Part 9: ManxomeBromide - Richtofen's Revenge
Let's Play Richtofen's Revenge!One of the "Previously Unpublished" games in Compute!'s First Book of C64 Games
The Plot
The dreaded ace Baron von Richtofen has been spotted! We'll have to deploy our vast fleet of attack planes and balloons to defeat h...
... wait, sorry, I was holding this cue card upside-down. It is in fact the Red Baron who has shown up with a fleet, and our plan is to send one plane against that fleet.
I see nothing wrong with this plan.
The Game
Click image for video
I do a normal run at start, beginning at level 1 and grinding my way up until I get bored enough to get careless. Then I crank the starting level up to level 30. It... doesn't end well.
The Good
- Full wraparound scrolling map
- Holy cheese, look how much stuff is running at once at high levels without lag
- Music and sound effects
- Crapton of difficulty levels; 1-30 available at start, and it goes up to at least 40 before capping out
The bad
- Your shots sometimes flicker so fast they're invisible
- Shooting an enemy at too close a range can make their explosion kill you
- Level select numbers are basically unreadable
- Getting a 1-up after every level means that starting on low levels can be a tedious but unstoppable steamroll
- Hunting down that last damn plane or balloon in a wave is sometimes a chore
The weird
- Our biplane can hover
The Verdict
This was published in 1983 and I'm pretty comfortable calling it commercial-quality for the time. It might not be to Lode Runner levels of polish but I sure played more of this than Manic Miner.