Cisco Heat (Commodore 64)

"For all the good parts of the C64, sometimes it really struggled when it came to racing games, and few games are a better example of that than Cisco Heat. Take a pretty bloody busy superscaler racer, and turn it into...this thing that appears to run at one frame per hour, has graphics that you would kill to get away from, and controls that may as well not exist. It's not the worst C64 arcade conversion, but it's right down there. Alas, while you could get some awesome conversions that really punched above their weight on micros, this is definitely not one of them."

- Kim Justice

Cisco Heat was a racing game developed by Jaleco and released in 1990 in the arcades. It involves various police cars driving through the streets and famous landmarks of San Francisco. Image Works managed to get the license for the game and produced several ports to the home computers in 1991. This article will focus on the Commodore 64 conversion developed by ICE Software, which is considered to be the worst version of the game.

Why The Commodore 64 Version Sucks

 * 1) The graphics are terrible for a Commodore 64 game.
 * 2) Incredibly choppy framerate to the point of being almost unplayable, topping somewhere around 3 or 5 FPS. Even the ZX Spectrum port of this game ran better.
 * 3) * Adding insult to injury, the lights on top of the player's car flash smoothly.
 * 4) You don't really get the same sense of speed you would normally get from the arcade original.
 * 5) The backgrounds are really generic, and look absolutely nothing like San Francisco.
 * 6) The rival car sprites lack any kind of transparency, which is inexcusable for a C64 game released in the 1990s.
 * 7) The game seems to have a poor sense of perception, as the cars don't really get smaller when they go further away, as sometimes, other police cars get big and small at random.
 * 8) The collision detection is really inconsistent. Sometimes, when hitting an object, the player's car keeps going as if nothing happened, while other times, the car may randomly flip over if it touches the edge of another car or object.
 * 9) Gaining positions in the game makes no sense, as the game randomly decides the player's positions, and overtaking cars is pretty difficult.
 * 10) The game's warnings to make a sharp turn have been replaced with signs that say "STOP" and the player's car randomly stops and flips over.

The Only Redeeming Quality

 * 1) Decent title music.

Reception
While the other computer versions of Cisco Heat received mixed reviews, the Commodore 64 version got really negative reviews from the various magazines, with a score of 12% by Commodore Format and 30% by Zzap!64.

In the book Attack of the Flickering Skeletons: More Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of, Stuart Ashen considers the C64 version of Cisco Heat as not only one of the worst racing games of all time, but also the worst racing game on the Commodore 64, even worse than the C64 version of WEC Le Mans.

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