Commodore 64 Sub Hunter Homebrew Review

Background
Sub Hunter is a fast-paced homebrew game, programmed by Richard Bayliss and published by Psytronik in 2008. The idea for the game was inspired by the Commodore Vic 20 game “Sub Hunt”. The game features what is called Parallax scrolling, a technique whereby background objects appear to move slower than foreground objects. This really a terrific effect, adding the feeling of depth to the game. The parallax graphics were at least partially inspired by a bonus round of the 1987 game Nebulus, in which you pilot a submarine.

Sub Hunter is a single-player game. When you first power on the Commodore 64 you are presented with the colorful RGCD three-dimensional logo. We are then bought to the pre-title screen page with background music playing. This screen depicts a submarine next to a sea mine. From here you can choose to play the game’s introduction or play the game. Selecting the Intro will bring up a really neat animated version of the games back story. Following the back story, the game’s credits scroll up from the bottom to top, followed by the instructions and acknowledgments.

Moving on, once the title screen displays, we are presented with another visual treat of the games name, reflected and shimmering just below. Some more game credits are displayed on the screen with stars vacillating in the background. At the bottom of the screen, the words “Press Fire” are flashing in green. But, before pressing fire you’ll note you can press left to enable in-game music or right on your joystick to enable the games sound effects only.

Gameplay
Pressing “Fire” brings you to the game’s first map. Here you’ll see the four layers of parallax scrolling in full effect. The first time I saw this I was just mesmerized by it. You’ll notice the “Get Ready!” text moving up and down. The game pauses in between levels, waiting for the fire button press to begin a level. The current score is displayed top left, followed by the high score, center, and the current level indicator on the top right, all in a white font. On the bottom left, your Subs available are displayed, followed by our oxygen remaining, center, and on the far right is a space for “swimmers rescued” counter. “Sub Hunter” has a total of 25 levels and once all are completed the game ends. As indicated in the game’s Intro, in levels 1, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 17, 20 & 21, you must save five swimmers. I’ll call these the “swimmer levels”. Keep in mind you are time-restricted due to depleting oxygen, on all the maps.

Once you start the game, you control your submarine, located on the right portion of the screen, facing left.

The controls are fairly simple. With a joystick plugged into port 2, move your Sub up, down, left or right, and press the fire button to launch torpedoes.

You have to battle sharks, crabs, sea horses, and a whole host of other sea creatures. Pressing fire will deploy your torpedoes one at a time. Striking any object will destroy it. Conversely, running into any sea life will destroy your Sub. You have to be careful because occasionally there are human swimmers mixed in with the enemy. Save them before they meet their demise. Round up five swimmers to advance to the next level. A congratulatory “Well Done” message will display.

On levels 2, 8, 15 & 22, the “sea wolf” levels, you control your surfaced submarine, allowing you to only move it left or right and drop depth-charges, one at a time, straight down to the bottom. Once it explodes you are allowed to drop the next one. On this screen, you are granted 30 seconds, in an effort to destroy 15 rapidly moving fish, to clear the way for the swimmers to get through safely. These fish are crossing your path, coming in from both directions, and are at varying depths, making this quite the challenge. Should you fail to meet your goal, you will lose a Sub and have to start the round all over. A nice animation plays of a swimmer being devoured by a shark. If you are successful you will proceed to the next round. Once the time remaining hits zero you will have a few instants to complete the task. One time I was playing and had zero displayed on the time remaining and still nailed the last shark just in time. The second time around you must complete the challenge two times, saving two swimmers. So the challenges get more difficult each successive time you reach them.

Levels 3, 9, 16 & 23 are what I’ll refer to as the “diver rescue” levels. You have to save the divers trapped on the sea bed floor. I’d like to point out at this time, the divers appear to be shirtless wearing Speedos and have no apparent way to provide themselves with oxygen, but I digress. On these levels once you start descending toward the sea bed floor, you cannot move in the opposite direction, and, you are in-fact in a sort of self-propulsion mode. Likewise, once you rescue a diver and are headed back toward the surface, you cannot move back in a downward direction. This limitation actually makes it more challenging and fun to complete the level, once you get over this learning curve. Watch out for the giant crabs and jellyfish, since they can destroy your Sub! It’s actually kind of funny. Once you rescue a diver, bringing him all the way to the surface, it looks like he slips right back out of the Sub and falls straight to the bottom again. Do this five times to advance to the next level.

Levels 5, 12, and 19 are “bonus levels”. On these maps, you must dodge the mines and try to collect the diamond treasures. Survive this round to earn your bonus and move on to the next level. Run into a sea mine and the bonus is over. The introduction instructions state upon completion you will be awarded a free Sub if you do not already have four Subs in the inventory. But in my testing, I was awarded a fifth Sub when I already had 4 Subs.

Levels 11, 18 & 24, are what the manual calls “Shark Attack!”. These levels contain varying sizes of sharks, coming at your Sub from both sides. Here you must dodge all the sharks for a predetermined amount of time, 70 seconds. This is very difficult! The parallax scrolling on these maps is even more impressive. It perfectly creates the feeling of moving through a deep underwater cavern.

Level 25 is the final map in the game. Here you must defeat the giant great mutant shark boss. This is no easy task, since this baddie has a few tricks up his sleeve, including sending out impervious multiple minion sharks your way.

Scoring
The scoring may change depending on which level you are playing. On the “sea wolf” levels, all the fish are worth 300 each.

Small Sharks, 100
Diamonds, 1000
Rescue a swimmer, 1000
Destroy a swimmer, -200 from your Oxygen
On “diver rescue” maps, picking up the diver earns you 200 points. Moving the diver to the surface, 900 points.
A direct hit on the final boss, 100 points.
Destroy the final boss, 0 points, game over.

On the “Shark Attack!”, and “Bonus” rounds you are awarded 100 points per second of survival.

Strategy
There’s not a whole lot of strategic advice to give out in this game. You just have to practice a whole lot and get good at it. On the “swimmer levels”, lookout for swimmers on the bottom portion of the screen. The colors can sort of camouflage them. Also don’t focus too much on destroying the aquatic life, instead, focus on rescuing the swimmers. On the “Swimmer levels” with the only jellyfish, move to the center of the screen. This will make it easier to pick up the swimmers. On the “fish clearing” stages I found that if I moved my Sub back and forth while firing, I had more luck than staying in a stationary position. On the “diver rescue” maps, timing is crucial. If you drop to the bottom on the wrong side of the enemy you cannot maneuver back up to avoid them. On the “bonus levels” do not focus on trying to get the diamonds unless easily within reach, instead, this is a survival round, focus on dodging those mines. They get successively faster as time goes by.

Graphics
This game is a master class when it comes to the parallax scrolling. It demonstrates the full potential of the Commodore 64’s graphics capabilities. The aquatic enemies are animated, multi-colored, and finely detailed. I love the fact that there are varying background images and colors on the various levels in the game. Let’s not forget about the artwork on the title screens, which are amazing. There are about three different explosion effects also.

Sound
The SID tunes are credited to the “Maniacs of Noise” and are really nice.

http://csdb.dk/release/?id=68969

There is a great tune playing during the game’s introduction. If you chose to play the game with music you are rewarded with several more unique tunes. Playing this way, however, disables the game’s sound effects, which is why I prefer to play it with the music disabled. After switching to sound effects mode, you will hear a tune play at the beginning of a level, and a different one on level completion. A sound plays when your ship first appears on the screen. There is a sound for firing. A few sounds for hitting the enemy. A few sounds for rescuing swimmers. A sound for dying. A tune also plays when the game ends. Overall this game has some pretty good sound effects and great music.

World Records
There was no entry in Twin Galaxies for Sub Hunter. However, there is an entry on highscore.com by user Shinjide with a score of 134,800 in 2014, on PAL hardware and is considered 100% legit.

http://highscore.com/scores/Commodore64/SubHunter/8674

For the emulated version there is a score posted of 26,200.

Over at cbm8bit.com, there is a score of 210,500 that has been posted but needs more votes to be deemed legit.
https://cbm8bit.com/highscores/game/c64/?game=Sub+Hunter

Easter Eggs
The manual states the following; “There were a few extra kilobytes left after compiling the cartridge build, so we decided to include a not so well hidden extra feature”. If anyone knows what that statement is referring to, please drop me a comment below. I was able to find a few undocumented features of the game, at least in the NTSC cartridge version. Do you ever have those rage-quit moments? Well if you really want to end your game and start over quickly, press “1” on the keyboard. This will immediately end your game bringing you back to the menus. Additionally pressing “Control” on the keyboard will pause the game until fire is pressed on the joystick. This will not pause the game’s music.

Packaging
The cartridge version comes boxed in the standard Psytronik packaging. The artwork on the front shows a submarine launching a torpedo while precariously positioned next to a sea mine. The back of the box contains four screenshots and the games back story. The manual for Sub Hunter is pretty basic and could use a makeover similar to what RGCD is offering now for some of their other games.

Ports
Sub Hunter was adapted from the Vic-20 game, “Sub Hunt”, but with many improvements thrown in. In addition to the Commodore 64, it was also ported to the Amstrad CPC in 2011.

Suggestions for Improvement:
Even though this game is approaching its 10th anniversary, I just want to throw out some of my ideas for improvement. I sure would have liked to have the ability to toggle the music or sound effects, in-game. Next, I really find this game to be a tad too difficult. This is partly due to running it on real NTSC hardware, in which the manual states will run slightly faster than on PAL systems. My understanding is that it used to be even more challenging just before the final release. I also find the bonus award system to be stingy at best. It would have been nice for there to be other ways to earn new Subs, like maybe every 25 or 50,000 points. I did notice on level 7 I earned a new Sub a few times on different games, but I do not understand the mechanism that triggered it. A wish-list item, for me, would have been to add a few power-ups, that enable things such as temporary invincibility and more firepower, like twin torpedoes. And finally, I add this idea due to the fact that I spotted one individual who recorded their high score by defeating all the enemies they could on level one, never advancing to level 2. For that reason, I believe a message should be displayed, either at the beginning of the level or after destroying a few swimmers, something to the effect of “Save the swimmers to advance”. High score save.

Podcasts / Other Video Review coverage
In the podcast “one man & his Mic” #17, track six features the title of the game from “maniacs of noise”.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/omahm

Conclusion
Psytronik has set the bar high, all the way back in 2008, nearly 10 years ago, with the release of Sub Hunter. It’s a fantastic & seriously entertaining game that has you coming back for more. The parallax scrolling really creates that sense of depth. The difficulty ramps up along with the color changes as you advance further into the game. You might think with only 25 levels that this is a short game. However, you’ll find that making it to the 25th and final boss level is no easy task.

Highly recommended.

You can download the digital version of the game, for free, over at:

https://psytronik.itch.io/sub-hunter-c64

The physical version is not available at this time. Do not let that bother you, the digital download has plenty of extras, including a two-player mini-game called “subduel” and a Vic-20 homage to the original, called “subhunt20”.

https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Nebulus
http://www.psytronik.net/newsite/index.php/c64/12-subhunter

Youtube Description:

This is my review of Sub Hunter for the Commodore 64.

Digital Download:
https://psytronik.itch.io/sub-hunter-c64

Maniacs of Noise:
http://csdb.dk/release/?id=68969

High Scores:
http://highscore.com/scores/Commodore64/SubHunter/8674
https://cbm8bit.com/highscores/game/c64/?game=Sub+Hunter

Podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/omahm

Youtube Original Post Date: 03/17/2018