Bob Winner
This strange little game (only about 20 screens) is remarkable mainly because of its elaborate and unconventional graphics. It used Mode 1 on the Amstrad CPC, which had only four colors, but a resolution of 320×200. The four colors chosen here were a dark purple, orange, a pale yellow, and white (Why exactly this palette was chosen, I do not know, but it was a popular choice for Mode 1 Amstrad games, you find the same combination of purple and orange in Reversi Champion and the Amstrad version of Mach 3). Backgrounds were probably digitized photographs; the sprites had natural proportions and very realistic animation. This naturalism, in combination with the completely unrealistic palette, gave an effect similar to an old print or tinted black-and-white photo.
Seen purely as a game Bob Winner isn't all that exciting. In many aspects it's a typical French side-view, flip-screen action adventure, but the emphasis is not on fighting or solving puzzles, but on avoiding rather unmotivated rolling barrels (in Paris?!) and flying insects. There is only one boss fight for each of the three scenarios, Paris, London, and New York. For these boss fights (two boxers and one cowboy), items that are found on the previous screens are elemental. From each of these bosses, Bob Winner gets a key; he needs all three to unlock a temple hidden in the desert, and that's all the story that is.
For the PC, the graphics were partially redrawn. The title screen got an additional border, and there was general more white. I suppose the reason for this was to achieve better visibility in CGA mode. Nevertheless the game was predictably ugly when run under CGA, but under EGA, the graphics came quite close to the original. Due to the restricted palette (in 320×200, EGA allows only the standard 16 colors available in text mode) the contrast was far lower. It was not a good idea to stick to the purple, which on the PC is not a pretty color. I experimented a bit with the screenshot and found it would have looked a lot better with dark red and brown instead, and still sufficiently close to the original. Another option would have been to simply set the darkest color black.
Nevertheless the PC graphics were spectacular and uncommon. In 1986, Bob Winner was one of the first games to support EGA, and no other EGA game ever looked like it. I'm not saying that it had the best EGA graphics ever, but it was, and remained, unique. Sword of the Samurai, with its imitations of Japanese woodcuts, occupies a similar position, as does Teenage Queen. But neither of these games has quite as much personality as Bob Winner.
In the year after the initial release there was an Atari ST version. It was very close to the Amstrad version, the backgrounds are the same, the sprites are the same, but the colors used in Bob's sprite, while similar, are different from those of the backgrounds, his adversaries have a greyish shade, and there are even some green dots if there is grass on the screen. On the whole, the look and feel is the same, just a little bit more sophisticated.
In 1988 the game was released in the UK, and was ported to the Commodore 64 for this purpose. This was not a good idea; definitely not a good idea. What made the game so attractive were the graphics, and the graphics would work only on a platform that could display at least four colors in high (320×200) resolution. But the power of the C64 was very limited in high resolution. It could display only two colors per 8×8 unit, and the background color always had to be the same. This mode was therefore rarely used, one particularily charming example is Kalah by Andrew Colin and Mike Masters, which simply used only two colors at all. Other games, like Turrican, used hi-res backgrounds with lo-res foreground tiles and sprites.
None of these solutions were feasible for Bob Winner, besides, it does not look as if the makers of the conversion put a lot of ambition into the graphics. The title screen got more colors, but the rest is just a blurry reproduction of the original. So the graphics that had been exceptional on the CPC and PC and at least still remarkable on the ST became sub-par on the C64. Without its main attraction, the weaknesses of the game became all the more visible and it is generally considered in the C64 community as one of the worst beat-'em-ups, if it is remembered at all.
