Rainbow Islands Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]

Developed by Graftgold and published by Ocean in 1990 Follow me on Twitter:   / al82_retro   Add me on Google+: http://bit.ly/1tPwL1u Whenever I embark on a C64 longplay project for a conversion of an arcade game, I generally expect the worse. In most cases, either the hardware of the machine simply wasn't capable of delivering anything like an arcade experience, or the development team responsible for the game simply weren't able to deliver. There is but a handful of conversions for the Commodore that I would actually classify as 'good' and even less that I would call near-arcade quality. The C64 conversion of Rainbow Islands by Graftgold is not only an exception to the rule, it is the best conversion of an arcade game that I've experienced on the system so far. I don't think it's understating the fact when I say that Graftgold managed to pull off a technical miracle with this game. Yes, corners have been cut, but the proverbial fat has been trimmed in the places where it has the least impact on the overall experience. Given the complexity of original game's graphics, mechanics and rule-set, this could have turned out to be complete garbage. Against all the odds, the team managed to replicate just about every aspect from the original arcade game and cram it into the C64 and, somehow managed to make it work - serious respect must go to the coder on this project (Gary Foreman) and what he was able to achieve. The artwork from the original arcade version has been recreated as faithfully as is possible, given the C64's graphical capabilities, and looks brilliant. From the loading screen graphic through to the closing credits, the attention to detail in trying to recreate the visuals of the original game is evident and is a testament to the work of the artist (John Cumming). It looks as though the team had to overcome some limits of the machine's colour palette (look closely and you'll see that the orange diamond is created by trying to cycle between red and yellow), and the colour of the player's rainbows changes between stages, depending on what colours are used in the tilesets and background graphics. The game's memorable music is captured in 8-bit SID fashion (Jason Page) and sounds quite jolly at first, although you will probably want to gnaw your ears off after having listened to it for a few hours on perpetual loop. One big plus in terms of audio is the fact you have simultaneous music and sound effects, and the effects are pretty good replications of the arcade effects. There is, however, one big flaw with the game that relates to accessing the game's true ending and how it's been implemented in this version. In the arcade version, the player must collect each of the small gems in correct order of colour (red through to indigo) in order to unlock a secret room on the boss stage of each island. Collecting the giant diamonds inside these rooms unlocks a further set of 'hidden' islands, which must also be completed in similar fashion if the player wants to unlock the game's true ending. Also contained in these secret rooms are power-ups that are permanently applied to the character, even persisting through death. However, one of later bonus items is actually a level skip that misses out an entire island - not something you want to collect if you want to get the best ending/highest possible score. On the arcade version, you can simply ignore the bonus item, collect the gem and exit the secret room. In the C64 version, however, the secret rooms have been removed, presumably to save on memory. Instead, the power-up items appear during the boss fights and become active once collected. On the Arkanoid Island boss, the bonus item happens to be the level skip, but it appears right over the top of the boss - this particular boss is static, so you are forced to collect the level skip as soon as you hit the boss with a rainbow. This means that you automatically skip the next island, meaning that you can never collect all of the big diamonds required to get the game's true ending; the only way around this issue is to make sure that you collect the small diamonds on this level out of order, thus ensuring that the level skip item never appears. As you might expect, I was bitten by this whilst recording the video and had to replay a good chunk of the game to work around the problem, much to my annoyance. Fortunately, the overall quality of the game is such that I was able to forgive Graftgold this blunder and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the game. If you're looking for what is possibly the definitive example of an arcade conversion done right, you really have to look no further than Rainbow Islands. With excellent graphics and gameplay to match, this really is a title that every C64 fan should try. #retrogaming