7. Press Your Luck
A considerable portion of Commodore's history in the 1980s and early 90s was written on 40-column bulletin board walls, scrawled in Sharpie marker on blank 5 1/4" floppy disk labels containing public domain demos or cracked and pirated commercial releases, and archived on the comparatively expensive, loud, and low-capacity hard disks of its time. Although traditional phone connections are quickly becoming somewhat of a historical curiosity, there are a surprising number of BBSes still taking calls and serving content to Commodore enthusiasts in the present day. The C64 WiFi Modem from Retro Rewind enables you to forego satin-silver phone cables and flismy RJ-11 connectors in favor of a Wi-Fi connection to the wide variety of online services available to contemporary Commodore fans.
I don't think it'd be much of a surprise if I told you that there were a lot of bad games released for Commodore computers.
I also don't think I'll blow any minds when I say that this is certainly one of them.
Press Your Luck is another 80s game-show adaptation by IJE/Gametek via Sharedata. There are a whole lot of these game-show ports out there on a wide range of 80s/90s computer and console platforms - heck, I've only written 7 articles for this website, and now two of them are about these games. Most of them are solid-if-unsurprising adaptations of turn-based rule sets that translate well to the computers and consoles for which they were developed, making for enjoyable, lightweight affairs to play with friends and family. On the other hand, I can't speak for Press Your Luck on any other platforms, but this results of this attempt are nothing short of a spectacular botch.
The problems start before the game is even loaded. Gametek (I think they were called GameTek by the time this was released - I see like 5 different companies listed across the box, manual, and game itself) somehow failed to structure the disk so we can load it with the standard LOAD "*",8,1 command, instead insisting on LOAD "PRESS",8 instead. I was hoping that "*" would give us a written apology for releasing this travesty, alas: this is not the case.
Let's start counting load time. 30-60 seconds from the command above to the READY prompt. I know the 1541 "is what it is", but I'm pretty sure could've fed this thing in on paper tape more quickly. Type the RUN command - about a 1:30 to load and play a series of short (if well executed) intro animations to let us know who was responsible for developing this piece of unintentional malware, as well as a static image of the game board to double as a title screen. Just in case you're curious, there's no way to bypass any of this.
A "Flip the disk" prompt ups my blood pressure by a few notches as I discover that the aforementioned animations and title screen took up an entire floppy by themselves. Flip the disk, another solid 30 seconds to get me to the "name your players" prompt, not even as much as some "loading" text on screen to let me know what the program was accomplishing. Note that no disk access was occurring while all this was happening - just a series of weird pauses where it is presumably doing.. something.
Onto our discussion of the Atari-8-bit-tier graphics. OK, maybe that's too mean - it is pretty ugly though. The flavor text on the game's box recommends a color monitor, rewarding the player with a garish fruity cocktail of berry blue, cherry red, lime green, and banana yellow.
Seriously, just look at that palette.
Even the box itself is ugly! It looks like someone pasted a Polaroid photo of the real-life game board onto the printed text and graphics, glossy glare and all.
The music is quite complementary to the game's visual presentation in that it is also awful. It sounds monophonic and strangely jittery/clunky, as if you played a digital audio file in slow motion without pitching it down. Thankfully, it kind of drops out along the way, as if the game suddenly acquired a sentient sense of shame and gave up on trying.
I would gauge the fun factor as somewhere between falling down a flight of stairs and anaphylactic shock. The game show itself was never my favorite, but GameTek just ups the tedium tenfold with countless odd pauses in action and dated, hokey questions. In typical stubborn fashion, I *did* subject myself to 7-8 attempts in a row until I finally beat the cruel, annoying AI. Up by 7000 points on the closest CPU player with 1 spin left? Lose a turn and and watch them immediately roll 9000 points. At some point I was being beaten so badly that the amount of money the CPU earned (at least $100K?) glitched and became "$.))-?".
How about old Hank? What'd I win on my last spin, once I *finally* won, finally conquered this utter leviathan of a game?
Couldn't tell you, it didn't tell me, just booted me back to the 1st round.
My computer started making a high-pitched whining noise toward the end of the last bonus section. I think it was just holding on for dear life, crying out in torture. Waiting for someone to yank the power cord as if said cord were terminated by a pair of alligator clips fastened securely to a ballsack.
Why yes,
GameTek.
This site is copyright 2023 Hank Wesley Chorkin. If you don't like it, you can get out!
Back