May 2022 Round Up Of New C64 Game Releases

Watching this video finally or at least some of it so far and I see one game I really like the looks of. Being a big Gravitar from the arcade and any gravity style cave or space crawler fan, Orbital Rescue looks like a hybrid of Fort Apocalypse and Choplifer combined with Neptune Lander, Lunar Lander, Space Taxi (a true classic on the C64) and others. Very cool.

By the way if you don't know the history of Space Taxi it might have been the first game on the C64 to feature digitized speech or at least was the first one early on I ever played that did. The graphics are primitive and so is the scratchy digitized audio speech compared to later C64 releases but just like Jumpman or Loadrunner the gameplay is top notch. Just remember you have to lower and raise the landing gear of your taxi to fly away or land. I think on original hardware you have to hit something like the space bar to do this but on something like a RetroPie image it's probably already been set up to use a button on the controller.

I've heard some today making jokes saying wow that digitized speech audio sucks. Yeah by today's standards maybe, but back then it was mind-blowing. No home computer or console could do that and the arcade machines were only able to do it a few years before.

Later stuff like Impossible Mission or Ghostbusters were able to do it better on the C64 as people understood what the SID chip was able to achieved. I may be wrong but I think the SID was the first sound chip in a home computer or console that had specific digitized audio to digital abilities built into it. Just took a while for people to discover and take advantage of it.

And thinking back I think the second game I ever came across on the C64 to feature digitized speech was Castle Wolfenstein. Again it had scratchy audio but was incredible for a home computer or console and one of the first to do that.