Story Time

Shoot'em Ups were a big thing back in the day and while I don't have a clue about coding, I guess the C64's hardware capabilities of smooth scrolling and up to eight hardware sprites were one of the reasons this genre fit so well. Of course, it wasn't just smooth scrolling and eight sprites, because that's boring, so there's stuff like parallax scrolling and definitely more than eight sprites and an often uncountable amount of bullets on the busy screen.

With all that, ads for the Shoot'em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK for short) always made me wonder how cool it would be to become a "developer" and create these fun games myself. Well, as it turned out, I've never saved the cash needed and I've most definitely never tried saving the cash needed subconsciously because my shoot'em ups would suck anyways. I don't know what exactly is holding one back to stop your projects and dreams before even trying but looking back, I just didn't see me conquering a powerful tool like the SEUCK.

I don't really know how many SEUCK-games I've played back in the day but I'm sure I've stumbled upon quite a few. Some were good fun, some were trash but my fascination with the tool never stopped.

Now, until recently, SEUCK wasn't really on my wishlist but due to a happy coincidence on Twitter, I got in touch with a fellow C64 nerd who was selling his collection. While I couldn't get all the games that I wanted to add — looking at you, Exile — I did snag about a dozen of games and SEUCK was one of them.