Cholo

Cholo is a 1986 Firebird release, offered here in its Commodore 64 version, and it remains one of the most ambitious things attempted on eight-bit machines. After a nuclear war the remains of humanity are trapped underground, because the surface is patrolled by a robot defence system that lets nobody out. You sit at a terminal below ground and remotely operate a scout robot, and your job is to free the people locked in.

The city is drawn as a wireframe three-dimensional model: buildings, trees, pyramids, thousands of structures you can drive between freely. In 1986 that was a leap both technically and conceptually, because this is not scenery to shoot across but a real space you have to map for yourself.

Its cleverest mechanic is taking over other machines. Your starting robot is a diagnostic model with one weak laser and almost no armour, so on its own it can achieve very little. Hit another robot often enough to paralyse it, though, and you can drive up, link to it and take control by entering a password. Each type of robot can do something different, so progress means hunting down the right machines, collecting passwords and working out which one gets you further. The game is nonlinear and never leads you by the hand.

That is also why Cholo is still hard going. The wireframe view is slow and hard to read, finding your way around the city calls for pen and paper, and without patience you will give up inside ten minutes. But if you enjoy a game that assumes you will figure everything out yourself, this is one of the most interesting titles of its era.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in your browser, with nothing to install.