The Commodore 64 may have been discontinued in 1994 (although it still puts up a fight!), but it remains alive in the hearts of all of us who once had it as a friend. So, even decades later, it's not surprising to find developer groups that, with infinite love and talent, keep expanding the game library of this memorable system. Such is the case of the group Covert Bitops, whose latest C64 game dates from 2016 (with another in production, which will be seen in the coming years).
“Covert Bitops is a small group making C64 productions (mainly games and music) as well as other related free utilities, just for recreation,” reads the developers’ official site. One of the clan’s main members is Lasse Öörni (a.k.a. Cadaver), from Finland, who has been handling programming, graphics, and the sensational music for all releases. All Covert Bitops games can be played on the original computer or with an emulator like VICE, since disk images (in .D64 format) or native executables (.PGR) are offered.
The Metal Warrior Saga
The first game from these bit artisans dates back to 1999 and is called Metal Warrior. It’s a shooter and adventure with horizontal scrolling, set in a violent and polluted future. It tells the story of a beginner guitarist willing to move heaven and earth to find out the identity of his best friend’s killer. Metal Warrior was the start of a saga with three sequels, culminating in 2003 with the sensational Metal Warrior 4 – Agents of Metal.
These games have everything: an excellent story, funny dialogues, shooting, adventures, punks, cops, spaceships, and special agents. Plus a complex gameplay that adapts perfectly to the simple joystick of the Commodore. Because that’s what makes Covert Bitops great: its members weren’t content with making clones of their favorite classics; they kept exploring (and exploiting) the interactive possibilities of the Commodore 64, delivering games with novel mechanics, solving limitations through pure creativity.
For example, a single button and a directional lever are enough to move the character, shoot in eight directions, jump from side to side, enter and exit doors, pick up objects, and even enter and select items from the inventory, without ever resorting to an extra key. And although the control scheme takes some getting used to, over time you get the hang of it and marvel at the good decisions made.
The graphics are very, very good, authentic and colorful, with enough variety to avoid boredom. The music is another strong point of the saga, as it takes full advantage of the sound chip of the old C64, which we all know was wonderful, composing chiptune melodies full of metal.
The four Metal Warrior saga games were continuously improved for years, polishing here and buffing there. Only in 2012 did the group members declare themselves satisfied, and there the final versions remained, ready to download from the official page. Besides the C64 versions, you can find a remake of MW1 for Amiga and another of MW4 for Game Boy Advance. Just because.
Hessian, a C64 Game Released in 2016
Kim is the night-shift security guard of a secret scientific complex. He wakes up not knowing what’s happening. He’s on a stretcher, recently operated on. The place is chaos. Seconds before dying, a scientist tells him that he was injected with nanobots that will make him more powerful, that he needs to put an end to the machinations of out-of-control inventions. And there begins an action-packed adventure, where you’ll fight against the evil inventions that have taken over the complex, always seeking the keys needed to reach the nerve center of the problem.
Hessian is a game that owes a lot to Metroid, but it retains the innovative controls of Metal Warrior because, if it isn’t broken, why fix it? Again, the graphics are very good. It’s incredible the amount of detail in each room. A lot of time and effort has been invested in the work. The music, of course, doesn’t lag behind and makes the SID 6581 shine like in its glory days.
Steel Ranger (Work in Progress)
Steel Ranger will be the group’s next game, as announced on the official site last January 27. It will be a shooter with gameplay inspired by Turrican (with elements of Metroid, which never fail). A “spiritual sequel” to Hessian, but with simpler controls. It will be set in the future, in a world where humans must escape a dying Earth while waging a battle against the killer machines of the previous game. There is no release date yet, but if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.
More Games and Tools
But that’s not all! On the group’s official site you can find a few more games, though much simpler than the previous ones. Advanced Action Movie Simulator recounts the career of a film hero in a mix of four minigames: chase, shooting, romance, and hand-to-hand combat. In BOFH: Servers Under Siege, you must defend your servers from a terrorist group attack with your bare fists. Finally, Escape From New York, which is a deliberate homage clone of Cobra (also for C64), bad on purpose. The site also offers some of the tools its artists work with (mostly for music editing) and the themes from all its games, to download and listen to.
And if you don’t have a C64 computer, there’s no problem! As already said, you just need to download VICE (my favorite) and the individual zips of each game. Unzip the emulator. Unzip the game. Open the emulator by double-clicking the file named “x64.exe”. Drag the decompressed game file onto the open emulator window. Et voilà! Enjoy as if it were 1982 all over again!
