Playing Silkworm (C64)

Entry posted by Cybergoth July 22, 2010

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Hi there!

This action packed horizontal shmup is probably one of Tecmos lesser known games:

I've been remembering the excellent Amiga version very well, so I thought to once again try an 8-Bit version here. I actually had a look at the NES one first, but was rather disappointed. There's only 2-3 enemies on the screen at a time, yet still it was made a very hard game, with the few taking a lot of hits before dying and by making other obstacles mercilesly hard to overcome.

It got very frustrating around the 3rd wave already, so I decided to have a look at the C64 version instead, which played a lot better and felt a lot more like the Silkworm I knew.

Graphically it's a mixed bag, the good technical execution (smooth scrolling, lotsa sprites) suffers a bit from the game being a single load, so the background graphics are rather boring and just repeat over and over again. Probably for the same reason there also isn't any ingame music, but the SFX are okay.

The playability is pretty much there though, (inclusive the two-player mode!) with only a few compromises it seems. Alone you can still choose between steering the helicopter and the jeep and of course I picked the 'copter, knowing that it's next to impossible to beat the game with the jeep only.

The 11 stages are all rather similar, so after less then half of them one has already seen everything the game has to offer. A large enemy helicopter and a large tank are taking turns as end bosses. Quite a downer, after the final boss the game just bailed me back to the title screen :sad: