Limbo – Commodore 64 [video]
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youtube.com
The parallax (e.g. trees) and enemies requires just some sprites to do smoothly, and tall and narrow is ideal for the sprites (you can manipulate the sprite registers with the raster interrupt to make them arbitrary tall; creating wider sprites is the hard bit)
I think on the contrary this is a type of game that was hard to envision at the time because it doesn't really push the limits of what the machine can do. It's an aesthetic for a game that did not seem appealing because people were still predominantly focused on stretching the machine to its limits.
If you look at C64 games of the era, there was a race to to cram as big enemies as possible and as many enemies as possible onto each screen, and using as much colour as possible. The evolution year by year was staggering, and few people at the time would "go back" to something simple.
The crazy thing is I suspect this would have been slaughtered in reviews of the time for that reason.
A lot of these type of games are possible for these platforms now because we're no longer stuck in a race for fitting as many effects as possible in.
So you're copying at most 2000 bytes (40x25 characters + colour) for every 8/4 pixels scrolled. If you're willing to sacrifice a sprite + a raster interrupt every 48 scanlines to cover and narrow the visible area of the screen a bit more, you can reduce the amount of copying even more. Same by not using the full height of the display, as is the case here.
After having a C64 growing up it was always painful to see stuttering scroll, as it was inconceivable to not have proper smooth scrolling in most C64 games or demos.
* Black and white
* Too short and easy
Although reviewers would talk up raw tech specs, when it came time to assign scores they were and still are more likely to consider the whole art style on a simple "how much representational detail and animation does it have" scale, which allows a lot of room for games with simple rendering techniques.
Limbo is spiritually most like Another World, which did have the "too short" complaint. Everyone liked the graphics, though.
And one of the reasons Another World did well was that it was obviously an entirely different beast, with it's rotoscoped vector graphics. It was something entirely new, and on platforms where there was much more tolerance for artistic vision vs. how to fit more enemies on screen.
While Limbo as presented here, would have been at risk of ending up as "yet another side-scroller" on the C64 at it's height, when side-scrollers of every variation was everywhere.
It's weird, because I've played through Limbo several times now and I never even heard of Inside, if it wasn't for a friend of mine who mentioned it when we played Little Nightmares together. Thanks for the reminder!
Rotoscoping is the source of smooth animation in a number of games around this time, though I don't believe Limbo uses it
I could see them second-guess if it was even possible to interact with that vine. And then at 3:00 I'm pretty sure they put the controller down to google what to do.
I would have preferred if the audio was in both speakers, though. It was a bit irritating listening via headphones and only having audio in the left channel.