Subj : SuperTrek 64+ and Tombs of Xeiops To : All From : Tristan Miller Date : Sat Aug 13 2022 10:38 pm Dear all, I've just posted to YouTube two longplays of relatively obscure C64 games: First, there's Tombs of Xeiops by Peter Gerrard and published by Romik Software in 1983: This is a budget-priced text adventure game in which your goal is to raid archaeological treasures from an Egyptian tomb. This was the very first game we got for our Commodore 64 back in 1985! I remember it came on a disk with a light blue label, with dark blue lettering in an LCD-style font. There's very little information on this game on the Web, and seemingly none on the disk version. (Scans of the cassette version are available on MobyGames and elsewhere.) Programmer Peter Gerrard was the editor of Commodore Computing International and wrote a number of other games and books, mostly on computing. The most recent book of his I'm aware of is "Around the Tube in 80 Pubs: A Guide to Some of the Best Pubs in London", a 2017 collaboration with his brother Mike. Six-year-old me found Tombs of Xeiops far too difficult and buggy and so I gave up after a few weeks. (The game's two most annoying bugs are its tendency to drop characters that are typed, and specious error messages about your inventory being full when it's not. Probably one or both of these flaws are evident in the playthrough video.) I created today's playthrough with the help of a walkthrough published around two decades ago by Dorothy Millard: Dorothy's walkthrough has a few errors in it; I reported these to her back in 2012 ago but I don't think she ever updated her walkthrough website, which has since disappeared. But Dorothy herself is still around as far as I know; she's posted to Facebook as recently as 2017: Next is SuperTrek 64+ by Don Lekei: This is a conversion of Star Trek, the classic 1971 strategy game originally by Mike Mayfield and later popularized and extended by David H. Ahl, Bob Leedom, and others. I believe Don released the game as freeware in order to promote Sysres, a programming tool he designed and used to help convert the game, probably from Bob Leedom's well-known version. Don developed Sysres while director of engineering at Solidus International Corporation in North Vancouver, BC. Don's got a LinkedIn profile which has seen activity as recently as 2013: SuperTrek was and still is one of my favourite C64 games, no doubt because it's fairly faithful to the tried-and-tested text-based classic, yet wisely spruces things up with colour, sound, animation, and a custom character set. The game does have a few minor bugs, however, ranging from rampant spelling errors to faulty logic in the phaser firing mechanism. Perhaps one of these days I'll release a patched version! Regards, Tristan -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Tristan Miller Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist https://logological.org/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3) .