I remember first seeing Grubz about 10 years ago and being completely blown away. At last here was a fully fledged Worms clone on the C64 and looking every bit as good as the Amiga original.
Sadly 20 years on it seems that the game has been abandoned and with no sign of it being completed, which is a huge shame, as it is brilliant.
With a multiplayer feature as well as CPU players, and Super CPU spport this may well still get seen some day, but for now it remains in limbo. Will it ever surface? Was anything more done than this preview we can see here?
At the time of writing, the web page for Grubz was still online, and details that the game would run on a stock C64 in PAL and NTSC mode, but would also support SuperCPU, IDE64 and CMD drives.
Highlights of the game would be:
- 2 screen multicolour AGSP scroll with open top/bottom border.
- 16 sprite multiplexer with interlacing (only if really necessary) and splitted hires/multi sprites.
- Particle effect for explosions.
- Possible to play against 1 or more computer players.
- Keyboard, and 4 player adapter supported.
- Fast math routines, movement of weapons/worms with wind calculated.
- C64 version with illegal opcodes and C128 2 MHz support on border for optimal speed. SCPU version works everywhere, but is expected to run with 20 MHz.
- Currently 2 weapons: bazooka and dynamite.
- Experimental ethernet support for local network game using two computers (TFE and RR-net works, ETH64 planned)
- Simple sound effects, random placement of worms and changing wind.
Work remaining was:
- More weapons
- More levels
- User interface
- and more.
A preview (which you can find here) was released at Forever 5 party and included 3 levels and one weapon. Its a SCPU version, so runs a bit slower. The plan was to release the game through Protovision.
Hopefully we’ll hear from the coders sometime and get confirmation on the plans for the game.
Contributions: Hartmut Pachl
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Grubz (zip)
Gallery
Update history
04/01/24 – Added references to Protovision, more details about the game from the site and credits.
The entry on csdb at least has gfx credits: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=12464
Also, the entry for the game on Singular’s HP is still live: http://singularcrew.hu/grubz/
Thanks Hartmut! I’ll make a note to update the page when I next do some site updates. Thanks very much for the heads up!
I do hope that Singular some day finishes the game!
Hm you think having a blueprint they could have built off that one. It’s a shame as the 2004 one was quite impressive.
Good luck with the new version though, it’s quite a task!
It indeed is a new development by a new person (8 bit Dude Productions): there is a playable preview now on csdb and it is clearly written from scratch and not “continued”, apart from having the same title (I would have changed it to prevent misunderstanding). So this title is not to be continued apparently.
Apparently someone resumed development on this game. Probably it is written from scratch by him though, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrB0WVYPoX8 is a preview of his work. I don’t know if this makes this entry obsolete or you consider them 2 different games, but I inform you.
That’s pretty interesting! It seems to be a new development by another group, so i’d probably keep this entry open and eventually we can link to the other completed version.