Chiller: The Forest

[Harrison]

Did anyone else play the game Chiller: The Forest back in the 8-bit days?

It was a budget £1.99 platform game released on the three most popular formats, C64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.

This game was loosely based on the Michael Jackson music video for the song Thriller, and was split into 5 screens roughly using the same locations as the music video (but in a different sequence). And the C64 version of the game was famous for getting into trouble for using a SID version of the Michael Jackson song. The other two versions didn't contain the song.

The plot involved the usual scenario of your girlfriend being kidnapped and you having to rescue her and the gameplay was quite a simplistic platform game with each level being a single screen. The player navigates around the screen, climbing ladders and ropes and moving across collapsing rope bridges. The point of each level is to collect all of the crosses, avoid the enemies, and eat magic mushrooms to regain energy, whilst also avoid eating toadstools as they poisoned the player and start to reduce your energy.

Once you reached the 5th screen you then needed to rescue your girlfriend, but then instead of the game ending you had to work your way back through all of the levels in reverse to get back to your car in the forest and escape.

I never did manage to finish this game as it was bloody hard. It was a little too easy to die and I think I only ever reached the 4th screen a couple of times in all of the time I played it. I've not played this game for years, so it might be really bad these days, but it does hold some great memories for me.

At the time I only played it on the CPC, but looking at Lemon64, CPCZone and World of Spectrum I've discovered it originated on the C64 and then was ported. It also seems that the CPC version came off the worst as was often the case in those days with developers tending to port to the Spectrum and then from the Spectrum to the CPC. This was due to the two systems sharing similar coding so it was easy to port from one to the other, and as the Spectrum had a higher userbase, that normally got the port first. This did however mean that the CPC version was hardly ever coded to the platforms actual abilities which were far ahead of the spectrums.

These screenshots clearly show the differences, which makes me now want to play all three to directly compare them. I don't really understand why the CPC version appears to be so blocky and low resolution compared to the other two versions as the CPC was able to display much higher resolutions than the Spectrum.

C64 version


Amstrad CPC

[IMG]ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/si.../c/Chiller.gif[/IMG]
ZX Spectrum

[Demon Cleaner]

Yep, I know the game, pretty good one, here's a C64 screenshot:

[Submeg]

Lol, that music clip was quite inspirational hey?

[Harrison]

If hadn't known what the song was meant to be I doubt I would have guessed the C64 SID tune was meant to be Thriller!

[Submeg]

lol, yea I can see why! lol. Well the music was extremely hard to recognise anyway on any computer back then....give me old school computer music/gameboy music anyday!