Mean Streak Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]

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AL82 Retrogaming Longplays

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Published on January 9, 2013 11:58:38 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJcslLXGb5w

Duration: 18:06

5,144 views

64

Developed by Dalali Software and published by Mirrorsoft in 1987.

Foreword: This description is one massive moan - you've been warned!!

Holy crap!! I invite anyone who thinks Demon Souls is hard to come and play this. I remember I got this free on a magazine cover tape and really liked it; funky music and a nice isometric perspective, but I never got off the first level back then.

The objective is to ride your bike along a straight road whilst destroying other riders and avoiding obstacles in the road. You're equipped with a machine gun that can destroy other bikes and a limited number of missiles that should be saved for blowing holes in obstacles to allow easy passage.

This game is monumentally unfair due to a combination of the following issues:

1) Bike tyre damage (indicated by the strange scrolling vertical bar) - your bike sustains damage when riding over pot holes, cracks and nails laying on the road. The courses are long enough that you'll almost certainly blow up by riding over too much debris in the road.

2) Fuel - you must ride over petrol pumps to top up your gas, else it's race over.

3) Rival bikers - they'll shunt you, shoot you and try and lay oil slicks in your path. If they shoot you, your bike takes damage (separate to tyre damage) and you'll eventually explode...that's assuming you don't get rammed off the road first. They can also steal your power-ups...(see problem 9)

4) Poor sprite collision - the isometric view point looks nice, but it doesn't work very well when it comes to collisions. You'll miss power ups that you'd swear blind you'd driven over, whilst avoiding debris is too hard, requiring pixel perfect precision whilst driving. If you have an enemy biker just behind you when you fire a missile, the missile will destroy the rider and you'll crash straight into the wall you were trying to blow up.

Perhaps the WORST part about all of this is when it comes to driving through gaps in walls; you will blow up repeatedly because even though it looks like you're driving through the gap, the game registers you've clipped something and you explode.

5) Speed - the fact that the game scrolls so fast just makes all the above so much more problematic.

6) Wheelies - if you perform a wheelie on the side ramp at the top of the screen, you explode instantly. If you land in a pot hole doing a wheelie, you'll explode.

7) Walls - you can't jump over them (unsure if this is just a programming glitch or intentional) so you have to use a missile to blow a hole in them. Some walls already have holes, but quite often you'll get one that covers the the width of the track. Due to problem 4, your missile quite often blows a hole in completely the wrong section and you'll crash into the wall.

There seems to be a glitch at the end of level 5 where you can stay at the top of the screen and the last couple of walls won't kill if you drive through them. I save a couple of missiles this way.

8) Bottom of screen out of bounds - ride to near the bottom of the screen and you'll explode.

9) Missiles - your missile count is not restocked between levels; you start with exactly the same amount that you finished the previous level with. You MUST start level 5 with at least 2 missiles because there are a couple of walls that cover the width of the road without gaps. Since you cannot jump the walls, you have to blow a hole in them using the missiles. If you don't have the missiles when starting level 5 then it's game over.

10) If you die, you restart at the beginning of the level. You will have the same number of missiles as when you died; if you're on stage 5 then it's pretty much game over (see problem 9)

11) The race timer - if the timer runs out, it's game over. You have to destroy rivals bikes to add extra time to the timer; time is added only if you shoot the bikes sinceforcing them into walls or if they simply collide with the scenery does not count! With each level of the game the bikes add less and less time; by stage 5 they add less than a second, so you HAVE to destroy practically every bike that appears. The problem is, if the bike is headed into a wall, it's suicide to try and line up a shot on it without crashing into the wall yourself.

After about 3 hours, I FINALLY reached the end of stage 5, only to see that the race counter still counts down during the victory music...and if it reaches 0, it's still game over even though you've just won!!! I really couldn't believe that the programmer had done this when the game is so hard to begin with. It's purely by chance that I reloaded the last save state and as I got towards the end of the course, drove as far to the right as possible, so that my bike had less distance to travel during the victory sequence. To my considerable relief, the level ends the moment your bike leaves the screen - much fist-pumping ensued!

After all that, I think I might be a bit late phoning the number to take part in the Mean Streak play-offs...
#retrogaming