Bruce Lee II
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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An unofficial port of an unofficial sequel: Bruce Lee II was first released for Windows and Linux in 2013, as a fan-made tribute to the original platforming classic, complete with a selectable "C64" graphical style. Another programmer then picked up the gauntlet, resulting in this native Commodore 64 conversion. The game keeps faithful to the original, as far as hardware limitations allow, but also introduces a new, easier difficulty setting (which demands less pixel-perfect platforming skills and starts out with ten lives, instead of five).

As Bruce Lee ventures into the depth of Tao-Bao's palace to rescue his captive sister, he is beset by a gang of mercenaries that follow him from room to room, challenging his considerable martial arts skills with their own. En route towards the final confrontation with Tao-Bao himself, the Dragon's path will take him from the palace garden, through underground pools (Bruce can now swim and dive), temples, pagodas and even a brief imprisonment in the dungeons.

Along the way, passages will have to be opened up by engaging in the familiar pastime of collecting hanging lanterns; devious and dynamic traps make things difficult for our hero, but environmental aids like traveling platforms, poles, vines, conveyor belts, and the idiosyncratic moving tapestries can be deftly exploited to avoid the hazards.

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The Original of the Original

Back in 1984, Datasoft Inc released a game based on the Bruce Lee character featured in motion pictures. The game was ported to many platforms at the time and it got pretty good reviews. Many people look back and remember the game with love and warmth in their hearts. So do I.

The Original

In 2013, Bruno R. Marcos released a spiritual successor to the Bruce Lee game on his website www.bruneras.com. The game was called Bruce Lee II. It featured an Amstrad CPC mode and a Commodore 64 mode which gave the game a retro look like it was created for those two platforms in the first place. It also featured sampled sound from the 1984 Bruce Lee game in addition to some new ones.

The Conversion

Mid April 2014 development started to port Bruno's Bruce Lee II to the Commodore 64. Almost a year later the game was finished. Even if the game originally looked like a Commodore 64 game it was very difficult to make it run on a real Commodore 64. The reasons are basically that the game contains a lot of features and also pushes the limits of the graphics hardware even if it looks simplistic. The conversion isn't perfect and some small things differ from the original due to hardware and effort limitations.

The Game

Play the game with joystick in either port or use the WASD keys and SPACE on the keyboard. Pressing the STOP key pauses the game. Pressing STOP again resumes.

The game exists in two formats, a diskette version and an EasyFlash cartridge image. The diskette version requires a disk drive device of some sort and the cartridge image can be burned on an EasyFlash cartridge and played using the cartridge only. No disk drive is required in the cartridge version.

The game has been made with compatibility in mind. It works on PAL or NTSC machines with no speed differences and should work nicely with a lot of add-ons, even some CPU accelerators, like the SuperCPU. The game features background loading on 1541, 1571, 1581, CMD FD drives and CMD HD. If the game can't detect the drive type it will fall back to kernal loading between screens. It should basically work on anything that loads using the kernal, just not as smooth as with background loading supported drives.

Some people report that the drive detection fails on some drives and loading gets stuck before the menu. You can force kernal loading by holding the commodore key between the intro with the black background and the menu with yellow background, releasing the key first when you see the menu.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/bruce-lee-ii_
http://kollektivet.nu/brucelee2/
