Cabal (Commodore 64) - Going Commando on the C64! - Saturday Afternoon Gaming
17A classic and unique shooter where we gun down guerrilla fighters in cottage country... oorah!
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Normally I'm working my way through the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE in my Let's Play 1001 Games series. This is a great book with a ton of classic retro games but it doesn't have everything and it's even missing some of my favorite video games. Hence, in Saturday Afternoon Gaming, screw it, I'm just going to play whatever I want!
In this series I will be playing some of the best retro games that don't appear in the 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE book. So pull up a chair, slap on your headphones, and join me as babble aimlessly through some of my most favourite classic games! And hey, if you have ideas or suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below. I'm always looking for more games to try! Today we play...
Cabal
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabal_(video_game)
Cabal (カベール, Kabēru) is a 1988 arcade video game originally developed by TAD Corporation and published in Japan by Taito Corporation and in North America and Europe by Fabtek.[1] In the game, the player controls a commando, viewed from behind, trying to destroy various enemy military bases.[2] The game was innovative for the era, but only a mild success in the arcades, and became better known for its various home conversions.
Cabal offers one player and two-player-simultaneous modes of gameplay. Each player assumes the role of an unnamed commando trying to destroy several enemy military bases. There are 5 stages with 4 screens each. The player starts with a stock of three lives and uses a gun with limitless ammunition and a fixed number of grenades to fend off enemy troops and attack the base. The commando is seen from behind and starts behind a protective wall which can be damaged and shattered by enemy fire. To stay alive, the player needs to avoid enemy bullets by running left or right, hiding behind cover, or using a dodge-roll. An enemy gauge at the bottom of the screen depletes as foes are destroyed and certain structures (which collapse rather than shatter) are brought down. When the enemy gauge is emptied, the level is successfully completed, all of the remaining buildings onscreen collapse, and the player progresses to the next stage. If a player is killed, he is immediately revived at the cost of one life or game overs if he has no lives remaining. Boss fights, however, restart from the beginning if the only remaining player dies.
Cabal was ported to several home computers of the era, including the DOS computers, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST and Amiga. It was also ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System console by Rare. The quality of these ports varied based on the target system's capabilities. A version for the Atari Lynx was previewed and even slated to be published in April 1992, but it was never released by Fabtek.[3][4]
When converting the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Rare were given a Cabal cabinet but did not have access to the game's source code, so they had to play the game over and over and redraw the graphics from memory.[5] To accommodate the many layers and sprites of the arcade game, programmer Anthony Ball used a common coding trick: swapping sprites from left to right every other frame. This has the negative side effect of causing the sprites to flicker when they reach the console's limit of eight per line, but Ball, like many programmers of the era, found this an acceptable trade-off for including all the game's content, and in a 2016 interview he said he is happy with the quality of the conversion.[5]
Cabal was followed in 1990 by Blood Bros., though the sequel had a western theme as opposed to Cabal's Vietnam-era theme.