Hi there!

Welcome to System 3s final C64 game:

Turbo Charge (1991):

Programming: Chris Butler

Graphics: Chris Butler, Robin Levy

Musician: Sean Connolly, Marc Francois

Ratings:

Zzap! Rating: 96%

Lemon64 Rating: 7.6

History:

For their final C64 release System 3 hired none less than Chris Butler, who is kinda like the David Crane of the C64. During his active carreer he programmed more than a dozen games and he was especially famous for his Arcade conversions of games like Ghosts'n'Goblins.

Not only was Chris a master of the C64, but he was also very experienced in Sega-style 3D-Scaling games, in fact before Turbo Charge he already did very respectable C64 conversions of Space Harrier, Power Drift and Thunderblade.

Overview:

With Turbo Charge Chris finally got to work on an original design again, still if you wanted to sum up Turbo Charge in two words they'd be "Roadblasters Clone"

Technically very impressive, over the years Chris had perfected his routines for this kind of game. The graphics are really dead fast, so is the whole game, a really breathtaking experience for an 8-Bit machine. Same goes for the music which is on a very high level.

The game starts with a fulminant cinematographic intro, then it presents a rather standard variant on-a-theme. Each "mission" is split into two halfes, first you're always chasing some criminals beyond the border, then you have to stop their leader in the second part. You're car is equipped with the standard unlimited-ammo machine gun and a handful of rockets that are executed with a slightly longer button press. The rest is just the usual racing ingredients, with obstacles like barriers, rocks and mines.

Fun in 2007:

Well, this one is again enjoyable for a little while and a definitive demonstration of the C64s capabilities. I found the gameplay itself a bit shallow and repetetive though, there's just all the standards of the genre, nothing really thrilling.

Greetings,

Manuel