Purple Turtles

The Good
Back in the early Eighties, long before they released their popular console to the masses, Nintendo introduced their legendary Game & Watch series, and one of the games released was Turtle Bridge, an original game where you have to jump on the backs of diving turtles to get a piece of fruit, then bring it home again. Jumping into the drink results in a loss of life. Mark and Richard Moore were a fan of the game and replicated the game as Purple Turtles, added music, and released it for the Commodore 64 and Commodore Plus/4.

The C-64 version of Purple Turtles looks more like an Atari 8-bit game. The cassette takes a long time to load, but hopefully it will finish loading by the time you grab a cup of coffee and return. You are presented with a demonstration of the turtles diving while some text scroll by, telling you from this very screen you can view the instructions, display the high scores, or start the game. You can also speed up the game with the [f1] key, and change the level with [f3]. The choices you make on this screen affects the demonstration (ie: the music speeds up as you decide to alter the game’s speed) so you always know what you’re in for.

The cover for the game looks nice. It has a zoomed-in, top-down picture of a man jumping on a turtle’s back. The cassette label is green, with nothing on it but the title and legal mumbo-jumbo below that.

The sprites are drawn nicely and there are some good animations of your character jumping from turtle to turtle. There is some activity in the backdrop rather than just being bland with one color; you can see hot-air balloons, storm clouds, and even the sun. There is music in the game, brilliantly composed by Mark Moore, but this music is limited to the title screen. It is the type of music that you heard as a child, but can’t remember what the name of it is.

It’s nice how some companies like Quicksilva catered to those people who don’t have joysticks. The [A] and [D] keys can be used to move your man left or right, respectively. QS also allows you to press alternate keys if you don’t like your fingers to be restricted to one side of the keyboard.


The Bad
In Turtle Bridge, fish appearing in the water causes the turtles to dive in the water so that they can devour it. Here, there is no such thing as fish so that it appears that the turtles are diving into the water because they can.

The Bottom Line
An excellent conversion of Turtle Bridge for Commodore’s later computers, Quicksilva’s take has colorful graphics, good animations, and nice music. The game is customizable, with the user allowed to change the game’s speed and level, and these settings are remembered even when the current game ends. If you like these sorts of these jumping games, then Purple Turtles should be added to your C-64 collection.