One of my earliest and fondest gaming memories with the Commodore 64 revolved around an oft-forgotten classic platform called Miner 2049er. It was originally made for early Atari computers and ported over to the C64 in the early 80s. When I first played it, my C64 was hooked up to a giant hand-me-down color TV in a wooden cabinet with very low contrast. It was pretty bad. But the game didn't care. It all worked the same.
It has all kinds of cool turns and twists. The basic idea is you have to run your character (a hideous and portly miner) across the entire floor of each level, changing the floor (or picking up something) from a hatched pattern to a solid color. And it’s timed. There are bad guys with no AI that walk around each level based on the designer’s intricate placings. If you pick up special items, this gives you a brief moment to eliminate the bad guys, sort of like power pills from Pac Man. And sometimes you have to kill them or you won’t be able to finish a level.
As you get beyond level 2, the levels become more extravagant and demanding. Maddeningly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to earn bonus men (at least, not that I can remember). You only have 3 men to start. Woe be the gamer who foolishly dies on level 2 or 3. Getting past level 5 requires a lot of patience, study and skill.
The mechanics and pretty fantastic and the game is extremely easy to pick up and start playing. It’s sort of like Donkey Kong in a way. But instead of just four different levels, it has 10 (although I’ve never seen all 10 of them).
In any case thought I’d trot this great old game out. I never see it discussed amongst the great games of the era, but it really was. At least to me.