Damn that robotic dinosaur!

Transformers: The Battle to Save the Earth. Unlike most of the world I enjoyed playing this game for the C-64. In fact I'll go so far to say that in my day the Commodore personal computer was the greatest personal computing product created. So there.

The game was designed by David Crane, a well know name in the video game world as he was responsible for the likes of Freeway, Pitfall, and many other Activision games back in the 2600 days. He also created A Boy and his Blob for the NES in 1989. In 1986 I couldn't believe the amount of speech that was included into the intro of this Transformers game, it was digitized speech taken from the first episode of the animated series.

In the game you were able to switch on the fly between a roster of eight available Autobots which included, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Pipes (what?), Hound, Kup, Blurr, Hot Rod, and then Rodimus Prime. How Hot Rod and Rodimus can be two different characters I do not know.

The basics of the game was you would take and Autobot or a group of them and send them off to a certain points on the map where you think the Decepticons might be attacking. Then you waited to see if they showed up to try to steal Engergon from the various sites on the map. You as the selected Autobot had to shoot them out of the sky while they were in plane or robot form to keep them from making off with a certain amount of the energy source. Not always easy as they tended to attack multiple spots at the same time, I do not know how many times I switched to a waiting Autobot to discover that the Decepticons had caused the robotic dinosaur from Dinosaur Park to go nuts and start running around smashing and eating things.

Much like the toys themselves each Autobot had different skills, Blurr was of course the quickest but couldn't take as many hits as say Pipes. The transformations of the Autobots were nice though now of course they are dated, but even back then I thought they transformed and rolled out just a little too slow.