Raid on Bungeling Bay

The Good
For its time, the graphics of Raid on Bungeling Bay were very good. Like Wil Wright's Sim City games, you had a tile based top-down view of the terrain below. The animation was smooth. The controls were intuitive and helicopter-like. Pushing the joystick up made you go forward and increased speed, while pulling it back slowed you down, hover, or moved you backwards slowly. Turning the joystick to the side would bank the helicopter.

The game had a high fun factor, and kept you coming back for more. I loved the way enemy missiles would seek your helicopter out, and you had to spiral and bank frantically in order to avoid being hit. I also loved the very sinister way in which the enemy battleship was slowly manufactured in the shipyard.

It was necessary to employ a fair amount of strategy in order to win the game. You could take out the ships bringing in supplies to the enemy installations, and slow the enemy's economy, affecting arms production. On the other hand, you also had to tackle the problem head on by bombing factories and the ship-yard.

Winning the game produces a nice splash screen animation of a ticker-tape parade, along with the front page of a newspaper describing your heroics. I once crashed my last helicopter into the enemy's last factory, effectively destroying both of us. The newspaper headlines then described my ultimate sacrifice.

The Bad
The sounds were adequate, but not noteworthy, consisting of bomb blasts, gun fire, and missile effects. The helicopter's engine sound was somewhat grating. There was no music.

The Bottom Line
Raid on Bungeling Bay is my favourite C64 game, and has a high fun factor. Check it out for its historic importance (Wil Wright's first game); come back for the game play. I still do play it.

The Good
I remember when Will first started writing this game. I was skeptical about the potential, but about 6 months later I was vacationing on Fripp Island and Will brought his C64 with him with an alpha of RoBB. Another friend brought his Sony Walkman, and I listened to the Police Synchronicity II on headphones at full blast and played RoBB until about 6am for two days straight. My hat is off to Will for proving his chops at cramming a lot of graphics and AI into 64k on a 1MhZ 6502 processor.

I spent a lot of time beta-testing RoBB. I remember one bug that was horrific to find at the time, but Will finally tracked it down: "It turns out all those crashes were because the self-modifying sprite animation assembly code was very efficiently animating random addresses in the C64 memory space."

A year or two after the C64 release of RoBB, a dedicated hardware standup video arcade version was produced in Japan. Will received one of them, which I had the joy of playing at Will's home in Oakland. Alas, it was destroyed in the great Oakland firestorm of 1991. I don't know if any dedicated RoBB arcade machines survive but they would be worth a lot today to collectors.

The Bad
Eventually you got pretty good at crushing the AI, so replay value diminished quickly. But even then, it was just mindless fun to fly around and shoot.

The Bottom Line
Blue Thunder tries to take out the evil SimCity before they take out the good SimCity you are trying to defend.