In this game, you play a guy with a helicopter jetpack, some dynamite, and laser vision.

Sounds awesome, no?

Yeah. It was.

This game gives you dozens of levels, which throw more and more obstacles in your way as you go on. Obstacles include: walls, which must be destroyed with your limited supply of dynamite, the lava-coated version of the same walls (which kill you), Evil Light Bulbs which turn off if you go the wrong way, reducing your visibility to zero, and a variety of animals like spiders, bats, moths, and snakes, all of which will also kill you if you don’t laser-vision them. (This game single-handedly justifies my irrational fear of moths, by the way.)

Then at the end of each level a guy tallies up your remaining time and dynamite and gives you points based on what you have left. At this point you’d be sent to the next level. As you progressed through the levels, the game would start sending more obstacles and various alternate paths at you, making what started as a simple game rather difficult after all.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the sound. There’s no music for this game, but between the copter-pack and the bombs there are a variety of fun sound effects which I will still launch into imitating without warning.

Choka-choka-choka…
chick… POOM
choka-choka-choka
choka-choka-choka
peeeew
tcccchhhhhheeeeewwwwwwww
POOM POOM POOM POOM POOM

Seriously that’s the first level. Check it out:

See, you can’t deny my sound effects aren’t accurate. You can’t deny it. You should hear me IRL.

Now, when I think of this game, I invariably think of my mom. See, I come from a big gaming family. I was playing online games back before most people had a computer– we’d play them over the modem. Anyways, it was mostly my dad and uncle who would do the gaming every Sunday, but I guess one day my mom wanted something to prove so she sat down and memorized basically this whole entire game, twisty pathways and all. She owned everyone at this game. Nobody could beat her. It was ridiculous.

I can’t remember how far I got personally. Maybe level 12 or so. (This game got difficult.)

Regardless, this game was a blast. It was such a simple concept: fly around, shoot stuff, and blow things up, but they managed to add some sort of level of strategy to it and enough levels that would get juuuust harder enough to keep you playing for a really long time.

Oh Commodore 64, you rock.