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Played by: MadMatty

Clive Barker's Nightbreed - The Action game, developed by Impact Software and published by Ocean Software in 1990.

"You are Boone, drawn to the 'Nightbreed' ... their victim, or their saviour? Begin your journey at the gates of the Necropolis, a graveyard above an underground labyrinth named Midian. Your task - to save the Nightbreed, a race older than man, of fantastic beings, shape-changers who are being attacked by man's jealousy in the form of the 'Sons of the Free', an evil organization bent on destruction."

The first game of a planned trilogy of games based on Clive Barker's movie Nightbreed. Only two were developed and the second did not get a release on the 8bit platforms. The second game being Nightbreed - The Interactive Movie, more of a puzzle adventure game where as The Action Game shown here is more a side scrolling brawler.

From the Manual:
In order to complete the entire game you must do the following:
1) Collect the 3 keys to Midian: one is located on each level. In
order to obtain the 3rd key, you must defeat the MASK (although
he will subsequently escape).
2) Work your way around the Necropolis and down through Midian
to the Nightbreeds' God, BAPHOMET, who will then baptize you.
This will enable you to transform into CABAL for short periods of
time. CABAL can withstand attack better than BOONE and has
greater strength than his alter-ego.
3) Open the door to the BERSERKERs chamber,
4) Work your way up to the surface of Midian to free the Breed.
They then tell you that the MASK has your girlfriend, LORI.
5) Descend back down and engage in the ultimate battle with the
MASK. With victory achieved, you must get back to the surface of
Midian where you will be re-united with LORI.

The game can be difficult to figure out due to the map layout and especially on level one which is quite large yet you only need to visit a few screens. While the monsters can certainly do some damage, their is plenty of health orbs floating around to keep you in shape. A gun can be collected if you can kill the pistol using enemy before he fires a shot. Unfortunately I just didn't get the opportunity in this run although I did pickup the extra ammo. As you progress there are symbols on the walls to note which can be used as passcodes to continue the adventure should you lose all 3 lives. It is a nice game though with good presentation throughout including intro, mid game interludes and outro. very rare for the 8bits at this time!

Overall, the C64 version plays well enough, looks nice and sounds ok with some nice tunes in the right places. It's a multiload so the tape version would be very annoying although it's worth mentioning it's also the most noisy tape loader I've encountered. Not so much an issue on disk. I'll just add that the Spectrum version of the game is especially well done for that platform with high detail gfx and great use of the machines limit color abilities.

Final Note: I just want to add that getting this recorded was a huge pain in the ass. While I'm sure the original disk images are fine, they cause me issues with input recording due to 'truedrive' requirement. Finding a cracked version was a huge chore as nearly all the available images are faulty in some way. Either not loading after level one or failing at some point further into the game. there is no 100% working version. The version I used to record is "NightBreed+3-Sharks&Thundertronix" which did allow me to complete game from start to finish. However it did put up a fight. Whenever you are asked if you wanted to go to next level (through a door) the game would cause a hang or cpu jam if the Y key (for yes) was pressed for more than a couple of frames as if some kind of overflow had occurred. I had to slow emu to 50% just to make sure the key was only tapped for a frame or so to be able to proceed. I cant say if the cracks work perfectly fine on real hardware or not. -

00:00:00 Title Music
00:03:25 Game

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