C64 Game Memories - Revisited 30+ Years later : Raid Over Moscow

This was not a direct follow up, but was the very next release from Access Software to Beachhead (they would later release Beachhead 2)

Raid over Moscow, which was a controversial title and later shortened to Raid was released in 1984 at the height of the cold war and had a similar feel and sound to Beachhead but the graphics were definitely a step up.

Just like Beachhead, the game consisted of mini-games which you had to complete to get to the final mission where you had to perform a raid over... you guessed it... Moscow.

It's hard to imagine but once upon a time games were released with the absolute minimum of instructions & controls and my mind may be playing tricks but the very first level took me ages to just guide my plane out of the hangar. You had to manouvre in front of the door before press F7 to open it. I must have spent hours just trying to figure out what key opened the door!

Once you actually managed to achieve that, the next level was very similar to the beach landing on Beachhead but this time you are in your plane. Again, the next level is similar in that you have to destroy a turret by shooting in a particular area whilst being fired on. You repeat these three levels for every plane and you take the total number of planes with you that you managed to guide through these levels into the 4th which only begins after your last plane has either successfully made it or been shot down.

The next level is the one I always had trouble with, where you need to shoot soldiers and also 5 doors in the middle of quite a good 8-bit representation of the Kremlin.

Then if your soldier makes it through that, you go to the final level and one of the most bizarre mini games where for some reason you throw discs to try and blow up a reactor. Now this was for all intents and purposes a rip-off of Tron which was very much the in-thing at the time.

Re-playing a game of your childhood this many years later, its intriguing to see all the little cultural things like this creeping into games of that time. Like Beachhead its still a decent game to kill a little free time.