Tedious memory, but important to me as a kid. Got a demo of this on the cover of Crash that had the 128K music included. Only had a short while to listen to it on my +2 before being dragged off to a family holiday I didn't want to go on. The music was going around in my head constantly and I couldn't wait to get back to hear it again. I was 29 years old.
C64 games have a tendency to disappoint these days, as our memory of how good the machine was is inflated by the frustrations of its contemporaries. But this at least shows that there was something in it - if you struggled through the AMS/ZX version in 1988 and then saw that C64 game, you'd feel like a dinosaur. But going back now, you probably wouldn't play any of them. Loving the phoned-in box art BTW: Straight "Final Countdown" rip-off, obfuscated by swapping in the wrong model of plane. Classy!
By 1988 a lot of Commodore fans had moved on to the Amiga, including me, so may have never even heard of this one for the C64 (I had not). The top down bit at the beginning on the C64 is actually fairly impressive. Character mode to the rescue! With only 1mhz (or less!) to play with, you have to use every trick in your toolbox.
This really faded into obscurity. Which is strange for a Konami arcade game. These ports are almost unknown as well. To be honest I have never played any version, but they don't seem like the worst conversions ever seen. In facts I think I would have liked it on the C64 If I knew about the port. Interesting that they didn't even attempt an Amiga/ST version, it looks like even the publisher didn't really believe in this game. At the end of the day it reminds me of SEGA's Thunder Blade, seemingly very little gameplay behind the visual gimmicks.
Finally, a game I had! I remembered the graphics (or at least that aircraft carrier) looking pretty good. The title tune was great, until you realised it was barely 10 seconds long. Once you knew where to shoot the carrier, you killed it almost instantly. I don't remember the slowness being a problem but, I also don't remember anything much else, guess I never made it off level 2.
My local arcade had a game identical to this but set in ww2. It had the scaling diving through the clouds to hit carrier bits and the vertical shooter parts, but with ww2 assets (you flew a corsair dive bomber against japanese enemies). I even remember it being called typhoon and it did get a conversion to 8 bits as I remember the very cool artwork in the adverts. Maybe it was called midway or something but it was definitely using the same engine and gameplay mechanics. As for these conversions, c64 has nice music and passable graphics, the others look dreadful but Im guessing that a good conversion was just beyond the capabilities of those machines.
The Z80 versions look atrocious! This os definitely one of those places where the C64's multicolour character tile mode worked so much better, even leaving aside sprites. The poor CPC was basically crippled by the number of pixels it had to push.
Not on my list at all. For some reason we didn't want anything on our C64 for xmas that year but got Robocop, Operation Wolf (and I'm fairly sure) LED Storm for our +2 and were more than happy.. alas my poor best mate, while he DID get Afterburner on the speccy from Santa, he also got Thunderblade and this pile of cack
Really wanted to like this back in the day, but in retrospect it was the arcade I wanted, really. All these versions are super bland meh. And too difficult.
hi chinnyVision good video review . typhoon look like after burner . i have question can you make video about indiana jones and the fate of atlantis- the action game (amiga, c64, atari st, spectrum, amstrad cpc) . my favorit are amiga games, atari st games, c64 games. chinnyVision you are on my favorit youtuber list
I've only ever played the Amstrad CPC version of _Typhoon,_ so I only realise now, after watching this video, just how poor it is. Was this *really* developed by the same team as the CPC version of _Wizball?_ The C64 version looks like a decent, albeit fairly standard, shoot-'em-up, and the scrolling on the ZX Spectrum version is reasonable. Definitely not one of Ocean/Imagine's best games, and it's perhaps best left forgotten. FYI, the CPC version of _Typhoon_ *does* load all the levels into the additional memory if you have 128KB of RAM. Also, _Amstrad Computer User_ rated it 16 out of 20 in their March 1989 issue, despite stating that "the first level action is mundane to say the least", "the single colour presentation does tend to become a bit monotonous" and "the sound effects are nothing special either". Go figure! On the first level, at 2:27, the "something" that you fly through looks like an outline of Greenland to me!
This might not be the best game but I can’t imagine any C64 owner would have been miffed had a friend instead got the utter tosh that is the UK After Burner. (The US version is at least OK.) First Strike at least had a reasonable crack at the 3D thing a year later. (Also, on all these versions that looping cloud animation on level one is yikes. No feeling of speed. No variety. It’s the visual equivalent of a stuck record.)
