(Yes its yet more of those blogs where dr_b gets far too excited for a man of his age about some really old video game)
Another year ,another Tomb Raider movie ,with Angelina "I wouldn't be working in Hollywood if it wasn't for these floatation devices" Jolie. Which reminded me of the game I spent most of 1989 playing . Y'see Lara Croft's dad wasn't really some lord played by John Voight, It was actually a little fella on the C64 called "Rick Dangerous"
Right, some background .Core-design (the company who later went on to make the TR games) came up with "Rick" as a sort of pisstake on Indiana Jones .
well sort of anyway.
The first level start off in a South American tomb, with you outrunning a huge boulder in an ...ahem "tribute" to "Raiders of the lost ark"...after a couple of trial and error goes, of getting squished by the large rolling rock , you figure out that dropping >here<>here< sends the boulder flying past and knocking the South-American-tomb-dwelling-Native (referred to in the manual as a member of the Gulu tribe) off the screen waving his arms maniacally.
That's the thing about RD, its very tongue in cheek, from the character design (Andy Capp style squat, big nose and eyes covered figures) to the animation, to the corny 1930's serial style openings of the levels.
Controls were simple but effective up made Rick jump, fire and up fired his gun (six bullets), fire and down leaves a bomb(again six sticks) ,and fire and right or left acts as use for switches etc.
What was really fiendish though ,was the level design. The tombs were filled with an almost totally unfair amount of traps, spike pits , blow darts and falling grates.All this and you had enemies like soldiers or snakes or fez wearing assassins to worry about . You had limited resources so quite often you had to use the traps against the bad guys (rather than using up your of ammo), eg by luring them under a falling block or getting them with a pressure pad released blow dart. I suppose one of the flaws of the game is that its probably too hard, requiring almost psychic powers to know that dropping down just >here<>there<>before save games , so dying meant going back to the either the start , or if you were lucky midway through the level, meaning much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the young dr_b as he got gunned by a gulu at the last screen.
There were 4 levels to Ricky D ; S.America, Egypt , "the castle" and the missile dump, again the last 2 playing into the Indy theme with him fighting Nazi type bad guys
Rick got a sequel a year or so after with him transformed into a Flash Gordon style hero , battling Aliens who were attacking London,
Rick Dangerous was ported to the Speccy ,Amiga and ST and was originally slated for a comeback on the Gameboy Advance , but this was canned by Core a while ago due to rights issues apparantly.
It's a pity however cos it's a perfect game for mobile play..
well y'never know it might end up as a java phone conversion...its more fun than snake I can tell you that.
Anyway It >does< work on my PDA via a c64 emulator , so I'm off for a game...remember
Watch out for those spikes: )
Oh theres a win32 conversion of it here
(not sure if this works or not)
and if you're feeling adventurous you can try running the original via an emulator with files from here
and if its to hard , try entering JE VEUX VIVRE in the high sore table : )
heres some piccies
