Soul Force - new shoot em up for C64.

[Carnivius]

High quality horizontal shooter for C64 by Sarah Jane Avory.  Am posting about it here cos it's really well done and shows a lot of effort gone into it and while we're primarily CPC folk we can enjoy a quality game for other 8 bit formats, no?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZcP7xjM0jo

[Gryzor]

Νο.

[pelrun]

Aw.

[ervin]

Well that escalated quickly!
 

Gotta say, it does look really good.

[DanyPPC]

Technically speaking, I put Alcon 2020 first and after this Soul Force. Alcon is a programming pearl. The C64 has many shoot'em ups that take advantage of its features.
Certainly Soul Force is a nice game, it takes a little from Nemesis, Thunder Force, X-Out, etc ... But the care that went into the Alcon conversion in my opinion is unmatched.
Making a conversion is more difficult than creating a new game.


I think that Alcon 2020 is the best game released in 2020.

[Carnivius]

Technically speaking, I put Alcon 2020 first and after this Soul Force. Alcon is a programming pearl. The C64 has many shoot'em ups that take advantage of its features.
Certainly Soul Force is a nice game, it takes a little from Nemesis, Thunder Force, X-Out, etc ... But the care that went into the Alcon conversion in my opinion is unmatched.
Making a conversion is more difficult than creating a new game.


I think that Alcon 2020 is the best game released in 2020.

Why the need to compare them?  And no I don't believe making a conversion is necessarily more difficult.  Some aspects of it perhaps can be tricky when trying to replicate features found on more powerful hardware perhaps but making a game from scratch with your own designs, graphics, music that aren't directly based on any existing product is extremely difficult to do of a high standard and you're being very dismissive to the author of Soul Force there.  Alcon 2020 is great but there was no need to put down Soul Force which is one of the finest all-new shoot em ups ever created for an 8 bit machine and shows a huge amount of love and care for game development in it.

[Gryzor]

It does look quite nice!!! I'm not sure why @DannyPPC compared it to Alcon (which I find to be better too btw) but my comment would be, it looks quite a bit like something that could've been released back in the day. Which is not a bad thing in my book, for sure.

[Carnivius]

Here's the itch.io buy page.

plus the selling points.  The first one really impresses me cos that's a LOT of work.

• 20 adrenaline filled horizontal shoot’em up levels, each with their own distinct graphical theme
• A dedicated bitmap screen and music for each level
• Seven in-game bonus items to collect
• Four individually upgradable weapon systems
• General ship upgrades
• Lots of boss fights
• Four difficulty settings
• Password and flexible save game system
• Progress automatically saved to cartridge
• Fully PAL & NTSC compatible

https://protovision.itch.io/soul-force

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Soul Force (and Zeta Wing) are good C64 shoot-em ups, with a lot of design effort into making them enjoyable as well as making good use of the C64 technically.


Sure, it's using the C64 character mode with animated characters to simulate parallax and other moving objects, but that works very well, and the CPC cannot do this at 50fps, obviously because that's a strength of the C64 (with its own limitations). The Plus can get closer, the hardware scrolling and sprites can free up CPU time to do spot animations in the background.


Alcon looks excellent as well, and it's hard to do these games on the CPC and retain smoothness, so it's great to see it.


Really, it's win-win all around.

[Bryce]

Aaarghh my eyes! Is this a symptom of Corona? Everything has turned brown!

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

Aaarghh my eyes! Is this a symptom of Corona? Everything has turned brown!

Bryce.

Well now that you mentioned it, the SID does seem to be farting a fair bit.

[reidrac]

I don't think there are that many C64 games like this one, neither now or back in the day.

Technically is superior to most shooters on the system (if not all), IMHO. Just the smoothness and the parallax is amazing, and not easy to do in the C64 even it has hw support.

I know this is a CPC forum, but Sarah is a wizard and this game is outstanding.

[Gryzor]

I know this is a CPC forum

Well that's precisely why the Other Retro is there for!

[Carnivius]

Aaarghh my eyes! Is this a symptom of Corona? Everything has turned brown!

Bryce.

Actually I think these are excellent graphics for an 8-bit system. Really well drawn and serve their purpose nicely.  Sure I'm not a fan of the C64 palette myself but Sarah has done great work here pixelling the sprites and distinct tilesets for each of the 20 levels. But sure let's ignore that and just rehash the same tired old immature playground comments rather than appreciate the fine work of a multi-skilled person who has put in a whole ton of time into developing a quality shoot 'em up we can all play whether on a real C64 or emulators.  The CPC may be my fave 8-bit system but I like a high quality game whatever vintage format it's on.

I don't think there are that many C64 games like this one, neither now or back in the day.

Technically is superior to most shooters on the system (if not all), IMHO. Just the smoothness and the parallax is amazing, and not easy to do in the C64 even it has hw support.

I know this is a CPC forum, but Sarah is a wizard and this game is outstanding.

I agree with all this.

[Gryzor]

Um, it's called... Humor? Check out who you replied to...

[Skunkfish]

Time to dig up the C64 emulator again...