Hi there!

Hans Gruber, Holly Gennaro and John Mclane on the C64:

I had way too high expectations regarding this game, since I thought it was the follow up to one of my all-time favorites, Project Firestart. Further research surprisingly (for me at least ) revealed though, that just the DOS version was made by Dynamix. The C64 port unfortunately was made by the same team that did the horrible Roger Rabbit game before.

Now this is really weird. So Dynamix, who had the Project Firestart engine ready to go for the C64, did the lame 3D DOS version and some second rate developer did the C64 version from scratch instead. They ended up writing a game that plays actually quite similar to Project Firestart, albeit with much uglier graphics and neglected audio.

Besides the loveless sprite graphics shown above, the cut-scenes look actually much worse. Once again it seems someone just ran digitized PC graphics through some auto-conversion tool. Other than that it's a playable and (despite all my critic so far) enjoyable action game, that a bit too slavishly follows the movies plot. Also, it heavily borrows from the formula that Project Firestart (Can't mention it often enough! ) and Tusker established.

The game has a time limit of 20 minutes, but it'll take much longer to figure the map and required actions out. It actually took me 2 days to complete it, but I was too lazy to start the article on the first night

Bye bye, Herr Gruber:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see the tie-in game for "Die Harder", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel