Wrath of the Demon Longplay (C64) [QHD]

Developed and published by ReadySoft in 1991

Wrath of the Demon was one of the most beautiful-looking and best sounding games on the Commodore Amiga, and ReadySoft attempted to bring some of the visual splendour to the humble C64.

Graphically, this 8-bit conversion is quite the masterpiece. Jorge Freitas did an excellent job converting the graphics, and the animation is pretty much flawless - definitely up with the most visually impressive C64 titles.

What's less impressive, however, is just how buggy and glitchy certain parts of the game are. There are numerous graphical tears and glitches during the side-scrolling "walking" sections, and enemy sprites in the final dungeon appear as a scrambled mess. I don't know if this is as a result of bad cracks, or whether the original had the same issue, but I checked some other videos of the game online and they all exhibited the same problems as I encountered.

There's also the fact that much of the game design is absolutely rubbish. This isn't the fault of ReadySoft, they simply converted the game, but there's the simply fact that Abstrax - developer of the original Amiga version - pretty much copied Shadow of the Beast and everything that was wrong with it, producing a boring "walking simulator" full of pop-up bad guys and traps that make much of the game a boring and irritating experience. It's laughable that all the earlier levels can be completed in less than 15 minutes, yet the final dungeon takes well over an hour to beat!

Credits
Coding: Steve Douglas
Graphics: Jorge Freitas
Music: David Whittaker, Steve Douglas

Time Codes
00:00:00 - Title Screen (music by David Whittaker)
00:00:58 - Level 01
00:02:35 - Level 02
00:03:30 - Level 03
00:04:17 - Level 04
00:10:13 - Level 05
00:11:35 - Level 06
00:12:25 - Level 07
00:13:44 - Level 08
01:05:42 - Final Boss
01:09:48 - Good Ending
01:09:53 - Bad Ending (Game Over)

#wrathofthedemon
#c64
#retrogaming