Well designed playfield in interesting colors.

Yesterday I found an old game, that I’ve played when I was a kid. In fact, it was the third computing-game I’ve ever played in my live. Back in the days I didn’t really got the gameplay, because the instructions were vague und the gameplay somehow complex (for the young boy, that I was). Nevertheless I remembered that ill colors and the cryptic gameplay years and years, but just could not remember the name of this game anymore. And since resources on the Commodore 16 are not that popular (all hail the C64), I had problems finding the name or asking someone, who could have known. Yesterday the day came. The name if the game is “Oblido” and the whole experience is just better than drugs. Game starts immediately.

Detail: This is you shooting and the enemies in the “Sin Bin”

You aim is to “sort tiles” into special fields. At the border enemies running around at random, some can shoot – you have to be careful with them. You can push the tiles against the enemies or shoot, in order to send them back to the “Sin Bin“. If you got hit by one enemy, you loose time. Precious time. Because you have to sort all tiles to the according place before time is running up. Most interestingly the game features various elements from different games, but mixes them all together in a great manner. You can sense elements from Pac Man (the enemies), Sokoban (pushing tiles around), even boardgames (the design of the play-field) or Boulderdash (your overall mission, time limit) etc…

I’ve played the game yesterday for hours (yes, the game is addictive, too) till I managed to finish the level. Well, and figured out, that there is more than only one level! This is where it gets really hard. Simply a great game, lost in the tunnel of time. If you got reading till here, I have something for you. Over at Commodore16.com you can play the game directly in the browser.

This game was published by Mastertronic, a company, that got lots of games on the market for cheap money. Most of the games from them were good, addictive, fair. No milestones, but just great small games. I recently took some inspiration from them for my own games I am writing at the moment over at scnclr.de. You can read more about the glory history of mastertronic at guter.