My expectations for "what the heck is going on in this game" were probably a lot lower at age 10, but I played the C64 port before I ever saw a Space Harrier cabinet, and I think it read about as well as the original, which is to say not very. :) There's rocks in the sky and giant mushrooms on the ground and one-eyed mammoths and Zardoz heads are shooting lasers at you. I don't think "the player should have any clue what is happening ever" was in the design doc!

The fascinating thing is that the C64 port was actually fun. It's decently fast, all the core gameplay is there, and it's got way more stuff moving and happening at once than you normally ever saw on the C64, or any 8-bit system really. There were quite a lot of crappy 64 ports of much less technically impressive games (Karnov and Ikari Warriors come to mind), so the fact that they (or him, I think this was a one-man effort like most C64 games) managed to make it work is kinda mind-blowing.

And I just learned that this was the somewhat-rushed UK release--the programmer apparently tweaked it a lot for the US release, adding striped ground textures, better projectiles, much better running animations, and improved sound effects, among other things. Wow.