Not been on here in a while, as it's quite some time since I've done any VIC-20 work, or had a VIC-20 that works
I thought some of you may be interested to know that the Commodore 64 version of Carling The Spider has just been released by Psytronik in the last few days. It's available on tape and disk, and I think you get a digital copy when you buy any of the physical versions. It'll be available as digital-only soon as well.
http://binaryzone.org/retrostore/index. ... i3e1mv69a2
I want to talk a bit about the game specifically from the point of view of someone familiar with the VIC-20 version.
I was playing the original today (which is included as a bonus on the disk copies), and firstly, I'll concede that relatively speaking, Super Carling The Spider doesn't push the C64 as far as the original pushed the unexpanded VIC-20. The game plays very similarly (in fact, it started out as a straight port), but on a machine with hardware sprites it's inevitably less of an achievement.
What I have been able to do with the C64 version though is make the game a lot longer (26 levels in each skill, and some levels have completely new designs from one skill to the next), and also implement a bunch of game play elements I didn't have space for in the original, including different ball types, conveyor belts, switching platforms, buttons, etc.
There's also time based scoring and a high score table that can be saved to disk. Score in general has been tightened up, and as far as I know isn't exploitable anymore - diamonds and other collectables, once collected, remain collected until you finish a screen, meaning you can't endlessly accrue score and lives.
Also new is the fact you can retain your progress with passwords (or by saving to disk) at 4 checkpoints in each skill. It lets you start a new game from any previous checkpoint too.
There's a lot more music in the game as you might expect, including a choice of music or sfx ingame. There's also a lot more presentation in general, to get the most out of having far more memory to play with than the original. There's an end sequence that changes for every skill completed, to give you an incentive to beat the next one. The game has life beyond the standard 3 skills as well...
Another thing I'll concede is, for better or worse, the game arguably never gets as hard or as fast as the original does. Now in some ways that might seem like a let-down, as Yellow skill on the original is a really fun (if frustrating) challenge. It's not for a technical reason though - if anything the C64 game can go even faster than the VIC-20 version. It's more that I've tried to balance things a bit better on this game, mainly because I want people to eventually manage to beat the whole thing. It's more of a journey than the original - levels are still quick and snappy, but there's much more of them, and as I've mentioned above, you don't have to keep collecting the same diamonds over and over again every time you die, so there's a constant sense of progress.
One final thing. something I tried really hard to do on the original was provide as much variety as possible from a very small data set, by upping the difficulty, flipping the levels, etc. I've tried to do the same with Super Carling The Spider; that is, try and get the most replay value out of the code/graphics/levels available, and I think I've actually done a better job of that this time around. It might take quite a long time for a player to eventually see all of that, though.
Another final thing - the game probably would have been a lot smaller or perhaps never finished if it wasn't for the support I've had from people who played the original, so I want to thank everyone for their encouragement and feedback over the years, it's shaped at least a few features of this new version of Carling.
I'll leave it at that - always interested to get feedback, if anybody does go on to play the game.
Thanks for reading!
Joe
