Marauder Commodore 64 © 1988 Hewson

Control your Marauder Battlecar to destroy and pass through the alien defence systems. Use smart bombs when needed. Shooting the right colour will give you extra shields, smart bombs or even battlecars. Technically very well coded game with very impressive graphics, multicolour smooth sprites and scrolling; coupled with top-notch SID generated music all running at rock solid framerate. Bad things about the Commodore version: (1) your shots do not reach very far in the horizontal directions - impossible to shoot many objects (2) as a vertical scrolling game, you would expect the playfield to be rather vertically oriented but the game actually is overgrown horizontally, not even occupying all the potential scanlines vertically (3) gameplay is not so intence and balanced as I would expect - often leading to tough situations impossible to get away from

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• marauder
• commodore
• 64
• c64
• c-64
• hewson
• battlecar
• vertical
• parallax
• scrolling
• shooter
• game
• flashing
• beacons
• vic
• sid
• 6581

[ZeroByte]

The parallax scrolling effect on the 2nd stage is great. The red bricks threw me for a second... Very impressive to pack all of that plus the combined SFX and music all into one package. Well done game, at least technically speaking.

[maiki60fps]

@ZeroByte I mixed the music with sounds in video editor ;-), the real game only uses one at a time (see the menu) more or less it's a great piece of coding

[ZeroByte]

@maiki60fps - heh, that explains it. Imagine what sort of awesome stuff we'd be treated to if the SID had just one more voice channel... or if the C64 had two of them.... 1/3 of the music is a lot to sacrifice for sound FX to be sure. (hmmm lessee, need the lead, need the harmony, need the rhythm... nothing left to give up)