Duration: 11:40

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Red Max, Developed and released for the Commodore 64 in 1987 by Codemasters.

From MobyGames:
"The survivors of the Global War had a new problem to face, the Sun had begun it's Super Nova cycle and a solution had to be found and implementing in a couple of years. The solution was to colonise the Moon and create huge anti-gravity orbs to send the Moon towards the Sun and when it was close enough, the orbs were activated to send the moon into deep space. The plan was a success and now the humans who live on the moon are in hibernation for 1200 years hoping the Moon will find a new Solar System and a new Sun to orbit.

You are woken from your hibernation as an alarm goes off telling you that renegade Death Lords have landed on the moon and planted 27 fission mines on the surface and disrupted the power supply. You must climb on your space motorbike and defuse all the mines before going below the surface to turn on eight nuke-core cooling systems, shut down four power plants and awake nine crew members to fight and defeat the Lords. Your motorbike has a fuel gauge that decreases but fuel can be found and used to keep it topped up.

The game is viewed from above with a small part of each level shown on the screen and the screen scrolls in all directions when you move. As well as the mines to find, there are various switches that need turning off and on to progress through the game and be careful using laser gates that turn on and off. Any electrical fences switched off keeps the fence switched off for a short while before turning back on so care must be taken not to get trapped. There is also slime that decreases your shield and need to be avoided. If your shield or fuel runs out, or you touch the electrical fences then you lose one of three lives."

Another frustrating, infuriating, insanely difficult, unbeatable? game. Level 1 isn't to bad once you know where all the mines are as the level is quite small but level 2 can be challenging as I show with no fual that I could find to pick up, so very much against the clock and need to find the best route (I didn't). You can go though the electric field on level one if you get trapped behind them but you need to be moving fast to minimise the damage.

Level 3 is quite cruel in that you need to have some pixel perfect precision movement going on. There are points where you really need to hug the wall to make it through. Too close and its back to the start of the level.You might notice me taking some weird turns as I navigate due to invisable radioactive areas. I cant be sure if these areas are a bug or not, but they can be damn annoying and again require pixel precision to move around. I really had to abuse emu savestates on this level and cant see it being done legit. In some areas, if you don't hit the slime perfectly you are locked into a path that forces you into a wall so again precision required. No ending , which seems to be a common theme with games like this but at least we end with a nice piece from David Whitaker.