Dork’s Dilemma by C64Glen

A long time ago, in the days before Commodore is Awesome/Vitno, I wrote a post on my blog about my favourite Commodore C16 and plus/4 games. A long time later it occurred to me, that I’d forgotten a very good game, but I couldn’t be entirely sure as my memories of the game were hazy. All I could remember is that it was a maze game where you played as some sort of thing inside an egg who would occasional stick his head out of the egg to have a look about.

A few more months pass without any more details of the game occurring to me until I stumbled upon this video on YouTube.

There was the very game I have been searching for, and it was called Dork’s Dilemma and was released in 1985 by Gremlin Graphics.

My first thought was, it’s very much like Bomberman isn’t it? This is probably coincidence as Bomberman wasn’t release outside of Japan until 1987 (aside from a pretty poor ZX Spectrum version)

The plot of the game is some yarn about how Dork has crash-landed on a strange planet and his spacecraft has been dispersed over a wide area of the planet’s surface. His mission then is to get out there and collect and re-assemble the pieces of his silver space-ship.

The planet’s surface is split into 25 screens, and you choose which one you want to start the game in by pressing the space bar as the program briefly displays them each in turn at the start of the game. On each screen, you must eliminate a certain amount of aliens by catching them within the blast radius of a carefully placed bomb. The number of aliens that you have to kill to progress varies from screen to screen.

Once you have collected all the pieces of your ship you are required to re-arranged them in the correct order in the final jigsaw puzzle before you can finish the game.

The game itself is a great obscure and (almost) forgotten classic. It has good colourful graphics, fast paced action and puzzle elements which makes it great fun. The only gripe with the game is the difficulty level can be a little steep especially if you start the game on one of harder levels.

In summary I’d give Dork’s Dilemma a solid 8/10 as this is a very good little game and worthy to be in the collection of all Commodore 16 and Plus/4 owners.

[youtube xOPIJgKXGbo nolink]
Review by C64Glen

3 thoughts on “Dork’s Dilemma by C64Glen

  1. Glad you enjoyed the game… I wrote it all those years ago, really wanted to try and come up with something “original” as all the others at the time were clones! Went on to do Tycoon Tex as well as Xargon Wars and Xargons Revenge :)

    1. Tycoon Tex, Xargon Wars and Xargons Revenge are also games I fondly remember from my childhood, I used to have this Compilation,
      C16 Classics
      and also another one which was called ‘C16 Star Games Classics’

      1. Yep, those are mine… and Petals of Doom written by my business partner at the time Jason Perkins. We were Microprojects at the time… Did some C64 games, Frak and Monty on the Run…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *