Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun

Here I am scrolling through new Steam releases and... There's that clown. That clown who, in an odd little way, represents one of the milestones of my gaming childhood. You see, kids... Circa 1990, good old Commodore had decided to relaunch the C64 to appeal to the console market. And since it seemed console users essentially wanted a computer with less features, they took the venerable 8-bit and shaved off the keyboard, removing all ability to program on it, load software from tape and disk, etc. Surprisingly, the Commodore 64 Games System was a huge flop. So the following year, Commodore had a lot of weird keyboardless C64s they couldn't give away. They also had a lot of copies of the cartridge that was intended to be bundled with the C64GS... Which included an odd little circus game called Fiendish Freddy's Big Top o' Fun. Fortunately - despite Commodore's best efforts - demand for the C64 as a home computer was still there, so they were able to get rid of the excess cartridges in a new C64 bundle called the Playful Intelligence Pack. Which your overly wordy reviewer would find under the Christmas tree in nineteen mumble mumble. And, by pure virtue of being at the top of the m…

Good old days. This game was spooky and weird when I was a kid and it's still the same today.