BOMB (Preview)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Bomb
199? Chris West

Status: Preview, Findability: 5/5
Coding: Chris West
Graphics: Tony West
Sound: Wally Beben, David Whittaker

Now if there were a sequel you could never have imagined existed, let alone known was started, then its the long awaited sequel to RISK, the excellent and underrated C64 game by Chris and Tony West. Shocked?… Well, I was certainly when Chris West got in touch with GTW and stunned us with several shots of this excellent sequel as well as the preview to test out.

Chris you may know also did the flawless conversion of Super Space Invaders for Domark back in 1991. Bomb was started just before this time, and way after RISK from 1988.

Chris and Tony started this game long after Edge had closed its doors and originally started this game for fun, and in the hope they could quickly sell it to a company. Unfortunately the game just never got completed, and Chris and Tony went onto other projects. Since then it has gathered dust on Chris’ work disks.

Only one level was ever completed, and already the game looks awesome. It can only be described as a kind of souped up version of Scramble, with its missiles that fly upwards towards your excellently animated ship (Animating to the standard of RISK and similar to TRAN and DEFENSIVE) that fires Defender style lasers and drops its Scramble-like bombs.

Impressive still is the stunning landscapes in the first level, and the explosions of the enemies and your main ship (Ok, I admit, I wasn’t too great at playing the game!  ). If you’ve seen Chris and Tony’s previous work, you will come aquatinted to this high standard of work.

The preview is packaged with the music and SFX from RISK, and has a simple title screen and hi-score to tie it all together. It’s sad that it never quite got finished, but the first level alone is worth checking out. Additionally we have just put in the rare version which has proper lasers that isn’t in the released demo.

Chris tells GTW “It was meant to feel like Scramble as we liked that game as well, but we wanted to bring a little more variety to it, ie some big bosses like in Super Space Invaders, resucing little Boffins again like Risk, and a lot more weapons, of which only coded 3 so far.”

There was plans to have the game finished off, but Chris and Tony disappeared completely and numerous contact attempts failed as we tried to find out more about their plans (as well as trying to get Typhoon Thompson released).  It is very unlikely that the game will ever get completed, and this is therefore all that will ever remain of the game.

Case closed!

Contributions: Chris West

http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/bomb/
