Since the craze of Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC’s in the early 90’s, we saw a new breakthrough in gaming. Seeing this kind of game even on the likes of a SNES or an Amiga was pretty impressive to say the least.
A C64 version of Doom?… Surely not? Well, No Name thought it was possible and therefore made it possible. After seeing hints that a C64 could replicate a port of Doom through various scene demos, “Mood” sent shockwaves though the C64 community as the first “Playable” version of Doom, and a pretty good one at that! Well, ok… its slightly more Wolfenstein than Doom, but we can live with that. It’s a C64 afterall, and this is still impressive.
CMD surprising does not offer a helping hand for this game. With no Super CPU’s or Ramdrives needed for this game, just a standard C64 and a joystick. This is one of the most impressive things you may see on a C64. Ok, so the graphics are not as defined as the PC versions, but compensation had to be made for the fact that we are running on an 8-bit processor, and almost full screen too.
MOOD was developed on the Amiga using cross-assembling and painting levels in various paint packages on the system. Perff created some converter programs which the Amiga used to convert the pictures to datafiles that could be transferred to the C64 and run.
The game is just as playable as its counterparts, and just as fast, even more so when you play on a C128. Most of the weapons from Doom are present too, although it takes a bit of squinting to realise what some things are. Movement of enemies is not quite as fluid as the original Doom, but so what?…
The game comes as a set of previews which have been collected over the years, one with a set of sound effects added and better maps and weapons, with no speed loss. Rumours however of a C64 based level editor were rubbished recently and its been confirmed that the level creation was a complex thing that only the developers could really do programatically.
Unfortunatly, production ceased on this game after over 6 years in development. Currently the No Name webpages have screenshots of another much later version of MOOD, with improved colours and status bar. The weapons have also been vastly improved, and I am guessing that there is sound (even music) even more integrated into the game. Incredible… The Christmas level was confirmed by Perff as being done by another developer within No Name. There is a possibility we may see it at somepoint soon.
In addition to what we have added already, we’ve bunged a load more preview bits in the zip file for you to have a look at, sourced from CSDB and the No Name site. But also additionally, Glenn Rune Gallefoss has kindly submitted to GTW all his SFX work which was mostly unused. This can be downloaded from the link above.
Recently Perff, one of the game’s developers put a special preview out of some more of the later stages of the game, including the new score status panels and running much much faster! Does this mean we could see more?? Well, Perff has suggested there is always the possibility, but in reality what we have here as a whole is likely to be all there ever is. We hope that might change though!
However, it is a title that we may well continue to see little bits and pieces added to over the years, so we await any more bits and pieces of this wonderful Wolfenstein clone!
A classic PC game which almost managed to fully squeeze its way onto the C64 in its own little way…
Contributions: Glenn Rune Gallefoss, Perff
