The Commodore 64 Collection 3 review – retro console serves up old favourites in fine style
It is an odd feeling having an unremitting barrage of childhood memories fired at you by a game cartridge no larger than a matchbox. That’s certainly been my experience of the C64 Collection 3, the latest in a series of vintage gaming compilations assembled by Blaze Entertainment for its Evercade retro consoles. Each of these little carts contains a dozen or so classic titles from various arcade manufacturers and home computers, all emulated to a pretty high standard. This one, for me, and I suspect a lot of other C64 veterans, is unmissable – for several reasons.
One is that it contains what I think is one of the greatest home computer games ever made: Paradroid. It’s a topdown multidirectional sci-fi blaster by Hewson, beautifully styled, fiendishly difficult and with one of the earliest examples of the now ubiquitous hacking mini-game.
When you play it in 2024, almost 40 years after its original release, it is astonishing how well it holds up, in terms of visuals and gameplay, and via the Evercade VS console it looks lush on my LED TV. Exploring the game’s vast spaceships again on a big TV in my living room, rather than just a dodgy PC emulator, has been a much more moving experience than you’d expect from a very old game about shooting robots.
Also here are two more genuine classics: the cave exploration puzzler Boulder Dash and the multiplayer sports sim Summer Games II. Like Paradroid, they hold up well to 21st-century scrutiny, although the latter isn’t quite the visual treat I remembered from my school days. It’s nice to be able to go into the pause menu and change the aspect ratio and add scanlines for a traditional CRT effect. And – I won’t lie – the built-in save feature has also been handy.
Elsewhere, the compilation choices are slightly more obscure, though this is a nice thing about the Evercade compilations: even fans like myself get to make discoveries. There are lots of titles by Hewson (one of the great
British developers of the era) that I’ve never played before, including another multidirectional scroller, Netherworld; the Golden Axe-style side-scroller Deliverance: Stormlord II; and Cybernoid II, which meshes Contra and R-Type and has an amazing SID-chip soundtrack.
There are interesting oddities, too, including Street Sports Soccer from Epyx, a sort of jumpers-for-goalposts sim where you choose kids with various levels of skill and play on the street or in the park. Super Cycle 64 is a motorbike sim clearly inspired by Hang-On, which reviewed well at the time and is a nice nostalgic throwback to that era of endlessly scrolling racers.
The most unexpected treat, however, is the inclusion of Break Dance, also from Epyx. It’s a street dancing game (and a forebear of the rhythm action genre) where you have to mimic the moves of a computer-controlled performer. It is both delightfully kitsch and absolutely awful, but I remember buying it because I was obsessed with hip-hop; I played it a lot while also repeatedly renting Breakdance: The Movie from our local video haven. How weird to encounter it again so many years later.
C64 Collection 3 is a weird, lovely, scattered compilation that fills some gaps left by its two predecessors but also mines unfamiliar nostalgic seams. Even for those who never owned a computer back in the 80s, these games are worth a look as museum pieces: they show how indebted to arcade culture the original home computers were, but also how, during the mid-1980s, they were moving away from those archetypes and experimenting with fresh ideas. Yes, most of these games can be hunted down for free online, as long as you know how to download and use an emulator and search for ROMs. But I like the ease and convenience of Evercade; I appreciate having a save function, and I like the fact the games look OK on my stupidly big TV. These games harbour special memories for me, and presumably for a lot of other people. If I’m going to go back, I want to do it in style.
• The C64 Collection 3 is available now, £20