ChinnyVision: Vampire

[chinnyhill10]

CPC is last up in this review of Vampire by Codemasters. Thanks to The Oliver Twins who kindly donated the MSX version. As usual, all from the real hardware.

CPC version has  got a bit of a raw deal on this one. Slower and some really poor palette choices resulting in an ugly looking game. Shame, so easily fixed.

[Joseman]

Hi

The real name of this game is Phantomas 2, and the real company who programmed this was the big spanish Sofware House Dinamic, the programmer was Emilio Salgueiro a freelance coder that made the cpc version, the first part (Phantomas 1) was programmed by another freelance (Enrique Cervera) who didn't provide a CPC version.

This a really lovely game (not good looking) but lovely anyway, i'd played this game docens of times, it has a huge map, lovely enemies, lovely atmosphere...

for me a good version without a doubt!

[chinnyhill10]

Hi

The real name of this game is Phantomas 2, and the real company who programmed this was the big spanish Sofware House Dinamic, the programmer was Emilio Salgueiro a freelance coder that made the cpc version, the first part (Phantomas 1) was programmed by another freelance (Enrique Cervera) who didn't provide a CPC version.

This a really lovely game (not good looking) but lovely anyway, i'd played this game docens of times, it has a huge map, lovely enemies, lovely atmosphere...

for me a good version without a doubt!

I do mention its original name near the end of the review. Personally I found the CPC version the weakest. Seems slow and has poor colour choices. C64 version is far superior for example as it combines a cleaner colour scheme and uses the machines hardware sprites for smooth animation.

[chinnyhill10]

I'm getting in in the neck a bit in the Youtube comments so I went looking for some contemporary reviews. Zzap 64 gave the game 34% and pretty much hated it (I think they are very harsh), Crash gave it 51% and YS 5/10. All seem to highlight the same issues I mentioned.


Amstrad Action gave it 68% though. So I guess it could be a "marmite" game. Some love, some hate. Personally I was somewhere in the middle.

[Zoe Robinson]

This looks like the kind of game I'd probably have spent a lot of time on when I was younger, despite its hideous colour scheme. It looks like a fun challenge and I'll no doubt end up picking up a copy at some point to give it a try but I think I'll be going for the Speccy version since my goodness, the Amstrad got even more of a raw deal here than usual.

[MacDeath]

The typical speccy port that get peoples to claim CPC is an inferior Speccy.


could look very much better with all the ink properly used AKA the real 2bpp graphics... but yeah if so you'll need more RAM to get those 2bpp graphics stored  and need to get some graphic artist to do it... cheap port but nice little speccy game.

The palette is badly chosen (white AND yellow ?) and I see few point to get both white and pastel yellow in the same palette in mode1 (the score/HUD zone).

seems CPC has to actually run some sort of emulator to run the slightly edited speccy version... I even guess the engine would emulate attributes... and I guess many speccy routines would get the game run slowly on CPC.

I guess the CPC coder only had a few days to convert the speccy version, with no graphic artist to help at all.

such speccy game could really get souped up into CPC if done reight... the graphics are not bad, just simple because of the speccy.
fun to see those 4 version, all speccy ports. CPC being the only machine without attributed graphics, it cannot work.

Should compaire with Head Over Heels for the same kind of comparison with CPC getting the upper hand.
HoH used many different palettes, but would always stick to black + bright colour (white or yellow, not both) the 2 medium colours, which is best way to deal with Mode1, and graphics (tiles and sprites) are in "real" 4 or 3 colours.


Now look how it is done right... with no useless rasters.

[chinnyhill10]

This looks like the kind of game I'd probably have spent a lot of time on when I was younger, despite its hideous colour scheme. It looks like a fun challenge and I'll no doubt end up picking up a copy at some point to give it a try but I think I'll be going for the Speccy version since my goodness, the Amstrad got even more of a raw deal here than usual.

Whisper it but in retrospect I think the C64 version has the edge. It uses sprites and has a cracking tune on the menu screen.

[AMSDOS]

It bugged me more with regard to completing the game, I never did (even with the Cheat in AA54), even when I thought I did everything right.


At least with Ghost Hunters I was able to do that much, the keypress did help a lot with that, though at least it helped me complete the game without Cheating!