Retro Weekends plays and reviews Rick Dangerous for the C64. All gameplay footage taken from real hardware.
What we thought
"I've got massive nostalgia for this game, its great fun to play and I really enjoy myself every time I load this up, which I can't say about many games. I love the premise of the game, the way it feels when you sucessfully manage to dodge everything, and the presentation is very nice too. Yeah its going to kill you over and over, and its very unfair because there's no way of knowing where things are going to come out until you've played it a billion times, but when you have played it that much and manage to complete it, its very rewarding."
4/5
"This game kind of breaks every rule of game play design, you've got blind jumps onto spikes, deathtraps that you don't know about until after they've killed you, jumps that require pixel perfect precision, and there's even a section where it forks into two pathways and one is a dead end that results in death. But saying all this, somehow... it kind of works! I have to admit the game is entertaining, I think its because the levels are fairly short and there's regular checkpoints so you always feel like you're making progress. Some good points, its satisfying to lead the enemies into traps (I don't remember seeing this in many platformers of the time), the presentation is good, and the sprites are quite well done and have some charm. In closing, its a game of trial and error, but I can forgive it this time simply because for whatever reason the game is actually quite addictive.
