Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago
Beauty and the Beast for C64, not by system 3 despite the claims in the loader.
Unrelated sid that I kind of want to hack into the game: duckandkitty.com/tale_as_old_as_time.sid
The are quite a few interesting things about this one - most detailed at gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/beauty-and-beast , but just to start with:
a) It dates from 1996/1997, supposedly by a team in Iran. That is a weird time for a game this elaborate, since it post-dates the commercial end of life, but pre-dates the indie resurgence by a decade or so. It's _especially_ both early and late for a tape master to exist!!!
b) despite the claim on the initial screen, this is NOT cyberload - there are a number of small tells in that regard - which make sense since some indie guys wouldn't have access to the cyberload mastering tools in the mid 90s. The claim it was it was made to look like cyberload because they wanted to make a system3 style game, which I find believable - that's the sort of thing I would have done in the 90s too, if only I'd had this level of skills.
c) The developers claim on gtw64 that it's _not_ the last ninja engine either, it's just written to look that way - they do point out some technical details which back this up, such as it not being able to have more than a few screens in a level since there is no compression or anything as there is with the last ninja games!
... although it _really_ looks like last ninja 3! A lot.... like a lot a lot. But I tend to believe this, because I suspect it would be more work to hack last ninja 3 this completly than it would be to write an engine from scratch....
d) Their home made loader is not super fast - which kind of backs up point (a) even more. On my first load, I was going to declare it super slow, but it turns out it was stuck ;). Bad tape, whee!
e) Obviously the music credits are a lie..... which sort of points to that "no, it's a hack of last ninja 3!" claim. But again, I'm somewhat skeptical of that given just how difficult it would be to have made a complete hack of ln3 like this, and manage to even master a multiload tape of it.
I had a lot of trouble with the combat, and it IS slower than the last ninja games, but... it's still _really_ impressive. I might, at some point, do an emulator/savestate playthrough of it on disk to show off the whole game, because it should be shown off!
Beauty and the Beast for C64, not by system 3 despite the claims in the loader.
Unrelated sid that I kind of want to hack into the game: duckandkitty.com/tale_as_old_as_time.sid
The are quite a few interesting things about this one - most detailed at gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/beauty-and-beast , but just to start with:
a) It dates from 1996/1997, supposedly by a team in Iran. That is a weird time for a game this elaborate, since it post-dates the commercial end of life, but pre-dates the indie resurgence by a decade or so. It's _especially_ both early and late for a tape master to exist!!!
b) despite the claim on the initial screen, this is NOT cyberload - there are a number of small tells in that regard - which make sense since some indie guys wouldn't have access to the cyberload mastering tools in the mid 90s. The claim it was it was made to look like cyberload because they wanted to make a system3 style game, which I find believable - that's the sort of thing I would have done in the 90s too, if only I'd had this level of skills.
c) The developers claim on gtw64 that it's _not_ the last ninja engine either, it's just written to look that way - they do point out some technical details which back this up, such as it not being able to have more than a few screens in a level since there is no compression or anything as there is with the last ninja games!
... although it _really_ looks like last ninja 3! A lot.... like a lot a lot. But I tend to believe this, because I suspect it would be more work to hack last ninja 3 this completly than it would be to write an engine from scratch....
d) Their home made loader is not super fast - which kind of backs up point (a) even more. On my first load, I was going to declare it super slow, but it turns out it was stuck ;). Bad tape, whee!
e) Obviously the music credits are a lie..... which sort of points to that "no, it's a hack of last ninja 3!" claim. But again, I'm somewhat skeptical of that given just how difficult it would be to have made a complete hack of ln3 like this, and manage to even master a multiload tape of it.
I had a lot of trouble with the combat, and it IS slower than the last ninja games, but... it's still _really_ impressive. I might, at some point, do an emulator/savestate playthrough of it on disk to show off the whole game, because it should be shown off!
