They can, but not in their current form. One of the best 8-bit games ever, and indeed one of the best C64 games was Bruce Lee - I did a re-imagination of it, based on memory and nostalgia, rather than trying to make an exact copy. My nephews at the time were 5 and 7, and they loved it. They wouldn't love the old C64 version, they don't have the same focus that we had to have back then, there is no way on earth that they could play through the original game. I did though, we all did, and the original Bruce Lee game was damn tricky. The graphics were good enough that we could fill in the blanks ourselves, and we did, but show anyone those graphics these days and people tend to recoil in horror. I think the C64's unfortunate pixel shape has left it looking a bit shabby by todays standards. The colour palette was pretty horrible too. Compared to say, the NES, people are a lot less forgiving of the C64's visuals.
Anyway, I found that my nephews really liked the gameplay and flow of the game, they especially liked bullying the green dude, just like I did way back then. Kids still appreciate the same things we did, but they are used to things looking much better than we had to endure.
I had an art package that used the joystick, yet I didn't mind at all - I'd happily doodle away, I knew about mice, but they always seemed to be things that total tech-heads had, not for everyone. In fact, when I first got an AtariST, the mouse died after a week or so, and I remember spending a good couple of hours, drawing Haggar from Final Fight, pixel perfect, using a joystick and Neochrome
- on the ST you could plug the joystick into the mouse port, and move the mouse pointer a pixel at a time. I tell you, I must have had a lot of patience back then.
I really liked the C64 though, especially SEUCK, that was about the best thing ever when I got that, able to write games with proper sprites and sound effects and all that stuff. I kinda wish I was a bit older when I had the C64, like old enough to learn assembly language and SID programming and all that cool stuff. I still play the odd C64 game, on this emulator I have for the iPad, I plug it into an iCade joystick, and have a few go's on Wizball or Bruce Lee, Uridium, IK etc... it's like going back in time 30 years
.
Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
