C64 Longplay: Nightdawn

I added the fabulous soundtrack (by Johannes Bjerregård of Stormlord and Flimbo's Quest fame) on top of the gameplay. The game kind of reminds me of Parallax, or Terminal City, though it is not that good and a LOT harder in the later levels: 0:00 Intro / Title 0:48 Level 01 4:55 Level 02 10:29 Level 03 17:29 Level 04 24:47 Level 05 26:50 (got bored with editing the footage here so the rest is just showing short segments of the remaining levels) 28:02 Ending (which is utter crap. Probably why the robot on the cover looks so pissed-off) "The History of NIGHTDAWN By 2345, the Terran Confederation was at the end of its rope. Already a dozen more Confederate systems were under siege by relentless Iron World shock troopers. Once they fell, a dozen more would fall, and the Confederation would become smaller still. The war had raged for eleven years, and the toll on the people of the confederate worlds had been high. Fathers and sons fought side by side, desperately trying to halt the progress of the Iron World's hordes. Yet they were losing the war. Every new tactic they employed, the Iron Worlders overcame. In every skirmish, the loss of life was too high; trained soldiers didn't grow on trees. Soon, there wouldn't be enough troops to man the Defence Grid protecting the Core Worlds of the Confederation. In desperation, the Confederate Forces rapidly assembled a top-secret, strike force. The Research and Development division of the Corps of Engineers had developed a weapon which they thought would turn the tables on the Iron World forces. For hundreds of years, man had relied upon remotely-controlled drones to aid him in battle, and the technology to produce such machines had progressed much. Yet the drones had always been used alongside human troops, performing bombing missions, reconnaissance, espionage, etc... They had never become a part of the main fighting force. This new strike force was made up entirely of remotely-controlled, battle-ready robots, and the men who operated them. The concept was quite simple. Having established a secure orbit around anembattled world, drop ships would deposit hundreds of remotely-controlled robots on the planet's surface. Each man in the Centari Force, as they later became known, was in direct contract with one of the robots, controlling it by satellite from the cruiser orbiting the planet. If a robot was destroyed, it was quickly replaced by the drop ships. Using this technique, the men of The Centari Force were able to become highly skilled at controlling their robots and, because of powerful shields and a small fleet of escort ships, the command cruiser was quite safe from enemy attack. The test of the new Centari Force was on the conquered world of Proxima 9. An early casualty in the war, Proxima 9 was a supply depot for Iron World ships raiding the Core Worlds. The last thing the men stationed on Proxima 9 expected was an attack by Confederate troops. They got quite a surprise. The planet was reclaimed easily. In the years to follow, the Confederation troops and their Centari Force bought back the planets they had lost to the Iron Worlds. By 2349, there were eight heavy attack cruisers in the confederate fleet manned by Centari crews. The tide had turned. The Iron World forces were driven back from every planet they had overcome. In the year 2351, after successfully driving a wedge into the Iron World home worlds, they surrendered their weapons. In 2355, on a routine inspection sweep off the Halcyon Nebula, the C.S.S. Constantinople discovered a small planet where one had never been recorded before. Moving close to investigate, the Constantinople discovered that the planet, designated "Nightdawn", was an artificial construct: a man-made planet. Their scans of the planet revealed ten concentric layers, each suspended high above the next. No life-form readings were detected, but the planet was by no means desolate. Nightdawn was crawling with mechanized robots. Their purpose was uncertain. A small team of Centari robots was dropped to the surface of Nightdawn, to explore the strange, artificial world..."