Newcomer: A NEW game for Commodore 64

[Fanghawk]

I never owned a Commodore 64, but from what I've been told that's where lots of people got their first taste of PC gaming. And now that's all about to come rushing back with Newcomer, an RPG developed specifically for the C64. As in, professionally.

Newcomer was being made in the early 90s when the Commodore was just being phased out. Most teams in that position usually either scrap the project or upgrade to the new technologies but they did neither. Instead THEY KEPT WORKING ON IT FOR 20 FREAKING YEARS.

The game is currently being put through its last bugfixes before going gold. The finished product will be 2MB in size and somehow will contain:

•180+ characters you can interact with, each with his/her own portrait graphic
•10+ people who may join you, to make a team of up to 6 members
•...or try it on your own, in the extra challenging Solo game mode...
•50+ different areas to explore, created with 30+ different graphic sets
•100+ cutscenes/situational graphics in-game, that make you feel like you are there
•180,000+ words of ingame text, mostly interactive conversations
•No random encounters
•Thousands of puzzles and situations to encounter and solve
•Complex, non-linear gameplay with multiple levels of endings
•Months or weeks of immersive gaming until you "complete" the game...
•...but there will still be a thousand situations, resolutions and encounters you have not seen yet, and 2 more game modes to complete!
•Animated intro and outro sequences
•Game controls changed for more comfort for emulator users on PC/Mac keyboards
•VICE fully supported, extensively tested, no virtual floppy disk swapping, works like a native PC / Mac / Linux game

A little poking around the website shows some interesting stuff....









Anybody else going to give this a shot?

[Starfox]

That's called perseverance. 20 years to complete a game project.

That brings back memories. In the late 80s early 90s I was selling computers. The C64 was still a good rig although already pushed out by things like the Atari 520 and 1040 ST, the CPC Amstrad and the infamous Amiga line (those were Commodore products too)... and then the first true *IBM PC compatibles" machines which introduced the notion of software "compatibility". Amusingly enough, although the whole PC compatible thing originated from IBM, the guys at IBM almost completely ignored the new trend. They thought that the notion of one computer per home was abhorrent, that computers were to be reserved for business and science and that home computers will never be anything else than a niche market... talk about short sighted. When they finally realized their mistake, it was too late for them and they were never truly able to get out of their strictly *business* area.

Don't remember a Newcomer project for the C64 but then there were so many in what remains a completely crazy computer era with dozen of different completely incompatibles machines (both in hardware and software).

[bobdog]

So is it only playable on C64? Or will it be emulated for use on PC?

[Starfox]

•VICE fully supported, extensively tested, no virtual floppy disk swapping, works like a native PC / Mac / Linux game

The important word here is VICE which is a C64 emulator, among other things. So yep it should work if you install the emulator.