MAIL ORDER MONSTERS | Commodore 64 (1985) 

The only channel where you can give a thumbs up before watching the video. 😉👍

The concept of this game is 10 years ahead of its time! I'm very surprised.

Electronic Arts released so many legendary classic games for the Commodore 64 and Amiga 😺👍🕹️. I have never played this game, but, as always, it looks pretty cool 😺👍🕹️. Gotta love these old retro games 😹😺👍🕹️.

I love this game! I remember playing this one with a friend. I think I usually picked the tyro or lionbear... but remember picking the carnifern just for something different... thinking it would probably suck... and then being surprised when I ended up beating my friend in a fight! LOL! Great memories! I love the Archon-style combat!

I never heard of this! thanks! Archon 2 was one of my favorite games! I see the similarities.

This one was definitely a favorite among friends from back in the day. So many early elements that have filtered through to modern games. Building/retaining multiple characters for future sessions. (Which led to my first lesson on how to hack to retrieve a forgotten password.) So many characters and worlds and options... some of which can actually do harm if OD'ed upon. But you always want to play this one with a friend. As the AI will brutally KO you around some of the primitive mechanics in play. Like this early menu system. More modern MMORPG found solutions with more buttons to working with real time menu systems. But we always had an honor system that when someone used their menu, just pause the action for a moment. If I recall, it was a clunky interface of 'stand still, double click, click through the multiple menus inside your info box, find your preferred weapon/option, exit'. Inside those vital fifteen seconds, the AI can just swarm you with a thousand claw cuts. Worse yet, when the AI wants to change things, it literally does so inside a fraction of a second. This really OP problem could have been solved so easily with an automatic pause. Probably would have taken one byte of programming to do. Another OP problem comes with a time saving option at the end of a fight. You are given the option to replay a match, which saves well over a minute. But... don't use it. Your character restarts. But that unfair AI goes into town, buys all the fancy upgrades, gets a spa treatment... etc. Basically, after a couple rematches, your character gets to growl while the AI is launching ICBM's and is sporting the latest in Dune body shielding. So unfair! Perhaps one of the worst that happens with advanced characters is that there are simply not enough supplies to go around. After all, the better characters get the better items. But everything needs supplies. Food seems simple enough. Just find plants out in the wild. Nope. Your character lives off of pre-packaged food from town. None of that foraging stuff while waging war. (These days, finding plants in the wild and cooking off grid is a staple of game play.) And those MRE's will run out, really quickly. Ammo. You only get that stuff in town. The game literally had an available answer to this issue. But again... guess they didn't have a byte of RAM left for it. It's called an 'Urban Defender'. These free-for-all battle tanks defend... what, exactly? Could have been supply dumps for reloading all your very limited supplies. Instead, I just used them to lure the AI into for free battle damage. In fact, the game only addresses the third supply, electricity, as a renewable resource. Many characters can have genetic upgrades to absorb sun into power through their bodies. It's painfully slow, especially when your fancy pew-pew gun eats amps for breakfast, that Star Trek grade tri-layer shielding isn't power friendly, the e-bandage is going, and the latte machine has no off switch. Your character doesn't need a cellphone charging battery pack. But an unlicensed Nuclear Accelerator pack. I suppose you could bother with that E-Stealer device. Ahem... which not only demands the same time and skill as a real weapon attack on your foe, but also will probably be trying to take the same watt that your enemy probably struggled to absorb from the sun. Which means that in advanced matches, your two Highlanders with insanely natural healing properties will be wishing to fire off those quad Buck Rodgers laser weapons. But forced to throwing around boomerangs, instead. I mean, just imagine any modern game letting you run out of supplies. No. They're always hiding stuff in the battle zone and dropping supplies from the sky. As for The Horde? Just the worst of the worst from the AI. Powerful weapons. Unlimited supplies. Rapid characters. Those guys needed a difficulty slider from the get-go. Big issues. But I chalk it up to being one of the first games of its type in what would become a super popular category... eventually. And I'd love to see this one rebooted with all the modern features. Barely even needs a name upgrade. Call it... E-Mail Order...

Oh man, another from the vaults! My friends and I played a ton of this game and that music will now haunt me all day (in a good way). This is one I'd love to see get a modern remake.

I knew this game existed but it never surfaced as a game I wanted to play. Good to see something new to my eyeballs though :)

Fantastic game! You can really see Paul Reiche III's influence in this game with the very Archon-inspired combat screens. Another game I really didn't appreciate fully as a kid and really learned to love later on which is a shame, I think me and my friends at the time could have gotten into this in a big way.

This was another gem of a game that I played the heck out of. Thank you for sharing this with us!! Great memories.

Electronic Arts was one of my fave publishers/developer for the C64, always top quality...but ive never heard of this baby. Thx for the great review bro!

This was one of my all time favorite games. I keep hoping some developer will find a way to remake it.

Ha! Never heard of this but I like the concept of it all. Great video as always!

I loved this game! I guess it's the closest thing we had to Pokemon back then. The music is catchy, if somewhat repetitive, and the combat reminds me a bit of Archon

I only got to play this one a handful of times (a family friend we visited during the summer owned it), but there was a surprising amount of depth to this one. You could certainly see the Archon lineage clearly- not surprising, given the developer.

I use to play this all the time and love it. So glad you covered it.

This is a fantastic game! Reminds me of a pokemon version of Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! I only ever played the Apple II version of that though.

I am going to download this game today and play it. Never heard of it before now.

All time fave. Each player had a disk formatted for their monsters, so you could take your morph to a friend's house. Also, there was a missile that said "strategic use only" but I never figured out how to use it. My guess is that it works on the overhead map. When you get enough money to keep enhancing your morphs evebtually the strength, intelligence, etc icons get all screwed up, which was fun.

The closest game I can think of to compare this to is _Archon,_ but with much greater detail. Graphics seem not too shabby to me, but honestly I was always willing to give any game a play if it had excellent game play, which this one definitely did! I've seen plenty of games that have great graphics but just just didn't do it for me, game-wise. Twelve year old me would love this game!

This and Movie Monster Game are awesome games (i discovered them through Game Grumps)...

EA nailed it once again back then with this outstanding game - simply abgefahren! 👍😉

I love M.O.M. so much, but man it could have been even more. The map view and zoomed in view could have made for an epic CRPG, especially with flip screen maps for an even larger feeling world. You can compare a bit with Autoduel, with a somewhat similar city view. My favorite build would be a crab armed with a flamer. The computer opponents were always dumb enough to walk into the flamer if you aimed it right.

I married a mail order monster.

I loved the two Archon games, and this seemed like the combat portion expanded into its own game, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't get into this one.

not sure I have seen this, but the name sounds familiar