Caren and the Tangled Tentacles - C64 adventure appears!

[MacDeath]

hm, sex was so one sided back then...

you meant it was only a distant dream... 


also :

hm, sex was so one sized back then...

that's what she says...



yeah, Sidewalk (the english version) was a fun little game.
bit of a shame they didn't inclure more "colours" to the graphics and it was a bit hard to not get lost on the "map" as there were no map you had to do it yourself as usual.

The theme was quite adult actually, and would more lean toward adult French comics...
well, let's say adolescents or young adults indeed.

The french version was somewhat a port/license from this singer and this song :

it says : get away, you stink and walk in shadow.

funny part of the lyrics :

"he should go back to greece to get lost"... sort of...
yeah, we had an expression : aller se faire voir chez les grecs...

= to go get seen at the greek's
basically it means go get f**ked by greeks/in greece.
Or something like go f**k yourself in greece.

basically it just mean get lost/out/away.

I think it dates back from the Gaulish era when Brennos went to screw some greeks in Delphia.
Or it was certainly a Latin expression.








yeah, Infogrames were a lot into licenses and Franchises.

Also some better palette could be chosen for the intro picture in order to have a larger contrast in the colour ramp...

[attachimg=1]

Oh, was released on many formats, even C64 obviouslt :

ouch...




But again sorry for the sliding...
please go on with the tentacle things.

[Neil79]

Last year we gave you the heads up for PriorArt's high quality adventure homebrew of ' Caren and the Tangled Tentacles ' for the C64. At the time we rated it as one of the best adventure games by a homebrew developer in a LucasArts style. It had great scene detail, lovely character animation, an easy to use control scheme and a great soundtrack. Well that same game has once again appeared in our footage news feed, but this time as a teased internal experimental Easyflash version of Caren, which shows a much faster almost non existing loading time between each scene.

Indie Retro News: Caren and the Tangled Tentacles - An impressive adventure for

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Good use of the C64's mixed resolution characters there.


But who has a staircase in their bedroom? Apart from Caren...

[Joseman]

I'm never jealous of the C64, but with this game and the lucas-scumm games that were released for the c64, make me feel something like hurt about the great CPC not having them... with our mode 0 and our wonderful colours they will pee on the c64 versions...

We really need to port this type of games on CPC... at all costs

[MacDeath]

with our mode 0 and our wonderful colours they will pee on the c64 versions...

or not quite...

Sid Meilleur's Pirates! is a clear exemple of american game ported from AppleII or C64... or Bard's Tale too...

= slow
= graphics not even accounting for the ST like capabilities video mode or palette...

yeah IO meant it.... Pirates! ? Monkey Island ? the bright warm hues in blues and proper RGB complete cube of CPC can really get the carribean island paradise...
Yellow sand, blue sea and sky, and so on... nope, denied...

at least we had a nice Prince of Persia because UbiSoft managed to screw Jordan Mechner for life and became huge as well...

Good use of the C64's mixed resolution characters there.

yep, the plain bright blue characters use fine pixels...




nah kidding, really nice job on this tengled tentacle rape game... so cute and well done. I'm quite impressed by the pixel art as well.

[reidrac]

I'm never jealous of the C64, but with this game and the lucas-scumm games that were released for the c64, make me feel something like hurt about the great CPC not having them... with our mode 0 and our wonderful colours they will pee on the c64 versions...

We really need to port this type of games on CPC... at all costs

I personally miss a lot of CRPGs that were released for the C64 and never got to the speccy or the CPC.

Actually, I thought that the 8-bit machines couldn't do RPGs or something (looking at the few titles we have, kind of makes sense), and that's why they never got as many as 16-bit systems. Until I found out that the C64 had them!

OK, the speccy didn't have disk until too late so fair enough, but the 6128 was released back in 1985 and all those CRPGs based on the "Gold Box" produced by SSI hit the market first time in 1988 (Pool of Radiance is a great game I enjoyed in my 8086).

What is reason behind this? I don't know, I guess C64 was big in USA and those CRPGs were big in USA with D&D (whilst EU CRPGs appeared way later), but it is a shame because I think the CPC could have managed those just fine.

[||C|-|E||]

When I was a kid I also found that we were lacking RPGs and adventures that were available in the C64. This was quite (very, I would say) traumatic, since these two have always been my favorite genres. Funnily enough, I knew that they were available on C64 because I had a friend with a Commodore that was frequently traveling to UK and USA and buying many games there. For me all these traveling far away with your nerdy parents to check on new computers and buy games was something very close to science fiction, to be honest. Later, he even managed to have an Amiga!  . Luckily, in Spain we were producing very decent Amstrad games back in that time, but oh man, I really was missing that Commodore stuff.

[PulkoMandy]

Marche à l'ombre / Sidewalk graphics are a Thomson port. The Thomson version is slightly better with some touches of colors: Logiciels Thomson

[arnoldemu]

What is reason behind this? I don't know, I guess C64 was big in USA and those CRPGs were big in USA with D&D (whilst EU CRPGs appeared way later), but it is a shame because I think the CPC could have managed those just fine.

I can't say. I will guess that in the US they had c64's with disk drives and the market was big enough to justify the version.

Similar market on CPC is France, but perhaps too small for the time.

CPC could do it well enough I think.

A friend looked at how the sprite masking was done on the ST version of leisure suit larry. They had a 16-colour screen which defined the z order so they could mask the sprites against the graphics. There was also control graphics for entrance and exits.

On cpc that would kill too much vram and a different method would be needed.

I think a custom version of scummvm v1 and v0 on cpc is a possibility. I don't think compiling scummvm on cpc would work.
I don't see a description of the v1/v0 opcodes

[reidrac]

A friend looked at how the sprite masking was done on the ST version of leisure suit larry. They had a 16-colour screen which defined the z order so they could mask the sprites against the graphics. There was also control graphics for entrance and exits.

On cpc that would kill too much vram and a different method would be needed.

I think a custom version of scummvm v1 and v0 on cpc is a possibility. I don't think compiling scummvm on cpc would work.
I don't see a description of the v1/v0 opcodes

That's a different type of problem, and an interesting one! Last Christmas I was experimenting with AGI (the interpreter for Sierra games) and they use 160x200 resolution and 16 colours (yes!); at least the earlier versions of the interpreter, that would allow playing a good set of games (eg, up to King Quest IV).

AGI did run in Apple II computers with 128k of RAM, so I thought it would be a nice project for the 6128.

I have some documentation and some example code, but I didn't get too far because I started my game for the ZXDev 2015 and... lost interest. Mainly because you can play those games NOW (even online, see Sarien.net - Instant adventure gaming) and there's no need top wait for a CPC port to be honest.

[Oliver Lindau]

...took a mockup of the game recently, changed colors to cpc palette and set some pixels here and there
no further plans for a port though...

[robcfg]

It sure looks nice!

[TFM]

That fence is freshly painted. 

[khaz]

I would play that.

[Gryzor]

Really cute. That shading on the tree is great, and overall is a very nice and balanced image.

[tastefulmrship]

The mock-up looks really nice. Any chance of an Amstrad version? I mean... puhleeze!

[khaz]

This looks fantastic. The aspect ratio on the screenshot is wrong, but it looks great on a real CPC.

[||C|-|E||]

hehe, I can take a picture of it this running in my Amstrad and upload it here 

[enthusi]

I would appreciate such an actual  screenshot!

[||C|-|E||]

There you have it! 

[attachimg=1]

The image is a bit too large, but otherwise it was very difficult to appreciate it. Consider as well that although this monitor displays an acceptable picture now (imho) probably some other units will be able to provide better convergence and/or less distortion.

[Gryzor]

This is such a beauty

[robcfg]

Indeed! It looks awesome! 

[khaz]

I'm a bit confused about the status of this game on C64. There is a v1.1, a v1.3, but the game isn't complete?

I watched a video of the beginning of the game, and I must say the writing was hm... not so good. Am I right in supposing that it was translated from German by a non-native English speaker?

[invent]

Where is the donate button to make the Amstrad version possible, great work Oliver. The C64 version looks super also

[Oliver Lindau]

I'm a bit confused about the status of this game on C64. There is a v1.1, a v1.3, but the game isn't complete?

I watched a video of the beginning of the game, and I must say the writing was hm... not so good. Am I right in supposing that it was translated from German by a non-native English speaker?

Hey There is a reason for this. V1.1 is in fact a version that the team set as finished - because of a game competition which is why this project exists.
Because of the deadline we needed a strict compact plot which (also thanks to the deadline) gets quite short at the end. The team decided to do something more than just continue the story, which leads to a Caren 2.x project - which is still too early to talk about...

The v1.3 happens because of a contact with RGCD and Sam Dyer, who started a Kickstarter for his C64 visual commpendium second edition book and was asking for suitable game projects as pledge option. We agreed, but because of the exclusive status of the campaign we started a special edition of v1.1 with some extra rooms and features like implementing the backer's names

Btw the English texts were initially the translated German text but have been revised by Robert Megone, who is indeed a native speaker and was involved in projects like Broken Sword 5:
Robert Megone - Games Design / Script Editing / Games QA




@||C|-|E||
Thank you very much for posting the screenshot