I finally tried my Commodore 64 Joystick.

None of the games on it are ones I had owned. Oh, well. The bigger name games I had (Dig Dug, Defender) are available in joystick form elsewhere, and the companies that owned the rights probably didn't want them spread too thin. Some C64 games I had were somewhat obscure, and others required the keyboard.

All the games have a black border around the screen. I think what's happening is that the joystick is putting out the image in higher resolution than the original C64, so the graphics get squished. It does make some of the text harder to read. Some NES emulators for Dreamcast do the same thing (though the better ones let you stretch the graphics back out to full screen).


The graphics qualities of the games is all over the place. Some look quite good (comparable to the NES, in some ways), others look terrible. Some look kind of bland in screenshots, but have surprisingly good animation -- like Impossible Mission. Impossible Mission, and maybe a couple of other games, also have some digitized voice.


Tower Toppler is indeed Castelian. FO remarked about that when she got Tower Toppler for the 7800.

I couldn't figure out what to do in many games. I couldn't get past the fourth screen in Cybernoid (which was also ported to the NES). You're pinned down by a gun turret, it doesn't seem like it's possible to damage the turret, and the turret's gaps in fire aren't long enough to advance from one safe spot to another.

There was one game I couldn't even get past the first screen. Funnily, in that game too, the problem was a turret I couldn't get around or destroy.

Impossible Mission seemed interesting, but I couldn't find a password to use the computers. FO has told me that at least some versions of the game literally are impossible. I wonder if that's true for the C64 version. (Impossible Mission 2 is also in this set).

One racing game seemed pretty simple at first, but then I went into some pit stop routine, and you manually control the pit crew, and I couldn't figure out what to do.

Not only could I not figure out what to do in Bull Rider, I tended to get a game over in less than one second, so it's hard to imagine how I could even experiment (the joystick did come with a [extremely brief] set of instructions, but I don't have them out right now)

I got up to the green belt in World Karate Champion B. The control for that game is really odd. I don't think you need to use any buttons at all. The different moves are all done with the joystick and context (example, under the right circumstances, it seems like pressing down does a head high side kick).

I didn't notice one single game that used the 1,2,3,4 buttons. I don't know if any game used the R button, either (Impossible Mission might have; I don't remember).


One complaint I hear a lot about game ports is "muffled sound" (probably because older systems, like the NES, used waveforms directly). Well, that's definitely not a problem with this joystick; the games sound very loud.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell