Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe's guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo's download service. Written by Sam C Gittins.

If you were in any doubt as to the questionable quality of the current C64 titles available on the VC you'd be right, while we have had one or two decent titles the rest let the collection down somewhat, fortunately though an exemplary title has arrived to redress the balance. Anyway enough from me and on with the games!

Available for download this week we have...

• Paradroid

Points: 500
Publisher: Hewson
Developer: Andrew Braybook
Released: 1985
System: C64

This title has the status of something legendary if you were a C64 owner back in the day, one of the highest rated titles of the eighties and apparently with good reason; this is all just hype though, what makes Paradroid so good? Let me tell you...

It's story starts with a droid crew of a gargantuan galactic space ship who have turned against their masters; A droid "influence device" has been teleported to the ship in an attempt to aid you. Using this device you must destruct, decimate and generally destroy the droids by driving into them or doing them in with your projectile based weaponry.

You can even take control of an enemy droid and use it against the rest by a process known as "transferring" and thats basically all you need to know. A lot of people seem to class this game as a shooter and for the most part it is but it has a lot of ingenious intricacies which elevate it to the height of being so much more.

For a lot of the time you may decide to just merrily go about blasting and bashing into bots but should you decide to charge your laser then you will enter transfer mode and upon crashing into a droid while in this mode you will get to partake in a mini-game by performing pulses along a circuit board (it makes sense when you play it) within a time limit; if you win you get to control the droid for a short while until they revert back, it's a well implemented element that adds to the experience.

Visually the game isn't bad and has enough detail to tell whats going on, it's viewed from a top-down perspective and as you patrol the decks you can only see bots that are in your line of sight which adds tension to the game as your never quite sure just when your gonna run into your next enemy.

Controls are nice and responsive with a small learning curve and several functions mapped to a single action button but it's fine once you get used to it and is testament to what was done with such a basic controller at the time. Difficulty is decently paced with everything easy coming at you from the beginning and then slowly becoming testing the more that you play it depending on how you decide to explore the decks, you can recharge your health at stations too after a battle which helps a bit.

Aurally there actually isn't much to hear at all as this is a "mute" game in terms of background music but in terms of sound effects used this was leaps and bounds ahead of most other things at the time with some memorable sound effects that are well placed and add to the enjoyment of the overall game.

So much attention to detail has been put into this game and with todays high budget development and teams of hundreds for most games it is indeed a triumph that this was coded by one person. Battling bots, discovering decks, transfer take overs, theres a lot to love about this game and it all comes together superbly to form an experience that is like no other, if you only check out one C64 game then make it this one.

Verdict : One man, One droid, One heck of a great game.

Thats it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!

Sam Gittins
[email protected]

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