Cabal Longplay (C64) (European) [50 FPS]
46Developed by Special FX and published by Ocean in 1989.
Cabal is an arcade coin-op originally developed by TAD Corporation/Taito and would have stood alongside many late 80's greats, such as Double Dragon and Operation Wolf, in the local arcade.
Naturally, it received home conversions on a number of systems, one of them being for the venerable Commodore 64. What I wasn't aware of is that a separate version was developed for the US market and I will take a look at that in another video.
This video showcases the European version from Special FX and is the version that I owned back in the day.
The premise is similar to Operation Wolf in that the player is required to destroy a defined number of enemies on each stage, before progressing on to the next. Progress is indicated by the bar located at the bottom of the screen; enemy troops contribute the least progress, whilst heavy ordnance, such as tanks and choppers, contribute more.
Despite sharing similar play concepts, Cabal's key difference to Operation Wolf is the fact that the player's character is show on-screen and both the aiming reticule and character must be moved around the screen simultaneously. The player has no energy and will die instantly when hit by bombs/bullets, but the projectile has to make contact with the player sprite, whereas the whole play area in Op Wolf could receive damage; it's a fair trade-off.
The payer is initially equipped with a low-powered machine gun and a stock of grenades, but additional fire-power can be found by destroying areas of the scenery (buildings, barrels, crates etc.).
I remembered this being an excellent game back when I played it on my real C64 and that still holds true today. Robert Tinman coded an extremely slick and polished game where special mention must go to the collision detection; the perspective of incoming bullets and the point at which they collide with the player sprite is excellent and allows the player to avoid them effectively.
The original arcade version allowed the player to perform a dodge-roll to avoid bullets and explosions. This has been omitted from the C64 release, but you can destroy enemy projectiles by shooting them down, which makes things survivable.
Karen Davies and Ivan Davies produced some excellent graphics for the game, whilst Keith Tinman wrote a decent enough tune for the title screen. The game lacks any additional music, but the sound effects do their job well enough.
I also owned the Amiga version of the game and, in my opinion, was nowhere near as good as the C64 version. In fact, the Amiga version omitted the entire second stage, whereas the C64 kept it in tact.
Hats off to Special FX for this superb arcade conversion. I'll be trying the US version soon to see how it stacks up; it has it's work cut out...
#retrogaming