Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 minute ago
Run The Gauntlet by Ocean for C64, loaded from tape
So this is an interesting one (Suggested by Rob Bowker - thanks!), which I'd weirdly been thinking about playing for a while since I liked the ads for it back in the day, but never actually tried it.
Firstly, note at 0:50 or so the screen that literally says "we fucked up mastering this game so badly that, despite us saying in the manual you could reset the tape counter and play agian, and in fact there is no way to play it again without completely starting from scratch and loading the digi music intro again!!!". At this point. I knew I was in for a ride. Wondered, did I, how did they fuck this up this badly? Surely, being a 1988 ocean game, Paul Hughes would have mastered it with freeload, we'd have ocean loader 4, and everything would be great.
The screechy loading sounds alerted me to the fact that I was not, in fact, in kansas anymore. Still, Jon Dunn's intro music is banging. I've left a lot of it in this video because I turned it up to listen to it because, as previously mentioned, it is banging.
Then, I hit space to load the rest of the game. At which point, loud screech directly into my ear holes. Fuck my life. But also, okay, someone must have tested it or else that note mentioned in the earlier paragraph would not exist, but.... did anyone ever actually fucking try this before sending it to the duplicators?!
Also: That cheetah 125 special that the game claims to support is cool, and I used to have one - it has two joystick cables on it, and the second one maps to fire on the other port. THe reason you do this, is because fire on port one also maps to the C64 space bar. The only other game I've seen with explicit support though is Flying Shark, which was why I had one back in the day. But it works on heaps of "press space to x' games. But I digress...
I do like that this loader at least shows progress for the multiload parts. Of course, this whole thing would have been a lot more pleasent if it wasn't for the forced reload of the presentation screen at the start - if they'd _just_ had the options screen and then have alreadt loaded the first event, it would have been a much better experience - especially since the event takes a LONG time to load.
Also: each event has music, but it's so much quieter than the loading screech that I didn't realise until the last even, because I had my volume down so low.
First event loads... quickly figure out the controls, wonder why they used up for accelerate instead of the perfectly servicable fire button. Sure, whatever, I wasn't great at it, mostly because I struggled with the controls, but fine.... then load the next event, off-road.
This is when I realise that they packed a non-linear game onto tape. I didn't find a c64 manual, but I did find a zx spectrum one with the words "Do not stop the tape. unless told to do so. Loading could take sveral minutes due to each event being randomly selected".
So imagine you're sitting in england in 1988, where tape is the predominant mechanism for games, and you are designing a sports game such as, well, this. And you have two options - have events in a random order, or have them in a random order only on disk, but make them load in a fixed order on tape. Which would you choose? If you're impact software, you'd chose, well, what you get to see in this video, which is 30 minutes of video for 6 minutes of gameplay.
In any case, I get to the second event, again struggle with the controls, at which point.... the game appears to crash.
I feel like I could get used to the controls, or actually I feel like if I played it again, I'd play it with keyboard controls, which I suspect would work a lot better for me. But I'm also not super inclined to do so, given that we're 27 minutes into the recording as I type this, and I've gotten to play for six minutes, and I really should have only had three minutes but I was crap at the game. So I stopped the tape, at which point it tells me what it's trying to load, so I guess it's back? But then I have the horrifying realization, that in fact it's trying to load an event that is earlier on the tape, and just sitting there was the games attempt to tell me that I needed to rewind the tape....
(continued in the first comment :)
Run The Gauntlet by Ocean for C64, loaded from tape
So this is an interesting one (Suggested by Rob Bowker - thanks!), which I'd weirdly been thinking about playing for a while since I liked the ads for it back in the day, but never actually tried it.
Firstly, note at 0:50 or so the screen that literally says "we fucked up mastering this game so badly that, despite us saying in the manual you could reset the tape counter and play agian, and in fact there is no way to play it again without completely starting from scratch and loading the digi music intro again!!!". At this point. I knew I was in for a ride. Wondered, did I, how did they fuck this up this badly? Surely, being a 1988 ocean game, Paul Hughes would have mastered it with freeload, we'd have ocean loader 4, and everything would be great.
The screechy loading sounds alerted me to the fact that I was not, in fact, in kansas anymore. Still, Jon Dunn's intro music is banging. I've left a lot of it in this video because I turned it up to listen to it because, as previously mentioned, it is banging.
Then, I hit space to load the rest of the game. At which point, loud screech directly into my ear holes. Fuck my life. But also, okay, someone must have tested it or else that note mentioned in the earlier paragraph would not exist, but.... did anyone ever actually fucking try this before sending it to the duplicators?!
Also: That cheetah 125 special that the game claims to support is cool, and I used to have one - it has two joystick cables on it, and the second one maps to fire on the other port. THe reason you do this, is because fire on port one also maps to the C64 space bar. The only other game I've seen with explicit support though is Flying Shark, which was why I had one back in the day. But it works on heaps of "press space to x' games. But I digress...
I do like that this loader at least shows progress for the multiload parts. Of course, this whole thing would have been a lot more pleasent if it wasn't for the forced reload of the presentation screen at the start - if they'd _just_ had the options screen and then have alreadt loaded the first event, it would have been a much better experience - especially since the event takes a LONG time to load.
Also: each event has music, but it's so much quieter than the loading screech that I didn't realise until the last even, because I had my volume down so low.
First event loads... quickly figure out the controls, wonder why they used up for accelerate instead of the perfectly servicable fire button. Sure, whatever, I wasn't great at it, mostly because I struggled with the controls, but fine.... then load the next event, off-road.
This is when I realise that they packed a non-linear game onto tape. I didn't find a c64 manual, but I did find a zx spectrum one with the words "Do not stop the tape. unless told to do so. Loading could take sveral minutes due to each event being randomly selected".
So imagine you're sitting in england in 1988, where tape is the predominant mechanism for games, and you are designing a sports game such as, well, this. And you have two options - have events in a random order, or have them in a random order only on disk, but make them load in a fixed order on tape. Which would you choose? If you're impact software, you'd chose, well, what you get to see in this video, which is 30 minutes of video for 6 minutes of gameplay.
In any case, I get to the second event, again struggle with the controls, at which point.... the game appears to crash.
I feel like I could get used to the controls, or actually I feel like if I played it again, I'd play it with keyboard controls, which I suspect would work a lot better for me. But I'm also not super inclined to do so, given that we're 27 minutes into the recording as I type this, and I've gotten to play for six minutes, and I really should have only had three minutes but I was crap at the game. So I stopped the tape, at which point it tells me what it's trying to load, so I guess it's back? But then I have the horrifying realization, that in fact it's trying to load an event that is earlier on the tape, and just sitting there was the games attempt to tell me that I needed to rewind the tape....
(continued in the first comment :)
