After Burner Longplay (C64) [European] [50 FPS]
90Developed by Dalali Software and published by Activision in 1988.
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There's little arguing that the sprite-scaling technology used in Sega's arcade games during the late 1980s and early 1990s was nothing short of astounding and After Burner was, in my opinion, the most technically impressive of the titles they produced.
Considering that the Sega X board that the machine was based on had TWO 12.5 MHz CPUs, it's amazing to think that coders even bothered to try and port such games to the home computers.
Well, they did and here is the result. This is one of two versions of After Burner available for the C64. This is the version that was released in Europe and the one that I owned on my real C64; a separate release developed by a different software team exists for the US market.
Zzap64 really slated the game, possibly unfairly. Sure, the game has a terrible multiload and it could never hope to match the speed and adrenaline of the arcade version, but to give it some credit, it's easily recognisable as After Burner. The graphics are reasonable and Adam Gilmore did a pretty good job on recreating the music for the C64 SID chip and it's actually playable.
It took me a few minutes to realise that the plane's cannons fire automatically in this version and that you only press the fire button to launch missiles once you've locked on to a target.
On some of the stages, you must perform barrel rolls to evade planes and missiles coming up from behind. For some reason, it's much easier to perform the necessary roll by moving to the top left of the screen; anywhere else and it becomes too hit and miss.
In conclusion, this was a brave attempt to bring the arcade classic to the C64.
Enjoy!
#retrogaming