Berzerk (C64, PAL) by Arlasoft

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Table of Contents

Objective #

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Your goal is to clear each screen of robots and then leave via one of the exits, avoiding the electrified walls. Doing so will earn you a bonus, but leaving a screen before all the robots are killed will cause you to be labelled a chicken and forfeit any bonus. As your score increases, the robots’ speed and number of bullets they can fire simultaneously will also increase, indicated by their changing colour. In later levels the robots can fire at twice the speed and therefore become extremely deadly.

Take too long to clear a screen and ‘Evil Otto’ will appear, bouncing towards you. He cannot be destroyed so you may need to escape the screen if he gets too close and accept the verbal abuse from the robots.

A key tactic is to entice robots to shoot or walk into each other (or walls), and you can also lure Evil Otto to kill robot stragglers or any trapped in a closed-off section of the map.

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Controls #

Move – joystick direction without fire button pressed.
**Shoot **– hold FIRE + direction you wish to shoot.
Pause/Unpause – P
Quit to menu – Fire button while paused.

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Background #

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This game wasn’t really on my radar for conversion as Berzerk Redux already exists. However some hardcore players pointed out to me that as excellent a game as that is, it differs from the arcade a fair bit. In fact the YouTuber Mamemeister maintains that the definitive home version is actually the Spectrum game ‘Horace and the Robots’ by Steve Snake, and we couldn’t have the Speccy claiming the upper hand…..
I set out to match the arcade visuals and aspect ratio as closely as possible, in fact the only difference should be that the playing area is reduced from 208 to 200 pixels high. So many C64 ports back in the day felt the need to stretch everything to fill all 320 pixels even if the arcade original was only 224 or 256 wide.
I also wanted to include all the sampled speech and SFX which I managed to achieve, albeit at a slightly reduced quality in order to fit it all within 64K and leave enough CPU time for the sprite multiplexor and game logic. In fact, there are some extra phrases in this version created using the existing words. The optimisations required to accommodate the speech will also be useful in completing Robotron 2064.
NTSC is not supported currently, due to the amount of raster time taken up by the sampled speech and SFX. You may need to disable certain add-ons such as SuperCPU or freeze carts, anything that interferes with NMIs etc. I’ve had reports the samples don’t sound as good on real hardware. I guess emulation isn’t so bad after all….
Thanks to Shallan for his sample player code.
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Feedback #

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Unlike some of my other ports there isn’t much information out there in terms of base speeds and speed increases, so if you’re familiar with the arcade game and something feels off, get in touch as these are values that can be easily tweaked.
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