Total Eclipse

The Good
It was real-time. Not necessarily gameplay-wise, but there was a real world time limit to the game that reflected the the amount of time the plot of the game allowed.

I loved that it was first person rendered 3-D. As I recall, this was the first fully 3-D rendered first-person shooter I ever played and one of the very few 3-D rendered games on the old 8-bit computers that actually filled the polygons!

The Bad
Slow! At the time, I was used to very fast-paced arcade style games. Even the role-playing and turn-based strategy games I played on my C64 were much faster. This is the trade off for having a 3-D rendered environment on a 1MHz 8-bit computer. Every step you take requires the screen to be re-rendered and you can sit back and watch as the screen renders each item in each room and fills the polygons. I was 13 at the time and it was years before I developed the patience to actually play this game.

Controls. The controls for this game were pretty rough. Because of the slow rendering of the display, your ability to control your point of view and do things like aim and shoot or even examine an object were difficult at best. It takes some definite effort to get used to the controls.

The Bottom Line
This game is a very nice game with the good quality you would expect of a true Cinemaware product. The story is very good and the action isn't over the top at all like you might expect from an ancient-Egypt-curse-of-the-pharaoh style game. It's got a good balance of mystery and action combined with a decent plot. It might be fair to describe it as a toned-down version of a Tomb-Raider game. While the slowness of the rendering might be bearable for an adult, it is probably not for a teenager or younger. If you are not a patient person, this game is not for you.

I think the graphics were a little too much for the C64. I never got to play the Amiga version, but it's possible that on a machine as powerful as the Amiga, the game could have played well. This opinion is coupled with my experience running this game on my C64 with a SuperCPU. The SuperCPU is essentially a 20x accelerator for the C64. When played with this add-on, the graphics render as quickly as if it were being played on one of today's (2005) game consoles or PCs with a graphics card. Unfortunately, running on the SuperCPU makes this game last about 1 to 2 minutes before your time expires. An interesting project for this game would be to see a patch for it that could make use of the SuperCPU (or other CPU accelerator for the C64) while using a timing mechanism that could still give you a decent period of time to play. If a patch like this were to come out, I would play this game again even today.