Commodore 64 Longplay [144] Rainbow Islands (EU)

http://www.longplays.org

Played by: MadMatty

Rainbow Islands, arcade conversion to the Commodore64 by Graftgold and published by Ocean Software in 1989.

"Rainbow Islands, Taito's Island-Hop coin-op! From the Island of Doh to Monster Island you will encounter Doh himself, stinging insects, hideous toy creatures, lethal combat machines, mechanical assailants, the formidable beings of legend and folklore and finally you will enter the world of darkness and it's inhabitants!"

I'm not sure the box blurb really sells this game. If it wasn't for the screenshots on the back you would probably ignore it if you weren't familiar with the Arcade original. If it had just gone with 'The Sequel to Bubble Bobble' that would have been enough.

Graftgold did a great job with this conversion to the C64 as it has with all the other versions to the home computers. Maybe not as polished as the Spectrum version due to missing Island map screen and especially due to the game ending if you finish the game not allowing you to enter a high score or continue. Apart from that the game is on point using all the C64s pixel pushing power to bring us a vibrant and reasonably accurate version of the game. That's not to say the C64 doesn't struggle of course. there is a lot of slowdown when there is a lot happening on screen. The collision detection is very forgiving which I don't think I've written for many c64 games. As long as you are moving quickly you can get pretty lucky with your movements, just don't stop when you think you didn't make it.

One issue with the game just ending if you complete the game is that all those cool item counters you have been building up cant continue into a new game. A second run would normally have allowed for some bigger score bonuses as you complete some item collection requirements. I'm a little annoyed the final boss ended up a corrupted mess. This seems to be due to the protection fairy sprite. Getting to this boss without it and the dragon displays fine. I know this is a realised to late that I had used the World Warp at the Doh boss and got the bad ending. I had to go back and lose a life to fix this as there didn't seem to be a way to kill Doh without accidently collecting the warp.

Just like all the other conversions by Graftgold, Islands 8,9,10 don't exists. I start the longplay showing the bad ending which also acts as an intro telling you what you need to do. The good ending is obtained by getting all coloured diamonds in each world over 4 stages which is more challenging than it sounds. Then killing the boss and collecting the large diamond. For an added challenge which I have shown, you can collect each diamond in order which will unlock a permanent powerup to be collected at the boss stage. Just don't collect the Warp powerup as that's a sure way to get the bad ending. Once you have the wings the bosses become stupidly easy to defeat HOWEVER, I did encounter a game or emu bug which could crash the game when flying above the boss and out of the screen.

Overall it is a great conversion to the C64 but lacks some features that made it into the Spectrum version.

00:00:00 Titles and bad ending.
00:01:05 Island 1
00:05:14 Island 2
00:09:25 Island 3
00:16:21 Island 4
00:22:13 Island 5
00:26:38 Island 6
00:32:36 Island 7
00:40:21 Good ending