Retro Review: Paradroid
Paradroid is a game by Andrew Braybrook that was originally released for the Commodore 64 in 1985.
Yes, I am writing a review of a 22-year-old game. Yes, this retro-review deviates a bit from standard Arthouse Games practice. I justify this deviation with the following two excuses: 1. I never played the game when I was a kid, so it’s new to me (and probably new to many of you, too); and 2. there’s very little modern grist for the Arthouse Games mill (art games are few and far between). That said, I’m not sure that Paradroid is an art game—more like an interesting landmark in the art of game design.
Okay, first things first: how can you play it? Paradroid was re-released as Paradroid 90 on the Atari and some other platforms. It has a few modern remakes for PCs (see http://paradroid.sf.net, http://paradroid.ovine.net/, and http://freedroid.sourceforge.net/). All of these remakes differ slightly from the original in graphics or gameplay, but they’re probably the easiest way to get a taste of Paradroid on a modern computer.
This review covers the original 1985 version for the C64—you can download a disk image of that here: paradroid.zip. I played it on the VICE emulator, and I had to download C64 system ROMS separately (from this package), since they no longer ship with VICE for legal reasons. I unzipped the paradroi.d64 disk image, mounted it as a disk in VICE, and auto-started the program on the disk. I had a bit of trouble here and there along the way (Paradroid is looking for a joystick—or emulated joystick—on port 2), but I was able to get Paradroid running smoothly with a bit of perseverance. If this process sounds too involved, try one of the remakes linked above.
Read the full review over at Arthouse Games.
Name: Paradroid
Developer: Andrew Braybrook
Year: 1985
Platform: Commodore 64
Type: Abandonware
gnome said,
June 9th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Uh, I meant, “fantastic review Json”
CosMind said,
June 10th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
’tis a shame this cat can’t get with a coder and rock out a remake of the game:
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=paradroid
the character design/art is so slick. i’d love to see it translated into sprites and acting as the visual backbone for an updated paradroid
Jake Birkett said,
June 11th, 2007 at 8:40 am
twas a great game. There was also a similar one on the Spectrum called Quazatron http://www.crashonline.org.uk/29/quazatron.htm . I also recently completed a remake of Paradriod 90 made in Blitz3D, it was good fun!
Anonymous said,
June 11th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Never could get into this game even back when it was originally released.
Chris said,
June 12th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Your commentary is spot-on. This *is* an artistic landmark in game design - and I think that was Jason’s entire point. I commented in more depth on that issue here:
http://www.somatoware.com/chris/2007/06/09/arthouse-games-reviews-paradroid-c64/