Relentless 64
A downloadable Commodore 64 game
A game by Paul 'Axelay' Kooistra, Harris 'rexbeng' Kladis & Pierre 'Cyborgjeff' Martin.
Back in 2013, Paul 'Axelay' Koositra, rexbeng and Tom & Jerry released a stunning 16KB shoot 'em up called Relentless for the Amstrad CPC - also, somewhat fittingly, as an entry in a 16KB cartridge competition - which it ultimately won. Then, to celebrate Psytronik releasing the cassette version of the CPC game, rexbeng uploaded a C64 version of the loading screen to CSDB as a teaser - but that was all - there was no C64 conversion planned... Until now!
Similar to the original, Relentless 64 is a high speed, non-stop score-chasing shmup with some neat score chaining mechanics. The enemy waves come at you thick and fast, and taking out an entire wave rewards you with an increasing score multiplier, resetting back to 1x should you miss a ship or crash.
Level progression is akin to Konami's Scramble - no pause to catch your breath, no 'level complete' text, just a scenery/enemy change and onwards you go, leaving a trail of destruction in your wake. The gameplay, aside from the scoring, is pure - no power-ups or bosses, just classic horizontal shooting action at a breathtaking speed.
It's fantastic stuff, with multiple difficulty settings (changing the rate of fire of the scenery mounted turrets and player autofire), options for music, sfx or both (with the soundtrack provided by the awesome Cyborgjeff) and proper high score entry (which even remembers your initials between rounds).
Download includes the original 16KB cartridge ROM image, a promo demo program and a disk version of the game for use with hardware or an emulator.
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I'm surprised that I didn't already comment about this game production. The game is technically quite stunning and modern. I really love the graphics. The game play is also very good. I am really amazed with how much has been crammed into 16KB for the Commodore 64. Well done. This would have made a great commercial game back in the good old days of the C64 if it was released back then.
very good
Do you think you could release this as a .d64 or .prg sometime in the future, so I can play it on my real C64?
Thank you for the disk image! Will try it out on my C128 right away!
Well done! I'm terrible at shooters games, like this. So, typically I don't spend much time playing them. But I really like what you've done here. Next to Salamander, I think Relentless 64 will become my next favorite shooter game. Thanks for including the different difficulty levels.
I liked the PETSCII graphics on the intro screen, too, and how you carried that theme over into the game-play. Very cleaver.