As much as I’ve enjoyed the three previous Commodore 64 collections on Evercade, there’s been something important missing every time… It’s certainly not been the number of games included, or the variety – the last one, The C64 Collection 3, contained thirteen games, and the quality was decent too; okay, you might need a dose of nostalgia to get much out of Break Dance, but there’s no denying that Boulder Dash and Paradroid are all-time greats on any platform, and I’d also rank the likes of Summer Games II and Super Cycle as among my favourites on this one. Then going back to the previous two, there are even more all-time favourites of mine on those as well, such as Winter Games and Impossible Mission. I’ve certainly had my money’s worth out of all of them, so what’s possibly missing? Well, in general, it’s the thing I enjoy above anything else when it comes to retro gaming – that wonderful sense of discovery!

Which brings us to the brand new Thalamus Collection 1, loaded with eleven Commodore 64 classics (or so we’re told!) from the legendary eighties publisher… Whose games somehow appear to have mostly passed me by! Okay, I’ve heard of a lot of them and seen a couple in action but given my experience of the C64 at the time, and even more so since, I’m amazed to say I’ve barely played a single on of these games, which is exactly how I like any new compilation! Before we have a run-through of each one though, a quick word on Thalamus, who were spun out of Newsfield Publications in 1986 to take advantage of their magazines’ reach and popularity, which included the near biblical-status Zzap!64 and Crash. Almost thirty commercial releases followed over the course of the next seven years, with about half of them for the C64 and quite a few on the Amiga, then a handful on the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and PC. Fast forward to 1991, however, and Newsfield are having major financial problems, and while their big magazines survived a bit longer after being rescued by Europress, they had no interest in making games, so Thalamus continued on its own. The imminent demise of the 8-bit machines would soon be the end of all of them though, and with soaring 16-bit development costs, continuing as they were became quickly untenable, and in 1993 Thalamus released its last game, Nobby the Aadvark on the C64. 

And we’ll come back to Nobby the Aadvark in a minute but first I want to have a quick look at this package as a whole. I should also mention I bought this rather than being given a review copy because I’d always do the same if the opposite were true! And while I’m on disclaimers, the screenshots you’ll see dotted around here came from the VICE emulator on a PC rather than the cart itself, just so you don’t need to suffer too much dodgy phone photography of dodgy old TVs or reflections of dodgy old me in handheld screens! Right, inside the box, as well as the cartridge there’s also the usual Evercade user manual, providing brief instructions, control mapping and gameplay tips for each game, and as usual, it’s one of the things I look forward to the most with these compilations because I do still love a manual! I’m mainly playing on the Evercade VS console here, connected to a TV, but have had a quick go on the Evercade EXP and Super Pocket handhelds, so will refer to them as and when it makes sense, but either way, once the cart’s in, you’ve got a menu screen you can sort how you want (which I’ve left alphabetical so that’s how we’ll go here), then clicking on a game will give you similar information to the manual, including the controls. Each game also has its own quick-save and manual save slots, and you can get to them in-game whenever you want, and there’s original ratio, pixel perfect or stretched full-screen display options, plus various levels of scanlines. And with that, I think we’re now ready to jump into some games!

I’m planning on a paragraph for each, and as we’re going alphabetical, that means we’re starting with Armalyte: Competition Edition. Of everything here, this is the one I’m most familiar with, both from the C64 Mini and as one of the system’s most highly rated horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em ups… Nice loading screen too, which I totally missed when I did my top ten of those on the system, although another game here will get a look in there later! It was originally released as plain old Armalyte in 1988, conceived from an obsession with Konami’s Salamander (and a Marillion song lyric!), and what seems like another obsession to get more out of the machine than should ever have been possible! You’re a space pilot trying to recover a revolutionary new power source from the clutches of some evil alien, fighting your way (solo or two-player) through eight levels of more enemies on-screen at once than you’ll believe you’re seeing, as well as mid-level and almost arcade-quality end of level bosses! Cool weapon power-up and satellite drone system to add a bit of depth to all that shooting too, which reminds me, the “Competition Edition” bit is a 2009 mod with an attract mode, level select and adjustable bullet speeds – possibly a new ending too but this thing is old-school brutal and I’ll never see it! What I can see is incredible in motion though, with smooth, detailed and minimally coloured backgrounds, complex enemy formations and some great animation, and it’s all maybe only let down by the sound beyond the title screen not really living up to the outrageous standards of everything else. Very good start all the same though!  

It may be one of Thalamus’ best-known and most-beloved games but Creatures really wouldn’t have been my cup of tea in 1990, so no surprise this one is new-ish to me now, although I have read a bit about it since. It’s three levels of three stages, the first two of which are more side-scrolling arcade-platformer, as you guide Clyde Radcliffe the Fuzzy Wuzzy across an alien world to save his fellow Fuzzy Wuzzies, then it’s more puzzle-platformer once you’ve reached the fiendish torture chamber stage their demonic captors have them locked up in. These stages are probably the highlight, with Wile E. Coyote-style contraptions needing disarming one way or the other using what you’ll find scattered around the screen, although failing to do so will result in a cartoon death animation that’s possibly even more rewarding! The trouble is getting to them though – the preceding regular platforming stages are a bit too big for their own good, and when you throw some mad difficulty on top, they do become a bit of laborious once the novelty has worn off. Which I guess is where save-states might come in because that aside, it’s the most gorgeously C64-looking game you could ever hope for, with some very funky music and so much character. Wild parallax effects too! And it’s really fun to play and addictive, at least for as long as the fun lasts.

Remember I said the torture chambers were the highlight of the first instalment of Creatures just now? Well, I’m clearly not the only one who thought so because this time this time they’re the headline act, and they’re bigger and badder too! Creatures II: Torture Trouble arrived in 1992, but unlike its predecessor, which also ended up on Amiga and Atari ST, I don’t think ever made it beyond the C64. Clyde’s still around though, and this time you join him on a mission to rescue his children from more demons and their deadly contraptions. It’s set across three island levels, each containing two torture chambers, with some particularly devious, multi-step puzzles to try and work out before your offspring meets a nasty end! Free them in time though, and you’ll be making a getaway across a very Game & Watch kind of second stage, trampolining the child across the screen. Do that one and you’ll come face-to-face with a series of demons to dispatch by kicking animals into pneumatic tubes to fire at them, and make it past those and you’ve got to horizontally-scrolling scuba your way to the next island with your kids in tow, avoiding meanies as you go. While there’s more variety, it still feels more focussed to me than before, although the difficulty hasn’t been toned down in the slightest! It’s one thing solving a bit of a puzzle but actually completing it is something else, and the slightest mistake and you’re starting again! Mistakes are generally your fault though, and one more go is no chore, especially when it looks and sounds as good as this does – those darkly humorous death animations will never get old! The other stages are more lightweight but they’re equally polished and can be equally tough on you too, and once you’re in the swing of things are a nice diversion, as well as being well integrated into the whole… Which is superb!

I love Hawkeye! It’s a pretty mindless run and gun platformer from 1988, and it’s just the ticket after all that brain-bending action with the Creatures games! As such, it might not meet the technical heights of anything else we’ve seen so far but it’s got all the future-barbarian looks and sounds, and it moves back and forth smoothly across a nice variety of very well-drawn, thoughtfully coloured and atmospheric environments that aren’t averse to a bit of the old parallax stuff either! You’re in control of a half-man, half-robot thing who’s out to reclaim the surface of his planet after some ne’er do well aliens massacred most of the population and poisoned the atmosphere, forcing the few survivors underground. You’ll travel through futuristic cities, medieval-looking places, glaciers, deserts and more, looking for the four puzzle pieces (and ammo for your various weapons) that will allow you to progress to the next, and the direction these are in is cleverly indicated by a glint in the eye of the two hawks on either side of the top of the screen. Of course, there’s all sorts of alien life out to stop you, and some guns work better on some more than others, so it’s handy to have switching to each mapped to a button here, rather than holding fire and pushing left or right in the heat of battle, although it’s rarely that frantic, and your infinite ammo pistol will work in most instances anyway. There’s a bit of nuance to jumping too but nuance is a strong word because nothing here is massively sophisticated – just fun! And it’s another one that’s very nicely presented, with a decent – if not hugely memorable – mix of high-energy music happily playing behind the sound effects, lots of animation going on and some cool cutscenes to boot. Think that’s another winner so we’re doing alright so far but is that going to last?

From the very moment I saw 1990’s Heatseeker for the very first time in Blaze Entertainment’s trailer for this compilation (which you can also see above), I had absolutely no desire to play it! It looked like wacky, sub-Monty Python, very C64 weirdness for the sake of it, set up by some ecological alien fairytale about stopping industrial pollution from killing the forests. You’re in control of a heat probe called Leg that looks like a leg and can awkwardly bounce its way around polluted areas, absorb their heat by throwing a ball around, then transfer it to three big plants to open their petals and block acid rain. Do this enough and you’ll move to the next area to do it again. Despite my hesitance, I really tried to give this a chance but it’s just so hard to like! It controls like crap, and you’re never sure what you can climb on and what you can’t, and the creepy crawlies you need to avoid or kill are even more annoying, and the sound effects are excruciating, and the graphics look like it’s 1983, and there’s so much brown – no wonder the C64 has a reputation! Maybe I’m missing something but from the little I’ve learnt about Thalamus so far in this collection, this doesn’t feel like a Thalamus game.

Hunter’s Moon Remastered, on the other hand, certainly does! It’s an official 2018 remaster, update and general overhaul of the 1987 strategic, multi-directional shoot ‘em up original that I did previously come across when I put together that loading screen top ten from earlier, where it got an honourable mention in my original shortlist gallery, although from the really quick go I had to see what it was about, I didn’t get just how good it was… Or quite how pioneering it was, showcasing one of the earliest uses of procedural generation in a computer game! You’re a space pilot who’s flown too close to a black hole and ended up lost on the other side of the galaxy, and now you need to shoot your way into sprawling hive-like space cities on each level to get at the mysterious alien Starcells containing the navigational data you need to collect to plot your course home. This version ups the level count to one hundred and eighty, spread across twenty-one star systems, and also introduces new level types and new game modes, with a training mode for novices and a random mode for veterans, as well as a level editor, although it seems like that’s not currently accessible on Evercade (due to it being selectable from a boot menu you can’t get at). There’s also some wonderfully ominous new music, a cool new parallax starfield effect, and intro and outro cutscenes that feature some of the most stunning imagery I’ve ever seen in a C64 game! The fundamental gameplay is the same though, and as brutal as it can be, it’s also addictive as hell and so intuitive to puzzle and shoot and dodge your way through the myriad of increasingly complex city structures. It’s a beautiful game too, with simple shapes full of movement and life and the most gorgeous, shimmering graphical effects. This one is just outstanding!

We finally made it back to Nobby the Aardvark, and I’ve never known a game that can take lives away from you as fast as this one can – no wonder you start with ten! Anyway, as mentioned earlier, this was just about the end of Thalamus when it arrived in Europe in 1993, although it had been around in North America since the previous year. It’s a genre-spanning free-for-all where you’re an aardvark trying to get to Antopia, a place where you’ll find endless ants to eat… Which you can also spit at stuff if you suck them up out of the anthills you occasionally find on the way too! It starts out as a straightforward, multi-directional, find the exit platformer but persevere through the brutality of the first level and you’ll soon be flying a hot air balloon, deep-diving on the wreck of the Titanic and finding your way around a maze in a space station! There’s loads of variety and all of it is just so hard… But after the initial shock, I think hard in a good way because most of the time you’re dying because you refused to learn the lesson of the last death in your eagerness to see what’s coming next, so you keep coming and coming until those ten lives are gone and then you’re coming back for more all over again! From the opening cutscene, and I think one of my new favourite title screens, it’s presented like a pixel art cartoon, and not unlike the similarly themed one from The New Pink Panther Show, full of humour and full of colour, with loads of character and animation in every sprite. The relentlessly bouncy music fits perfectly too, and every level has its own tune, which unfortunately comes at the expense of sound effects but, if I’m accepting the outrageous difficulty as intended, then that’s about all I don’t like here. Thalamus went out with a bang with this one!

We’re not done with them yet though, and next up is Retrograde. Like its friend Nobby just now, this one from 1989 starts as one thing and evolves into something else, but in this case there’s also more to what it starts as than meets the eye too… For better or worse! You’re on a mission to save your planet from alien invaders, who are operating out of underground nerve centres on the other seven planets in your system they’ve already conquered, meaning you need to plant explosives around the core of each one and blow them out of existence! You can’t just wander straight in though – you need to get yourself fully armed, upgraded and in possession of a primed Planet Buster bomb first, and you do all of that in the shops you’ll come across, meaning you need to collect the money dropped by the aliens you shoot! This happens in the first phase, which reminds me a lot of Dropzone, as you jetpack left and right across the surface, and it’s enjoyably chaotic and fun enough but does go on a bit as you grind away for the vast amount of cash you need if you’re making a serious attempt at the game. Once you’re ready though, it’s simple platforming down and down below the surface, killing more aliens until you reach the bottom where a very impressive, large-scale boss fight is waiting for you. The rest is more simple to look at, I guess, but I think it’s a great-looking game, with effective use of colour and limited parallax effects, expressive animation and loads of variety in the enemies and the different planets you find them on, both above and below the surface, with some really imaginative sights to see in the latter especially. Sound effects are effectively ominous too, backed by some jauntier music coming and going at various times. I think the time you need to spend in the first phase (or phases, depending on how you want to play it) might make this a bit of an acquired taste if you want to get the most out of it but I’ve certainly got the taste and I think it’s fantastic!  

Snare isn’t the game I thought it was… Turns out I was thinking of Spore, the minimal budget take on Gauntlet with a bit of puzzling. Good game too! Anyway, this one from 1989 is equally bonkers and equally worth your time trying to penetrate its madness, as we enter a deadly twenty-level maze created by an eccentric billionaire inside a temporal cavity, which he also disappeared into years ago with his most prized treasure. Hunting for this treasure has become the hottest game show on TV, and you’re the next contestant, looking for the way out of each area and onto the next in your armoured glider, which can jump gaps, fire a gun, and build a Tron-style wall, which you’ll need to use to progress through some levels. These are displayed top-down, and made up of no-frills but very effectively textured tiles, walls, holes, hazards, mystery collectibles and patrolling security ships that clearly don’t want you there. Many of the tiles you pass over will affect your progress, like patterns of arrows that will change or force your direction of travel until you get to the end, or ones that (often handily) slow you down or prevent you turning or jumping, or switches that affect your progress through the level somewhere else. Those arrow tiles will probably also give you a good idea where the exit is hiding too! Oh yeah, almost forgot, you can accelerate a bit and decelerate to a stop if you need to but while turning left and right does indeed do exactly that, when you do it, the entire screen rotates ninety degrees in one binary motion rather than your glider doing it as you’d naturally expect, so it’s always pointing up! And this is the most jarring thing ever and you’ll hate the game for totally ruining the experience for the sake of being different… And then it clicks, and then you stop thinking about it, and then this weird, instantaneous, somehow first-person motion becomes the only way you can imagine playing this methodical, puzzling suicide mission! All the same, it’s as hard as nails however normal it soon feels, and will still have you tearing your hair out at every turn, but will still have you coming back for one more go every time too! I said no-frills earlier but the whole thing reeks of that Thalamus polish I’m now starting to get a feel for, and that goes for the psychedelic sci-fi sound effects and absolutely exquisite title music too. It’s always a risk sticking something not very welcoming in a compilation of this many games but read the manual then stick with it because you won’t regret it!

Two of those games left and they’re related, so I might be able to be a bit more brief than I was with Snare for one of them at least! First up is Summer Camp, another cute, cartoon platformer from 1990, featuring Maximus Mouse, resident scapegoat for anything that goes wrong at Camp Wottadump, such as that all-important American flag going missing the day before the camp opens for business. He’s got twenty-four hours to avoid the blame by getting a replacement, so he decides the one left on the Moon will do nicely, and getting it is going to involve crossing four huge levels, collecting parts of the vehicles that are going to get him to next one, which you put together in a bonus mini-game once you’ve found them all. And good luck with that because not only is this game way too hard for its own good but it’s too frustrating for you to want to spend the time getting anywhere near good, if that’s even possible! The controls just don’t support the precision required, and that’s before you even think about far too many things out to get you on a lot of the flip-screens, especially when you’re blind-dropping down into one below, only to have something waiting to kill you exactly where it’s about to position you as the screen transitions! And it’s such a shame because it looks fantastic, with so much character and joyful colour, and the sound isn’t spectacular but it all supports the situation you’re in perfectly well. Likewise, the mass of objects you collect to help you get at those vehicles parts have some really clever uses too but I just don’t have the patience for this kind of thing anymore unfortunately.

I do, however, have more patience for the sequel. Marginally! Here we rejoin Maximus Mouse for our final game, Winter Camp from 1992, where he’s now a rescue ranger at Camp Nice ‘n Icy, making his way across eight snowy levels to try and stop a pesky bird on top of a mountain causing an avalanche that will engulf the camp. Sounds like Maximus but this time things are a bit different, and you’re going to be ice skating, skiing and in a boat, trying to perform a certain number of rescues on your way while avoiding hazards and obstacles in all sorts of madcap ways, and also collecting objects you can use against the boss you’ll come up against at the end of each level. Some levels will also introduce a bit of rhythmic button mashing, memory games, Kong-like mountain climbing, and even Operation Wolf-infused snowball fights with the local wildlife! Plenty of variety this time then, and in turn it feels more like a compendium of sorts than the more sequential original, not totally unlike something like the aforementioned Winter Games I suppose, and in some levels more than others! It’s all linked by that final goal though, as you’ll be reminded by a nice cartoon avalanche inundation when game over inevitably arrives! Another real looker too, with loads of attention to detail and icy humour, and lots going on as well, both in the other characters you’ll come across and the various environments, which are surprisingly colourful given the setting too! And once again, there’s plenty of inventive touches that keep you learning and experimenting and generally on your toes, although while it’s never frustrating, it’s not going to go easy on you however cute it looks or however much it shoves a nice chiptune version of Walking in a Winter Wonderland down your throat!

So much for being brief. Again! I think it was worth the effort though, and I think that’s where I also stand with Thalamus Collection 1! First and foremost, I’ve had a great time discovering all eleven of the games here. Even the leg one! And apart from that, I’ve had a really good time playing them too. Okay, Summer Camp went too far on what I’ve learnt is probably trademark Thalamus challenge, but there’s no denying its quality, which seems to be another trait I’ve picked up on throughout the rest too. Then there’s the variety, both in the selection of games included, and within the games themselves, where we’ve seen several examples of genre-flipping, as well as all sorts of spicing things up. Of everything here, I think Hawkeye made the most instant impression and I’m nowhere near done with that yet! Snare is another one I’ll keep on the go – properly intrigued by that! And I think Hunter’s Moon, Retrograde and the Creatures games warrant a bit more immediate attention too, so this cartridge is definitely going to be sticking around in my various Evercade consoles for a while, and there’s absolutely no doubt I’ll get £17.99 of value out of it! By the way, I didn’t really have cause to mention them but these all work great on both the Evercade EXP and Super Pocket handhelds – in fact, most of them benefit by not being blown up on a big modern TV, and those colours really pop! It’s a definite recommend from me then, and keep an eye out for more (and maybe much more!) on a few of those games in my Weekly Spotlights here in future!

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