game!). Also, after you've killed the required number of enemies to beat the level, you have to walk out of the screen. Only one direction out works - sometimes it's left, sometimes right, sometimes up; Sometimes, to beat a level, you have to fall into a pit that would normally kill you. There's NO WAY of knowing these things, unless you have played the level before (or use save states. Use save states.). Playing this on the original console must be frustrating to say the least (unless you are real, real good). This crappy level exit method, the lack of diversity in gameplay and the shoddy collision (explained below) are the main detractors to sinking hours into this dusty gem.
The sprites look great. There's only 3 (and a sick, animated "health-bar"). Smooth, smooth animation and a decent onscreen sprite-count (max 5-6? It seems like more when things get crazy) make the lack of enemies less of a problem. The collision is iffy. An enemy standing a couple pixels away from the hero sprite will sometimes hurt you. This problem cuts both ways - sometimes you'll flagrantly get hit and take no damage.
Sound effects are nice and bright. The effects tend to interrupt each other or cut out completely when things get REALLY hectic. The theme music is by Hubbard, so it's amazing. The track features the best fast-pulse-mod bass on the C64.
Nemesis is a great game of action - killing terminators and stacking their corpses is pure dark joy. This combined with the brutal challenge factor and large, gritty sprites translates just enough 2000ad grit to make it worthy of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic's name.
