Stumbling through Winter Games

[davidn]

Continuing my one-video-long tradition of playing Olympic-themed games when the real thing is going on in some part of the world outside my basement, here is Winter Games on the Commodore 64, which kjorteo wrote about some centuries ago. Oddly, despite being four years older, this one looks rather better than the PC sequel I had that came out in 1988. Does it play any better? I'll find out, but the answer may not surprise you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bfJWdXoxXI&hd=1

Comments

[davidn]

I can't imagine the choice of variable name being a European thing, but these things have surprised me before. I vaguely remember that in the books I used to read, Z$ was typically used as the input variable, I for loops, and I can't remember any of the rest. (Mostly single-character variable names and no concept of scope - how was this ever considered an easy language!)

Notably, this video was approximately twice as long before I cut out the loading times. I couldn't believe that it took three separate loading times to even reach the first event!

I was curious about the genius behind using joystick port 2 as the first port as well - I read somewhere that it was done that way because port 1 was wired to double up for certain keyboard presses, for some equally opaque reason.

I really wanted to try the Bobsled again, but I would have had to go through the entire sodding game again to retry it! Even with emulator fast-forward, that was more than I was prepared to do at the time, even though I was disappointed in my unimpressive performance. But in the real Olympics, you have to wait four years before you try it again!