Everybody has to start some day.
One fateful day, we decided that the used Amiga 500 that we had got from a store didn't work that well (well, broken demo disks or something, they took it back and kept selling it to unsuspecting people). I got a Commodore 64 instead.
And with it came a lot of games. Some original. Some not. I still have the machine, of course. And, one original game that came with it - Airborne Ranger. The other two had crueller fate: Outrun disk was hosed at some point due to my clumsiness... and Rambo III disk disappeared. I suspect it was stolen by some of the less close "friends".
This game was thus one of the first games that I got working on the machine. The first one was Outrun. I didn't get Rambo III working because my father put the floppy to the drive left edge first. (Thank God 3.5" floppies fit in the drive only one way =)
And years and years later, the game was among the first I downloaded. One of the first games I played with VICE with tears in my eyes.
And in my book, Rambo III is, and always will be, a game lot better than Rambo: First Blood part II that everybody thinks is the best C64 game ever. Nay.
...
So what is Rambo III? The game was released by Ocean in 1988. The game was programmed by Zach Townsend, graphics done by Andrew Sleigh and music done this time by Jonathan Dunn.
Welcome to Afghanistan! The game is divided to three levels:
- Rescue Colonel Trautman
- Find a couple of bombs scattered around the level
- Drive a tank.
The first two levels are shown from top-down perspective, and the third one is from first-person perspective! The first two levels are divided into screens (no scrolling - walk to the edge and you get to another screen). You could pick up weapons and stuff to use. There weren't too many different kinds of enemies - just one: The utterly dumb and very blind soviet soldier. They walked back and forth and had precisely one thing that ticked them off: Trying to shoot without silencer - in that case, they came to kill you in large numbers.
Moving around would still be difficult. In first level, There were things like IR beams, electrified doors and minefields on your way - you could shut down the couple of zaps from the doors and go by memory, or could find the mine detector, IR goggles, and stuff like that that would show where the traps are. The second level was interesting because I (with two closer friends =) did a map of that - the map for the first level was published in MikroBITTI.
The game was very fun, a lot of action, pretty graphics, and, of course, very very very cool music!
...
To this day, I haven't seen the movies. I wonder how my perception of the past would change if I'd see them?