1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1988And what is this supposed to be? SSI making a simulator? A strategy company crossing over to the simulator side.

Well, it's not as simple as that. Anyone expecting an ordinary sim is in for a bitter disappointment when they load up B-24. Once again SSI has turned out a strategy game worth taking seriously, one that doesn't demand as much studying as usual.

The player gets the controls of a B-24 Liberator bomber in their calloused hands and gets to lead bombing raids against Ploesti in Romania, Nazi Germany's most important oil producer. And the job isn't easy - the 19 dangerous missions, spent being knocked about by flak, fighters and engine damage, make sure of that.

The execution is very much of the same type as the old evergreen 50 Mission Crush. Much more advanced, though. A brief mission description might go like this: take off, climb to 2000-3000 feet to wait for the squadron to form up, fly to the rendezvous with the escort fighters, climb to bombing altitude and fly to the target, drop the bombs and head home.

An effort has been made to make the game as realistic as possible. Although the presentation is a little deceptive (the plane is seen from above), it has been pulled off well. Flying the plane is done with the stick, while the other actions are on the keyboard. The game runs in real time, but it can be sped up as much as 60 times, which will cheer players up especially on the dull cruise legs to the targets.

The play area is made up of squares 10 miles across; one at a time is visible on the screen. This occasionally causes a bit of a headache when the plane has to stay within the square and the neighbouring square is mountains, which the plane crashes into after straying out of its square. On the other hand, the grid is an excellent way to navigate and to meet up with the escort fighters, a whole different thing from navigating by radio beacons.

The game's look is nothing special, nor does it depart from the general strategy game standard, and neither does the sound, though there isn't anything more to it than the roar of the engines, flak and air combat.

There is one small complaint about the execution, however. At normal speed the plane moves one notch at a time. When you speed the game up it jumps several notches, and at 60 times it only shows up on the screen a couple of times, meaning the plane jumps half the screen at a time. Smooth movement would have been more pleasant.

There's not much to slate in B-24. Then again, I personally couldn't get very excited about it either. The game is by no means bad, quite the opposite, but maybe it just isn't for me. The partial stick control may appeal to younger players too, although the many keyboard functions are an obstacle in turn. In any case, B-24 is worth playing, and challenging.

1991 SyksyTerrapolis, the largest city on Selenia: a meeting place for the galactic races, and describing it with the words "fascinating and flourishing" takes a sarcastic sense of humour. It becomes even less inviting if the crackpot scientist Vrangor and his henchmen carry out their threat to set off sixteen nucturobiogenic bombs with a bang, whatever those may be.

Once your agent on the Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters' payroll has been created to your liking, you pop over to collect your gear from a contact lurking in the toilets, slip into the bustle of the city, and the adventure can begin. The game is a sort of comic-book epic that makes busy use of speech bubbles and of splitting the screen into strips of several panels. The stylistic devices, for their part, are postmodern cyberpunk in its most hardcore form, which you can get a bit of an idea of from the fact that the red-light district has a cinema advertising virtual porn delivered through all five senses.

Quite a range of functions has been squeezed into the pure mouse control. Hidden icons in the pictures turn up routes, someone to chat to, the nearest phone booth and a million other things. Clicks away from any icon, on the other hand, bring up the command menu, the mini-computer implanted in your wrist tissue, or the chance to stop random passers-by.

The mouse handles more unusual tasks too, for instance dancing at the disco with the beautiful Lydia by pressing the mouse buttons in time with the music. For added spice there's action as well, mainly sharpshooting when deranged thugs jump you, plus piloting a glider in a three-dimensional flight sim. Among the other clever touches, the wrist computer's programming language deserves a mention: with it you can write commands along the lines of "alert me if I'm hungry".

The quality of the artwork, livened up with random animations, stays surprisingly high even though over 1100 drawings went into creating Terrapolis. At their best the street scenes look ripped straight out of Bladerunner. Sadly, the disco oompah thumping away in the background is a bad letdown and a humiliating touch for Amiga owners. You see, the digitised effects made possible by the sound card bundled with the ST version have been praised to high heaven. Sometimes it goes this way round, too. The title music, at least, is decent.

Technically B.A.T pales beside the graphics systems of Delphine, Sierra and Lucasfilm, but then Ubisoft's aim is to create something new: an interactive comic that boldly puts its money on plot and atmosphere. There's room for improvement, but the direction is encouraging.

1987Back to the Future is a game based on the film of the same name. In the film Marty (the film's hero) slips 30 years back into the past in an atomic-powered De Lorean car. Things get tricky when he accidentally messes up his parents' first meeting. Marty now has to get Lorraine (his mother) and George (his father) to fall in love, so that in the future they will be able to make Marty possible.

The idea of the game is to get George and Lorraine to fall in love with each other by keeping them together as often as possible. This is done with various items that can be found around the playing area. If and when the player manages to play the game through to the end, Marty can go back to the future.

You can see how the game is going from two photographs. The more clearly these pictures show, the further along the relationship between Lorraine and George is. If both photos fade away completely to nothing, the game is over.

Back to the Future's graphics are not among the best. There has evidently been an attempt to put plenty of variety into them, but the colour choices are not good. Naturally not all the sprites showed up, since sometimes Marty "vanished into thin air" and reappeared somewhere else on the screen. Then again, nearly every game suffers from this disease.

I liked the film. The game was a smallish disappointment. The music plays slightly off-key and at the wrong speed (I'm the happy owner of the Back to the Future soundtrack album). The graphics are not earth-shattering. All in all, though, the game is better than average.

1991 SyksyThe adventures of Marty and the professor in time just keep on rolling. Now the pals have shot off to the Wild West, where they come up against Indians, gunslingers and locomotives (?).

At the end of the second part of the trilogy, the DeLorean time machine flung the professor 70 years back in time, leaving Marty stuck in 1955. The local postal service, however, outdoes itself and delivers Marty a letter from 1885. In the letter the professor says he is living a happy life as a blacksmith. He forbids Marty to come and fetch him, but still tells him where he has hidden the time machine. The DeLorean turns up in an abandoned mine shaft. Nearby, Marty finds a gravestone engraved with the professor's name and a date of death just a few days after the date on the letter. So Marty sets off to rescue the prof from the past.

For lack of action, the film doesn't offer many openings for making a game, but Probe, who usually turn out sheer garbage, have lo and behold managed to cobble together a surprisingly good game. BTTF III is split into four levels that get harder towards the end. In the first level, as the prof, you have to ride down Clara Clayton's horse-drawn wagon, which bolting horses are carrying towards a ravine. Pull that off, and Clara becomes your lover.

The second level is a shooting gallery where the player blasts away at all sorts of targets and racks up points. In the third level Buford Tannen's gang surround Marty, who has to hit every member of the gang three times with pie plates. After that he faces Mad Dog himself, Buford Tannen. If the player survives even this, there's still one last level ahead, in which you try to get the DeLorean up to a high enough speed for the time jump by mounting it in front of a locomotive.

The game lets you practise levels two and three before the game proper. The pie-plate throwing in particular is quite exceptionally difficult because of the odd perspective and the way it plays, so practising pays off.

The visuals range in quality from average to good. The audio side offers passable versions of classic old western film theme tunes. All four sub-games are quite decent, although the plate throwing is far too hard. The sum of the parts doesn't lift the game out of mediocrity, though, so this game can only be recommended to those who liked the film and want to try their skills as Marty and the prof.

1988Paul Woakes is an odd bird who reached demigod status after making only two games. Mercenary is a legend, but how many people remember Woakes's first game, the classic Encounter?

Backlash's full name is Backlash: Enocounter Mk II, which tells anyone familiar with Encounter what the name of the game ought to be. That is, an insanely fast, furious, three-dimensional mega-shoot-'em-up. And that's exactly what Backlash is. As an old Emcounter fan, I went crazy with delight after just a few minutes of playing Backlash.

Backlash is one of those rare games made for the super micros where you can tell the machine is being pushed to its absolute limits. In Backlash, for example, there can be dozens of moving objects on screen at once without the game slowing down one bit. The enemies are no longer simple geometric shapes but really good-looking ships with a metallic sheen, in some cases even animated. The graphics are truly unbelievable all round. Everything moves smoothly, fireball-like shots bounce across the terrain, objects grow and shrink without the slightest jerkiness, and the use of colour is exemplary. Every object, even if it's just a scrap of an explosion cloud, naturally has a shadow. Neither words nor pictures can do the graphics justice; you have to see it.

As a game, too, Backlash is top class. It's a truly brilliant shooter that you can keep blasting away at for hours on end without getting bored. The only thing to complain about is the radar around the gunsight. It's hard to make out on a television. Search as you might, you won't find any other fault.

Backlash is a must-buy for every owner of a 32-bit micro. Best of all, Woakes's next game, Damocles-Mercenary II, is going to be even more impressive. The future looks bright.

1990 SyksyOnce again we move into a world mangled by nuclear war. To console players about the bright prospects for the future, they are put into a mutant's shoes and, unfortunately, trousers.

As a result of the nuclear war a lot of mutants were born into the world. The normal people quickly cut the mutants off from their midst, and the poor mutants were driven far away from civilisation. In their own reservations the mutants live a peaceful existence without disturbing the 'norms', who in turn leave them in peace. Things went on like this for some time. Then alarming messages began to come from beyond the mountains. For some reason the norms are setting off on a crusade against the mutants. The mutants' chief reasons that the mutants haven't got what it takes to win an armed struggle, so the only option left is to use the little grey cells. The chief sends a single spy to find out why the humans have suddenly turned against the mutants. That mutant is of course you, congratulations.

The game's programmer is Chris Roberts, whose track record includes Origin's game Times Of Lore. TOL shines through in Bad Blood as well. On screen there's a partly buried television through which you watch the game. Next to the television is a bottle whose contents reflect the player's energy. The television has a few knobs that handle everything you need to do in the game. Like TOL, the game is viewed from above. Owners of a VGA card are in a happy position, as the trend is moving towards 256-colour VGA graphics. Bad Blood too follows the new standard, and the end result is a real treat for the eyes.

Nobody even tries to do anything revolutionary with the PC's beeper, but it's another story if the machine has one of the more popular sound cards. Apparently quite a few working hours have been put into the music, and it creates a splendid atmosphere. The keyboard control works accurately and without a murmur. The only big minus in the game is the inordinate difficulty at the start. There isn't so much as a token clue, and the character is weak and nearly unarmed. The playing area is so vast that you get lost in the desert far too easily. If thirst and hunger don't kill the character off quickly, the assorted monsters transformed by radioactive dust will see to that.

BB only shows its best sides after many hours of play, but by then the most impatient players will already have switched the machine off. That's a pity, because BB is a good game despite its initial difficulties. By way of guidance, I can say that if you liked Times Of Lore, you'll like this one too.

1988The year is 1988 and Seoul is getting ready for the Olympics. Celebrities are preparing their speeches and the organisers are waiting for the crowds to pour in. But the notorious sewer cats, loathed by everyone, are planning games of their own.

Phew. Of all the idiotic stories I've read that were cobbled together to justify a game, Bad Cat's drivel must surely be among the very dumbest.

Bad Cat consists of a handful of events in which you steer a cat dashing over and under obstacles. World Games for cats, then. The events are certainly rather peculiar, ranging from trapeze artistry to barrel kicking, and there's even some beer drinking in there. Playing it could be quite a pleasant way to pass the time, if the playability hadn't been botched quite so thoroughly. The stupid moggy just won't obey the joystick. The final fine-tuning has gone wrong, and it wrecks a game that looks and sounds nice.

The C-64 version's graphics don't lag much behind even the Amiga version's, but the game's sound certainly doesn't make you sit up and take notice. A big plus worth mentioning is the intro that loads first, whose background music deserves a perfect ten. Once the game had frustrated me, I actually loaded the intro all over again. It's nicer to watch and listen to than the game is to play.

1990 SyksyIt can truly be said that you've fallen into bad company. All around you there's a violent-looking bunch: mercenaries, company hirelings, weapons experts, in other words obvious psychopaths. Or what else could you expect from guys with names like Chronos Warchild or Bruce 'Maniac' North.

The BAD company has hired these creatures to wipe out every living thing on a few planets, so that the planets can then be sold off to Earth for settlement. The job is obviously a suicide mission, but what wouldn't you do for money.

When you know who dreamed up Bad Company, you know to expect a bloody game that's all about killing. Steve Bak has earned a certain reputation as a maker of Commando-style games. His latest products include, among others, Dogs of War, which was supposed to be a kind of culmination of its genre. At that DoW didn't entirely succeed, but undaunted, Bak has pushed his next game out the door. Anyone expecting yet another Commando game will be disappointed.

Bak reckoned the ordinary top-down shoot-'em-up had been squeezed dry, so something new had to be invented. Bad Company isn't all that original, though; it resembles Space Harrier. A man seen from behind runs through a three-dimensional landscape, whittling the oncoming monsters down with his gun into a less unfriendly shape.

So that nobody mistakes Bad Company for Space Harrier 2, something new has had to be thrown into the mix. The most visible difference is that Bruce Maniac and his pals can't fly. But Bruce can also move backwards, and extra weapons are on offer too. Bruce can also take cover behind various heaps of rock and hope the enemy fire doesn't blast the cover to pieces.

On the planets' surfaces you may run into strange creatures that fly or get about on foot. Some enemies hurl deadly balls to the player's annoyance, others settle for plain shooting. The player's strength, which drops with every hit, is shown as a bar at the top of the screen. Fortunately your strength slowly comes back, depending on the soldier's condition. The ultimate salvation is a regenerator, which raises your strength back to its original level.

Collecting weapons also calls for a bit of tactics. The flying baddies can only be brought down with a few of the weapons. To boost your firepower you can find energy packs, and once you've used one you've got twice the oomph.

At the end of every level there's a bigger monster to nail, unfortunately the same model in every world. Once the end monster is dead, the company ships the player off to a new world again. The familiar star scroll whizzes across the screen, and then it's more shooting ahead.

The graphics are in no way revolutionary, and the sound effects don't make any better an impression. Bad Company would be quite a nice game, but something seems to be missing. Shoot-'em-up fans may get some degree of satisfaction out of it, but interest soon drops, especially as the game isn't terribly hard to play through. The two-player option naturally raises interest, but not enough.

1989 SyksyWhat does "Elite" mean? What on earth is "Gauntlet"? At last a game has arrived for our age, which needs everything spelled out: "Bad Dudes Versus Dragon Ninja". Rarely does a name tell the busy city type so clearly what a game is all about.

Dragonninja is based on Data East's acclaimed coin-op. As those who have played a bit more will already guess, the Dragon Ninja battles through armies of terrorist ninjas to face, at the end of every level, the obligatory special opponent. Some of the clobbered Bad Dudes leave behind a knife, extra time or extra energy. By standing still on the spot with the fire button squeezed tight, the ninja builds up power for a special-super-mega-punch that mows down opponents by the bucketload. Of the joystick's sixteen possible positions, every single one answers the call and gets results.

So Dragonninja brings nothing new to the gaming world, but at least it delivers its stock phrases nicely crafted. There's no stumbling into a botch-up like Double Dragon. The Commodore 64 graphics are excellent, even though the characters' walking speed and their animation are at odds with each other. The hit area of the blows, on the other hand, is stingy and miserly, which pleases some people but not me.

Two-player option aside, Dragonninja is as close to the arcade machine as the Commodore 64's resources will get you. The Amstrad version loses out on graphic detail but wins on playability. Among the 16-bits, the Amiga does excellently, with graphics that are big and showy and move very nimbly. The ST looks the same, but the massive slowness results in the game disks being formatted.

Dragonninja's biggest advantage is that any misogynist can beat up women on screen without having to get married.

1991 KevätThe classic Super Sprint, whose ST home version earns full marks and whose other versions earn a roasting, has come back in Atari's arcade game Badlands.

Badlands is, as Super Sprint games always are, a top-down racing game whose most striking features are very small graphics and a race track with four cars scurrying round it. The aim is to be first across the line and to pick up as much of the junk that appears on the track as you can. In Badlands you can also take potshots at your fellow competitors, and you can go head to head with a mate too.

Badlands was programmed by Teque, who have churned out a truly large number of dismal games. The title screen is downright ghastly and certainly doesn't raise expectations. So the game turns out to be a pleasant surprise at first, apart from the audio side, which is in a sorry state. The playability is perfectly OK, the graphics are passable and there are no bad blunders in sight.

But heaven help you once you get a bit further into the game. However much you tune up your car, the computer-driven cars tear to the finish at such a staggering speed that all you can do is tear your hair out. Bringing a mate along doesn't change a thing. A few tracks go quite nicely, until all of a sudden the computer's cars start zooming round like mad. That's where your progress grinds to a halt, and so does your interest in the game.

1987The idea of Ballblazer is the same as in football. There are always two players. If you can't find a second player, the computer is your opponent.

The object of the game is naturally to score as many goals as possible. The pitch is fairly large and its edges are completely elastic magnetic fences. The players sit in rotofoils, small craft surrounded by a magnetic field. With the magnetic field you can catch the ball and carry it along with you. You "kick" the ball into the goal by boosting the strength of the rotofoil's magnetic field (fire button). The ball then flies forward at tremendous speed.

So that the game doesn't get too easy, the goal gets smaller after every goal scored. After seven goals the goal is only 2.5 metres wide. In a one-player game you can also choose a tougher computer opponent.

The game's musical and graphical presentation is better than average. In my opinion this game is extremely interesting. I myself couldn't stop playing it again and again. The game is too simple, though.

1989 SyksyPsygnosis/Psyclapse seems to be positively churning out new games these days. I have yet to see a single overly original contraption, and although Ballistix tries hard to be original, dig a little and you can trace its roots too to Imageworks' Speedball. The game is played either two-player or against a computer opponent, on a futuristic pitch that scrolls up and down. The idea is to get the ball travelling around the pitch into the opponent's goal.

You by no means scoop up the ball and carry it into the goal, knocking the opponent's men flat along the way; instead the ball's course is controlled by shooting metal pellets at it from the tip of an arrow that obeys the joystick's commands. The arrow always points in the direction opposite to whichever side of the ball it happens to be on. The fire button naturally launches a pellet. There are also various icons and letters on the pitch, and collecting them gets you extra pellets, extra time and goals, and plenty more. The manual is only needed to explain the letters and symbols that appear on the pitch; otherwise Ballistix is simple and easy to grasp.

In true Psyclapse style the audiovisual side is well in hand, so nothing more to say there. With the playability in order as well, all you can say is that Ballistix is a well-made and fun game. With some reservation, you could say that playing against the computer gets boring quickly, so playing against a mate is more advisable. Myself, though, I'm sticking firmly with Speedball.

1987This strategy game from Strategic Simulations Inc. is the third part of a series of programs about World War III. The Warsaw Pact armies have rolled onto the soil of the Federal Republic of Germany as far as the Rhine, where they are forced to halt. At this point NATO's supreme commander has decided to launch a counter-attack to rescue the NATO troops trapped in Berlin. The player has to either try to carry out this attack or stop it. There are three difficulty levels.

The game starts from a position that is highly favourable to the attacker. At that stage the attacker still has a large superiority in strength. While resistance is light, you have to try to push as far as possible along the roads leading to Berlin. At the start of the fifth turn the Warsaw Pact armies receive their first reinforcements. By then you had better already be in Berlin, because the defence has a large superiority once the reinforcements have arrived. By the end of the eighth move the defender is winning, unless the attacker has managed to destroy enough of the defenders early in the game.

The game ends when one of the sides has lost. Victory is calculated from the number of positions captured and held and the number of troops destroyed. You can tell from the way the points are counted that the Warsaw Pact has been given the upper hand. The NATO player gets only half a point for each unit NATO destroys, whereas whoever represents the Warsaw Pact countries gets a full point for destroying a NATO unit.

In the game the units are controlled from the keyboard. The number keys 1-6, which sit in awkward places, have been chosen for the controls. Playing is fiddly at first, since finding the right keys always takes a moment. After a few games, though, it becomes routine.

Each unit is commanded separately. The enemy is fired on either by calling in air support, by direct fire or just with a general fire order. The air force provides more or less air support depending on the situation. The number of air strikes is recalculated every turn, taking the current state of air superiority into account. Direct fire is the deadliest, because all the firepower is concentrated on the one enemy unit you want to hit. A plain fire order gives all the troops within range permission to open fire. The firing unit's firepower is then split among all the enemy units.

The screen always shows part of the playing area, along with your own and the enemy's units in that area. The screen is a window through which you see part of the map of the area. The Apple version also lets you view the whole map at once.

This game offers a chance to think logically. Especially at the higher difficulty levels, strong strategic thinking is needed. Like other strategy games, though, this one has a drawback too: a game lasts many hours. Of course you can save the game to disk, but when you carry on you may no longer be in quite the right frame of mind for the situation.

Once the Warsaw Pact countries' troops get their reinforcements, for many a NATO player the game may turn into a tediously slow (or quick) defeat. You have to remember, though, that in games you can, and must, learn the hard way. The idea of the game is not far-fetched as such, since it has all the units that make up a modern army.

Baltic 1985 can be recommended to anyone who likes strategy games. There is nothing new or particularly earth-shattering about it, but it has a style of its own all the same.

1987"Wretched Hyrkanian dog, eat the edge of my sword", growls Nico's invincible Barbarian, and with a deft combination of moves he strikes his opponent's head clean off his shoulders. The loose head goes bouncing along the flagstones as the blood-spurting body slumps to the ground. The goblin dragging the body away sends the head on its way with a hefty kick. Sick but fun.

Three frames from the new Conan? Well no, just a snippet of Barbarian, Palace Software's new release, a rollicking and bloody duelling game. Samurai Trilogy and Highlander did try earlier to swap karate for swords, of course, but they're not worth remembering. Barbarian fights in a whole different weight class.

The idea is simple. The swords of two burly barbarians carve slices off each other, driven by one or two players. Each can take a certain number of hits, but one successful bit of brain surgery cuts off the game (as well) right there.

For the graphics the makers watched Conan films for hours on end, and not in vain. The sixteen moves have room not only for hearty macho sword-waving and ballet-like sword strokes but also for dirty tricks, such as a headbutt, a good hard kick and a fair old trip. All of this is nicely animated, even though the fighters suffer from a mild case of Lego disease.

All in all, the impression is of Conan transplanted onto the screen, though without the speechifying between every sword stroke. The sound effects are good, with their swishing swords and clonk-clonk bouncing heads. I did miss Fist-style grunts, though.

Despite its naive disco-barbarian cover, The Barbarian is an excellent addition to the overstuffed range of fighting games. Many a tankard of Cimmerian ale got spilled as the local barbarian crowd got carried away. Bit hit of the month!

1989 KevätDrax - he lives! Barbarian I got plenty of attention, not least thanks to Maria Whittaker's intellectual assets, but mainly because of the jolly violence it contained. And Barbarian II doesn't disappoint: it's sure to be part of the evidence if and when video games start getting censored.

The Equality Ombudsman will get no joy out of Barbarian, since besides the pixel-Conan the player can also choose Princess Mariana. Both possess identical killing skills, although the male swings a terrible axe and the female a more svelte sword. And with these skills you're supposed to make the wizard Drax an ex-Drax.

Even on the C-64 the graphics wipe the floor with the first game. Admittedly the barbarian himself hasn't changed, apart from the axe, but Princess Mariana looks like a woman despite her big pixels. The monsters have nothing to be ashamed of either. Apart from a few little blobs, the monsters are big and nicely animated. The sound effects are excellent and create a lively atmosphere, and the animation is so realistic it almost brings you to tears.

Unlike the first game, Son of Barbarian is more of an action adventure. On every level you have to collect two magic items if you mean to survive further on. On top of those, the stray skulls lying about give our hero pair an extra life.

You'd better map the levels, or progress will remain a pipe dream. Luckily, once you've cleared a level you don't need to go back to it until you switch off. The aim, of course, is to make it to level four, where Drax is to be found.

The actual killing moves have dropped to four. The line-up consists of a crouching strike, a quick kick, a stiff blow to the head and the famous head-lopping stroke. And if those don't help, never fear: there are plenty of fun death effects. The purple lizard snaps up its main meal of the day, the jelly blob churns your tummy into a mess and the loutish worm spits your bones out onto the floor.

In the ST version both the graphics and the animation are considerably better than in Barbarian I. The excellent sound effects are digitised; otherwise the game is identical to the 8-bit version. A pity. A lot of extras could have been crammed into the 16-bit ones.

Barbarian II is quite simply perhaps the best slash'em-up in a long time. As a bonus, the buyer of this excellent game pockets a poster in which Maria Whittaker and what's-their-name-again strike a pose.

1988and it came to pass one day: the mad god Tarjan set his loathsome horde of monsters loose. Skara Brae was razed to the ground in a terrible bloodbath, and the once so proud Adventurers' Guild survived only in the form of a refugee camp. It was time to gather a plucky party, comb through the seven dimensions and snuff out Tarjan.

So once again you roam a three-dimensional world and fight nonstop against monsters that appear out of nowhere. If you manage to find the way into a dungeon, you get to roam three-dimensional corridors. And fight monsters that appear out of nowhere.

With Ultima V having vastly improved an already good game and Dungeonmaster having redefined the cutting edge of role-playing games, it was a sad discovery that the latest verse of the Bard's Ramblings is mostly the same old thing with a new serial number.

A few small changes have been made. Really tough fighters can become Geomancers, wizards who command a handful of nifty spells. There are small improvements to the combat, but otherwise BT III is identical to its predecessor. On the plus side, the disks have been left unprotected, so you can make your play disks in a jiffy without Electronic Arts' ultra-slow backup programs.

But, but: you can't rip your alter egos out of the Ultimas, only characters from the previous Bards will do. Even that beats starting from scratch.

The future lies with Dungeonmaster and the Ultimas, and with both of them coming to the Commodore 64, Bard's Tale is in far too tough company. Personally, I got bored pretty quickly. Then again, anyone who has generally been smitten with the Bard's Tales will surely like this one too, and the opening animation is as convincing as ever.

1988Basil the Great Mouse Detective is the latest of the Disney cartoons. And also of Gremlin's licensed games.

A plot summary follows:

Sherlock "John" Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street. So does Basil, the holmes of mice. The worst of the rodent villains, Professor Rattigan, has kidnapped Basil's partner Dawson. Only Basil can foil Rattigan's plans and rescue his partner by using his phenomenal powers of deduction. Actually, the "powers of deduction" are an object with a stick, a lead and a few fire buttons. Using it, you steer Basil around the screens and collect clues (collect five and you get to the next level - there's deduction for you). To heighten the suspense, some of the clues are false. On top of that, Basil can build up his strength by collecting cheese, and Rattigan's numerous henchmen can be caught in rat traps.

As you can deduce from the above, Basil The Great Mouse Detective is a pretty run-of-the-mill game. Basil walks, Basil jumps, Basil climbs, Basil picks up objects... According to Gremlin, the reason for this simplicity is that Basil is aimed at young, very young players. Unfortunately I didn't have any of those to hand, so their view will remain a mystery until the end of time.

The graphics as such are well done, as is the rest of the game, but if you're past the magic age limit of ten, the whole thing soon starts to taste of mouse droppings.

With the same effort, Basil could have been hammered into a game with broader appeal. That's Gremlin's problem, though, not mine.

1988A basketball game from Imagine? Something has gone badly wrong somewhere this time, because instead of putting out a lousy shoot-'em-up, Imagine has released a perfectly playable sports game.

The execution is quite passable, though not very special (which you could hardly have expected anyway). The court is crammed onto a single screen, on which two players knock the ball about. The little guys are a nice size, not small but not too big either. And of course, in the background there's a stand seating a crowd as vast as ten or so spectators.

The playability is good; the guys obey the stick admirably, with no delay. All the commands are easy to give with the stick, even in the thick of a heated match.

The best thing in the game, though, is the replay. Every now and then, when the computer reckons a basket is worth replaying, it runs a proper close-up replay. The players grow to about 1.5 times their size, and the area around the basket is shown enlarged. Not bad at all, let it be said. But that's where the good points run out. The crowd's reaction when someone scores is downright ridiculous: they bounce up and down and clap their hands 'clappity-clappity-clap'. Yuck.

But worst of all is the outrageous difficulty against the computer. Even on the easiest of the three difficulty levels, it takes a horrendous amount of effort before you've scraped together your first point.

As a two-player game this passes muster, but never as a one-player one. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Playing this won't get you to Nirvana. Try Hat Trick instead (or Project: Stealth Fighter/Airborne Ranger).

1989 KevätIt's a wondrously lovely afternoon in Gotham City. Suddenly Ocean releases a game called Batman, even though a couple of years ago Ocean released a game called Batman. Holy I'd be a little baffled, if I didn't know that the new game is based on the upcoming Batfilm.

Besides the Penguin planning to conquer nothing less than the entire world with his robot penguins, the Joker has kidnapped Robin, so Batman's remit is unusually clear-cut.

Batman commands a satisfactory number of fighting moves and can even fling the Batarang, as long as he finds it first. The Bat-Man can find plenty of other items too. The map of Gotham City is big and sprawling, so there's plenty to do.

Bataesthetically the game is well made. The C-64 Batman even has a genuine Adam West batpotbelly. In the ST-Amiga Bat the graphics look pretty much like a comic, and the Amiga even has a sampled Battheme. The Batanimation works and the batmenu is pleasant to use. The graphical carrot is the windowing, which gives a comic-book feel: a new batscreen pops up right on top of the old one. That's why it's such a pity that the game follows the usual British arcade adventure line, i.e. every screen has a villain or two plus, as a bonus, little robots that shoot. Reinforcements turn up on the spot as soon as you've got rid of the previous lot. Am I paranoid, or is it really true that nobody can be bothered to come up with anything new any more?

As a batman myself, I was annoyed by the lack of Sock!Pow! mentality in the fights and by the Batmobile, conspicuous by its absence. In its own genre Batman is nevertheless a good action adventure, but when you've been playing the same formula with different sprites since you were a kid, you can't just sigh "Holy amnesia!" and punch your fist into your palm. Not exactly a (bat)must-buy.

1990 KevätThe Bat-renaissance begun by Frank Miller culminates in the film directed by Keaton and the Bat-junk hysteria it has set off. The film, which draws heavily on Moore-Bolland's Killing Joke, is admittedly pretty good, but not worth all the fuss it has caused.

Roughly speaking, the film deals with a small-time crook named Jack Napier turning into the psychotic Joker and his attempt to gas Gotham City with Smilex poison gas, and it ends in an excellent duel on the roof of a cathedral. Ocean got the licence to make a game of it, which no doubt brought smiles to faces, since the game is, after all, a guaranteed hit.

In the way already so familiar from Ocean, the game's five sections follow the plot of the film. First up are the chemical plant and the pursuit of Jack Napier. The usual platform-climbing-and-shooting is livened up by the Bat-rope, which works almost the same way as the famous arm in Bionic Commando. In part two the C-64 crowd tear along horizontally and the Amiga owners Outrun-style in the Batmobile, and the Bat-rope can be thrown round a lamp post to help with quick turns. In the third section you analyse the Joker's poison, and in the fourth you cut the ropes of poison balloons with the Batwing, Afterburner/Space Harrier style on the Amiga and from a bird's-eye view on the C-64. Part five is a race to the top of the cathedral in the style of part one.

The execution of the C-64 version is, both graphically and aurally, the usual Ocean quality, for better and for worse. Batman himself is a nice-looking combination of a hi-res sprite and a multicolour sprite, while the quality of the other sprites varies. The main complaint is the punchless sound effects, in place of which you can listen to nondescript background music. On the Amiga the maze sections are on the difficult side, since the extra power has been put to use by cramming too many sprites into the level.

Batman serves up a bundle of good old ideas in an attractive package, with Ocean once again managing to capture a film in binary numbers. Somehow it's hard to think of anything else to say.

1990 KevätWho remembers that lovely old C-64 game Combat Leader? Who among you played it for days on end, trying to tell the green units and the green enemies apart from the green background? The undersigned and J3-Kasvis at least. (and me!-NN) How many, on the other hand, have ever heard of Battalion Commander? Or played it? Not all that many. And once again we have proved that sequels hardly ever reach the level of the originals.

Battalion Commander is an expanded and improved instalment of the legend that is Combat Leader. It comes with new units, 40 different maps and three different sides (gum-chompers, Russkies and yellow-faced slant-eyes). As in Combat Leader, the fighting takes place in real time, which is a refreshing exception. There is infantry, there are armoured vehicles and above all tanks. Progress has been made: the units are no longer the colour of the background but black, which spares you the desperate hunt for your troops against a background of the same colour.

So it sounds good; unfortunately the truth is something else. In principle Battalion Commander beats Combat Leader any which way, but, but... Something is missing, chiefly that certain something that makes a creature sit at the computer for hours on end, playing the same game over and over again. There are exceptions too: one person I know played nothing but this, perhaps because they didn't have anything else.

1991 KevätYou don't abandon an idea that sells. You make a sequel out of it. This profound insight into marketing policy has dawned on Interplay too. In Battle Chess number two the graphics and the rules of the game have changed, but presenting the moves and captures with funny animations is exactly the same idea as in its predecessor.

Chinese and modern chess are related in the sense that both have the same ancestor, the Indian Chaturanga. The games have just developed in slightly different directions. The board has grown a little and a stretch of water has been added across its middle, which is mainly a nod to the fact that the Chinese empire is split in two by the Yellow River flowing through its middle. The line-up of pieces shows local colour too; for example, the cannon that fires over the other lumps of wood is proof that the Chinese inventors of gunpowder got there ahead of the Westerners. Plenty of remnants of the original game are left as well, such as the minister, which moves two squares diagonally in the same way as Chaturanga's elephant.

Chinese chess has exactly the same flaw as its predecessor. The high-quality animations are fun to watch for a while, but then they turn into little more than a distraction that slows the game down. The humour also lacks the inspired anarchism of Battle Chess. There are some funny ideas in there, such as the mule pulling a cart first turning into a dragon, after which the other side magics it into a lizard and squashes it underfoot. But some shamelessly tedious combat scenes have strayed in too, some of them even stolen straight from the predecessor. The jokes also lose their sharpest edge because the pieces aren't familiar in the same way as in modern chess.

As a game, Chinese chess is hard to judge because I'm no master at it, but I did at least notice that with the same difficulty level and the same position the computer always plays exactly the same move. In graphics and sound, though, the game is certainly top-notch. Each piece has its own fanfare, which sounds quite stylish through the Adlib. Surprisingly, the effects that come out of the sound card are feeble hissing, whereas when you use the PC's own speaker they are convincingly digitised clanks and clinks. The price of this processor-time-gobbling technique is the animation's irritating habit of stalling.

1991 KevätWe've been waiting for this one. Realtime Software's Carrier Command was in its day one of the pioneers of 16-bit gaming (and still would be, if the little kiddies in design hadn't made the game needlessly easy). Battle Command is a sort of unofficial sequel, long awaited, long hyped.

In the New World the North and the South have been squabbling for ten years now, and the situation is escalating into the first world war. Because of mutual destruction, an all-out brawl can't be staged, so the war is fought with guerrilla strikes behind enemy lines.

The player commands a futuristic Mauler assault tank, which a stealth chopper drops onto the battlefield. The Mauler has room for four weapon systems, which is a pity, because there's plenty to choose from. A 120 mm missile gun (no wonder the US Army ditched it after the M60A2 disaster), various missiles, a laser-based close-in missile defence system, flare and chaff launchers, and time bombs. The missions range from destruction jobs to escort gigs and everything in between.

Carrier Command made an impression; Battle Command doesn't. The first thing to hit the eye is, of course, the graphics. Although the objects are generally well defined, the terrain itself consists mostly of simple trees and pyramid hills. The sound side is pretty nondescript too. Then again, these are aesthetic drawbacks that proper game design can rescue.

Sadly, that has been left half-done as well. The 10+ missions are varied, sure, but the actual game world isn't. The enemies are sprinkled evenly here and there, and good Lord! the Mauler supertank can't climb gentle slopes but instead hurts its poor little tracks, which is a kick right where it hurts to normal tank strategy.

The armament is otherwise well done, but this gun... slow and ineffective shells and, on top of everything, a fixed turret, which you don't even find on self-propelled guns these days. Realtime Software could have read, say, the M1 Tank Platoon manuals to get a bit of a feel for what you can expect from a tank of the future.

BC is no dud, even if the verdict is harsh; it's more of a shoot-'em-up that demands strategy. Battle Command deserves the same verdict as Sherman: a good tank game that a little tweaking could have made brilliant. Pity.

1989 KevätCrap Commando clone.

1991 KevätOnce upon a time there was a magical world where orcs, elves, dwarves and humans slaughtered one another to pass the time. According to prophecy, however, a time would come when a killjoy would rise from the rank and file of the common folk, who would bring peace and beat swords into ploughshares (slaughtering most of the population along the way). Does that sound familiar? If not, I suggest you turn to the family headshrinker.

Battle Master is a Faery Tale-type role-playing adventure, but one in which the player has a lot more choice when it comes to role models - you can be any humanoid race you like (the orcs are really beautiful), and there are plenty of professions too, from merchant to wizard (zap). What's more, the player's character can have a band of helpers along for the journey, who keep the hostile baddies at bay with their bows or magic wands.

So Battle Master has all the ingredients of a true role-playing classic, all the more so since the graphics are perfectly passable, apart from being jerky now and then and so on. The game could still have done with some finishing touches, though, since as it is you get no proper idea of how a fight is going, for example, until either the opponent or the player goes poof. The same goes for many other things, which seem to happen half by themselves. In some places pitfalls can even block off the only way forward, and so on.

1987Here, for a change, is an attempt to bring the world of naval warfare to the strategy gamer's screen. The model chosen for the game is the famous Battle of Midway from the Second World War. This battle, as we know, was the turning point in the war between the United States and Japan. Japan's seemingly invincible navy got its first taste of the bitter cup of defeat. On the other hand, had the USA lost, the entire west coast of the United States would have been open to attack.

Within the confines of a single naval battle, however, it is hard to give the player a chance to fulfil themselves as a misunderstood admiral. Only a game covering the entire Pacific War might pull that off. As it is, the game consists mainly of steering reconnaissance planes around in search of enemy ships. When the enemy is finally spotted, guiding the bombers to their targets is utterly routine.

As is PSS's habit, a little mini-game has been crammed in, which in principle is supposed to make the player feel part of the battle. The player controls a single anti-aircraft gun (a Japanese one as well), which is then used to blast away a bit here, there and everywhere. The feeling never arrives, though, since the game is, to put it mildly, on the dull side, and after the first couple of tries you get totally fed up with it.

The graphics, or the lack of them, also soon start getting on your nerves while playing. The figures, done in character graphics, hop about here and there, and there is no way whatsoever to tell the air squadrons apart.

All in all, a pretty feeble performance. SSI has also made a strategy game based on the Pacific battles, though it hasn't been seen in Finland. Hopefully it hasn't fallen into the same mistakes as this sorry effort.

1987Good old Zoltar (who?) has hit on the idea of wiping out all of humanity in my solar system, says the message... Time to say goodbye to my nearest and dearest, mail my obituary to the paper, give the Cobra Mk. III a pat and jump into the cockpit of the Phoenix fighter. Turbo to full and off into outer space! And what do we see out there? Incredibly good-looking enemy fighters done in wireframe graphics. A handy radar shows the positions of the enemies, the home planet and the hyperspace gate, so the nearest enemy goes in the sights, and at a press of the fire button my lasers trim Zoltar's wage bill. The poor wretch tried desperately to dodge, but it did him no good, no sir.

As in Elite, the enemies can take a varying number of hits, so I coolly hit them several times. FOMP! A circular fireball spreads out and I can carve a notch in the laser's grip. So that the enemy doesn't get bored, I kill the next couple with neutron missiles. Flicking through my status screens (shields, engines, planet, missiles, lasers) I notice the shields are on yellow, and what do you know, a few enemies have managed to land on my home planet, wiping out a whopping 60% of the inhabitants. So, set course for Xenath for repairs. The screen changes to the surface of the planet. On the planet are the tanker and repair ships, and this time, then, the enemy tanks as well, which, wonder of wonders, destroy me before I get the chance to save the remaining four planets.

Judging by the instructions, Battle of the Planets is based on a TV series showing in England. It's no Elite II. Still, it is a very well made, hard-wearing shoot-'em-up with a dash of realism thrown in. BOP has been chosen as a competition game for the "National Computer Games Championship", so this is a quality game we're talking about.

1990 SyksyFirst Out Run, then the same thing as a turbo, and now as a battle version. The designers have at least had enough imagination not to name the games Out Run 1, 2 and 3. BOR is like a stripped-down version of Chase H.Q., which has also been released for the Sega, but it is considerably more playable and in a completely different class graphically.

The idea is familiar: you plonk yourself behind the wheel of a turbo-tuned petrol monster and put your foot down to catch the lawbreaker speeding ahead, dodging crawling VW Beetles, oil slicks and roadblocks. At the end of each stage you get the chance to tune new features into your car, like more power to the carburettor, a better engine, grippier tyres and a sturdier body for smashing the villain to scrap. The only single-use purchase is the nitro you pour down the turbocharger's throat.

On the smoothly winding three-lane road the throbbing red Ferrari handles with a splendid feel, though the car moves sideways so slowly that you can't always dodge the dawdlers that shoot out in front of you from around a bend. Luckily, cutting round them via the hard shoulder doesn't really hold you up at all. The difficulty level has been honed really precisely. When you finally catch the crook and start shunting it into scrap, the proceedings usually turn into a nerve-shredding game of seconds.

You'll happily shove the cartridge into the machine for the driving alone. If only Sega could also be bothered to throw in some rolling terrain, as in Nintendo's Rad Racer, the result would be a top-class driving game.

1990 KevätBattle Squadron is, as the name suggests, a shoot'em-up, and a perfectly ordinary upward-scrolling shooter at that. Doesn't exactly wake up your interest, does it? Well, the initiated start waking up when they're told that the game is actually Hybris II. In case someone doesn't know Hybris, let it be said that it was a high-quality shooter equipped with fine graphics, superb effects and good music.

The start of the game doesn't inspire any sort of awe towards the programmer. The player's own ship doesn't look like anything special, though it is well animated. The backgrounds don't look like much either. A pleasant soundtrack chugs along in the background. But after playing for a while it turns out that this gaming session isn't going to be a short one after all.

The aim of the game is to destroy the evil Barrax Empire. First you cruise around the surface of the Barrax planet and then you burrow deeper underground through the openings that keep turning up. Once an underground section has been destroyed, you rise to the surface again, look for a new opening, go down, and so on. There's no point hurrying into these underground sections, since that's where you'll find the really big (and also really well made) aliens that no puny little laser will make a dent in. So it pays to cruise around the planet's surface until you've got some really good weapons in hand.

The player's ship glides over well-made, dirty-green terrain dotted with craters. All sorts of enemies come at you, and before you know it the first chance to get extra weapons comes along: a biggish enemy ship leaves behind a small colourful box, which the player then collects. The player would do well to wait for the "extra weapon box" to change colour and then collect the extra weapon matching that colour, since not all weapons bite on certain enemies as well as others do.

There are four basic types of weapon: orange fireballs, blue and green lasers, and red balls that fly off in every direction. The basic types come in a great many variants of differing power and looks. One of BS's best points is the really superb and versatile extra weapons. There's also the Nova Missile, a kind of smart bomb, of which you have three at the start. More can be collected, of course.

Since the playfield is wider than the monitor, you only see a narrow slice of it at a time, so the screen can also scroll sideways. Simultaneous two-player play is possible too, though this leads to battles on the other side of the screen as well, as the players "discuss" who that extra weapon really belonged to in the end. Confusion can also be caused by each player yanking the screen in their own direction.

BS's most praiseworthy aspect is the superb effects, which include both the mighty extra weapons and various little tricks that add hugely to the interest of the game. Of these, let's mention the enemy that turns up every now and then and brings to mind the monster from the film Predator.

Battle Squadron is a game worth buying, and your interest in it won't run out any time soon. I myself found, with bloodshot eyes, that I had played for many hours straight, even though I'm not especially fond of shoot'em-ups.

1987In Anirog's Battle Through Time you drive a specially built car fitted with weapons. Your task in the game is to shoot everything that moves.

The game begins in the First World War, where the opposition consists of rattling biplanes. Having dealt with the resistance put up by the biplanes, the player moves forward in time to the Second World War, where the biplanes give way to 1940s fighter planes. The 1940s aircraft drop showers of bombs, trying to stop you from advancing to the Korean War.

In the Korean War, Korean bombers threaten the player's future. After dodging or destroying the bombers, the player once again moves forward in time, though not by a very long leap this time: to the Vietnam War.

The helicopters of the Vietnam War are ready to shoot the player at any moment. Once you have avoided the helicopter threat, you move on to the Third World War, where various satellites threaten the player. Once the satellite threat has been dealt with, the whole world explodes and the player faces assorted war mutations. After them, various primeval monsters come at the player. At the end of the primeval monster stage there is a Tyrannosaurus rex. The game's tester never made it past this one.

Battle Through Time belongs to the moonbuggy game category. Its graphics are slightly better than the usual moonbuggy standard. The sound is basic. The effects consist of bangs and other crashes. The game's interest evaporates in a single evening, because you can carry on from the same point where you left off. As a whole the game is a poor buy in itself, since you soon get bored with it.

1990 KevätBattle Valley was originally a budget game programmed for the C-64, so it's rather interesting that somebody bothered to convert it to the 16-bit machines. After all, these days it's more the rule than the exception that games are first designed on the ST and Amiga and then crammed by brute force into their 8-bit little brothers.

The game's backstory spins some yarn about terrorists, nuclear missiles and other things of that sort, so apparently it's time once again to dig the war gear out of the closet.

The game's events unfold in two stages: first you have to collect pontoons with the winch that comes as standard equipment on the helicopter and repair the destroyed bridges. At the same time you tidy the hillsides of surplus junk and, when need be, haul up fuel and ammo. After that you can go cruising off to the terrorists' headquarters in a tank that amusingly follows the topological structure of the hills (meaning the surface). To add to the torment there's a tight time limit, and once it runs out the evil terrorists destroy the world. It would be interesting to know how they manage that with two medium-range nuclear missiles. If they were intercontinental, the logical solution would be to aim one at each polar ice cap (Will you shut up Mr Spock!).

Technically speaking, there's nothing to fault in the way the game has been done. The background scrolls beautifully in three layers, and you won't find any stray judder even if you go looking for it. But the game's content gives a somewhat anaemic first impression: you fly the helicopter right or left and fire off a couple of shots every now and then. The tank section is even duller.

The same frugal approach carries on in the graphics, whose overall look is monotonous and down-to-earth in its colouring (except for the sky, whose blue shading is really lovely). The sound effects don't rise much above average either, but the music is at least perfectly listenable.

Battle Valley isn't cut out to be a hardline shoot'em-up, since next to the likes of Silkworm it's a leisurely Sunday stroll, but as a whole it's interestingly put together. Endlessly grinding through the same routine, though, gradually drags the interest down to the level of the TV programmes that come on at three in the morning.

Yaaawn. Right, this boy is resetting the Amiga and shaking off the sleep by tossing something a bit more rip-roaring into the disk drive, like Datastorm.

1989 KevätWhere does white always go first (apart from South Africa)? Why, in chess, of course. For hundreds of years the sacred rituals of this game have proudly defied all change, heads held high. Until now. Now Interplay, familiar from the Bard's Tales, is quite literally bringing chess to life, and bringing sex, humour and violence along with it.

As we all know, Battlechess is based on a well-known board game whose current world champion is Garri "Gasp!"Arov. The rules of chess can be found in the book "World Religions", so let's concentrate on this latest version.

I once expressed a modest wish for a chess game in which capturing (meaning removing a piece from the board) would be animated. Apparently Interplay reads C=lehti too. Every piece is superbly animated, and when two pieces meet, a nice fight follows. By way of example, take the meeting of two horses (knight in English), where the winner hacks off all of the loser's limbs, one at a time, just like in the film "Monty Python & Holy Grail". There's another four megabytes' worth of animation, so the examples stop here.

The graphics are really, really good, and the digitised effects give an extra boost on top. The death of a piece, and the way it's dealt out, always change depending on which pieces meet, so there's a very commendable number of dramatic death scenes. Word has it Battlechess also plays well, so the fun isn't limited to just enjoying the show. Those who take chess seriously can switch the screen to a normal lifeless two-dimensional board if the sacrilege becomes unbearable.

The only thing that puzzles me is who Battlechess is aimed at. People who don't play chess will play a few rounds under the spell of the graphics, but chess is chess even if you fry it in graphics. The Check-Mates, on the other hand, will be incensed at humour being mixed into their sacred hobby, and this boy isn't giving up noughts and crosses, but thanks to everyone who wrote in about the Chessmaster review.

1987Here, once again, is a new game simulating the Third World War. The playing field chosen is Central Europe, its outer limits running from Paris to the Polish border and from Copenhagen to Vienna. The game can be played against the computer or by two players with the computer acting as referee.

The player simulating the Soviets must command numerically superior armoured and infantry divisions, the aim being to conquer the whole playing field. The NATO player has to slow down this onslaught from the east with few but qualitatively superior troops. Both sides also have some air units at their disposal, which can be used to support the ground battles.

The balance of forces in the game depends on the difficulty level. The ratio of NATO to Warsaw Pact forces ranges between 1:2 and 1:3. The outcome of a battle is calculated mainly on the basis of the two sides' strengths and the air units used to support the battle. The result is also affected by fatigue, training and supply. Fatigue and supply matter most. Fatigue increases with every battle and only decreases if the unit is allowed to stay out of combat. Often the war can be won simply by cutting the enemy's supply lines.

In the two-player version nuclear weapons are available too. When playing against the computer, you are not allowed to use nuclear weapons.

The idea has been carried out excellently in Battlefield Germany. The reason is probably that this game is a computerised version of GDW's well-known "Third World War" strategy board game. Not all the fine points of the board game version have been brought over, though; for instance, the number of terrain types has been reduced.

The Amstrad's good graphics make for a colourful display, most of which is filled by a partial view of the playing field done straight in the colours of the board game. Finding your bearings is made easier by a small overview map of the whole playing field in the top right-hand corner.

The game ends after six or twelve turns (set at the start of the game) or when one side has been wiped off the map of the world. In the former case the winner is determined by victory points, the number of which changes with the fortunes of war. In the latter case it probably isn't hard to guess who won.

Battlefield Germany is a war strategy game of medium difficulty. It also suits those who have only just taken up gaming, since the difficulty levels range all the way from easy to impossible. A 12-turn game lasts 5 hours at the most (my own record), but you can manage to lose the game within an hour.

1990 SyksyWhat are the huge 20-100-ton metal monsters that hurl flaming rockets, devastating energy bursts and exploding metal at each other? Who are the warriors of the future, idolised by the people, whose match in bravery history will be hard put to find? Well, the monsters are Battlemechs and the men Mechwarriors. These vertebrae make up the backbone of future warfare.

The universe has changed a great deal. Mankind has spread far out into space, and people being what they are, they can't help it: they itch to kill. All was well as long as the Star League was going strong, but then 75% of the army melted away beyond the edge of the known universe.

That set off the wars between the power blocs over power, planets and BattleMech production sites, in other words the Successor Wars, and demand for mercenaries was huge. This is where you yourself come into the picture, as a lonely little .MechWarrior who can shoot a bit and pilot a 'Mech. You're feeling broke, and the way to get rich is to fight in the arena for money, glory, titles and spare parts - or a little grave plot all your own. Once you have more money, you can found your own mercenary unit (1-12 'Mechs), and that's when the fun really starts...

BattleForce is an incredible program. How on earth has one person managed to make something like this, as PD? BattleForce knocks the wind out of 99 percent of Amiga programs, and surely some games house would be interested in publishing it. The author has already turned out who knows how many ever-improved versions, and there's no end in sight. Not much will be missing any more once DropShips turn up too, as they presumably will, and perhaps the other missing combat arms.

The program isn't limited to fighting alone. Wars bring damage, and so the 'Mechs have to be repaired. That brings in the repair shops, where worn-out 'Mechs get fresh parts bolted on or the damaged ones get fixed. As long as your stash holds out, you can also modify a 'Mech to your heart's content, provided the weight doesn't grow too much. And nothing stops you from building a 'Mech entirely of your own.

Heat is even more dangerous than the enemy. Everything you do raises the 'Mech's heat, and if there's too much of it the 'Mech shuts down or the ammo goes BANG. This imposes the biggest limits in combat. Each weapon produces a different amount of heat, but the output varies too. So the rate of fire depends on how well the 'Mech can quickly soak away the excess heat.

The control and combat systems are implemented with rare ingenuity. Each uses its own menu, independent of the other, with all the movement commands naturally crammed into one of them and vice versa. This makes for smooth warfare once you've first grasped the principle.

What kind of game is it where you don't get promotions or money? BattleForce offers both to skilful warriors. Every warrior starts at the Green level and can advance to Regular, Veteran and Elite, with the pay rising of course. Extra money can be earned if the Unit pays its warriors shares of scrapped enemy 'Mechs. With experience points and promotions you can improve your skills as a better guarantee of survival; a single point more of shooting skill can decide who dies. Still, it all comes down to luck in the end.

On the repair shop side a technician comes into play; after all, the 'Mechs have to be made battle-ready again. The better the technician, the better and cheaper the repairs. And the more surely the repaired weapons will also work later on, instead of falling to pieces after the first shot, as happened to the undersigned in three consecutive battles to two 'Mechs as they fired their AutoCannon 20s.

Nor will you get bored by any sameness in the maps. The terrain types include hills, forests and lakes (four different variants of each), ice, sand and rocky ground, and there's even open ground on offer. In Combat Patrol missions the program makes the terrain itself, whereas in Combat-Missions you at least get to tweak the parameters to your liking. On top of that you can make your own maps with the included map-making routine.

BattleForce has more substance than most strategy games, and it's also better made than most of its commercial rivals. It should be noted, though, that the version described is the author's registered copy, which includes the Warrior and Factory programs, in other words your own characters and the 'Mech repair shop. The freely distributed PD version doesn't have these; there you have to make do with the ready-made characters - which will certainly keep you playing for weeks on end. To get the full version you have to toss the author a bit of currency.

1989 KevätBattlefront contains four battles: Crete 20 - 26 March 1941, Stalingrad 17 - 23 December 1942, Saipan 15 - 30 June 1944 and Bastogne 18 - 26 December 1944. All of them have enough variety of terrain to exploit, but on the banks of the river running through Stalingrad in particular, the program really has its work cut out.

There's no point saying any more about Battlefront, since in practice it's just like the other SSG games. Battlefront is nonetheless among the very best of strategy games, and it can easily be recommended as your second strategy game, after Reach for the Stars, for example.

1989 SyksyThere it is, the Americans' aircraft carrier. Blood roars in my veins and wind in my wings as I turn my dive bomber towards the target. Camera on! Air brakes open! And a brilliant drop smack onto the middle of the deck! Could the Battle of Midway be turning into a Japanese victory after all? But... oh woe! I have destroyed the U.S.S Enterprise, and bowed down by this shame I can do nothing but, this evening, quietly press the point of a katana into my belly and pray to Kirk for forgiveness.

As you might vaguely deduce from the name, Battlehawks is set in the battle for mastery of the Pacific. In Battlehawks you can fly as either Japanese or American, in a fighter, a dive bomber or a torpedo bomber. The different nations' planes differ enough from each other that the option is welcome. You don't need to bother with taking off and landing, since the flight always starts in the thick of the action. The pilot's career is saved neatly to disk as the ace picks from a generous number of missions, and you can even practise the different missions.

Battlehawks manages to bring new dimensions to the simulator world. One of the biggest surprises was that the player wasn't a lone wolf: other friendly planes were whirling around in the air as well. This manages to create a deceptive feeling of realism. And best of all: Battlehawks has no dead moments, which makes it dangerously addictive. The manual may look thick, but there's no need to be scared of it: BH is extremely easy to learn.

BH also has a camera. With it you can record the high point of a mission for later viewing. The camera doesn't follow the plane but sort of stays hovering in place, and you can fly it around here, there and everywhere.

Unusually, Battlehawks uses sprite graphics instead of vectors, but with 1500 positions defined for each plane, the end result is at times deceptively realistic. Little touches, like parachutes and planes billowing smoke, improve the impression further. Strangely enough, big clumps of planes slowed the Amiga down really disproportionately, even though this type of graphics should be the wonder machine's special talent. Still, the speed is perfectly adequate most of the time. The Amiga sounds are good, apart from a rather pitiful machine-gun effect, but on the ST the sounds have been tuned to be truly pitiful.

The plane has the usual ability to peek in every direction, plus, as a novelty, a scanning view in which you can spin the view all over the place without your course changing. Extremely handy, and it would be needed in many other sims as well. In the bombers and torpedo planes, the rear view is used to operate the machine gun sticking out backwards.

Battlehawks earns a further plus for being unprotected. So you can make not only backup copies but a hard disk version too. Hopefully the trend continues.

Besides being the flashiest Second World War simulator I've seen, Battlehawk is, thanks to its brilliant playability and pretty astonishing pull, a must-buy for gamers who normally shun sims. Say Banzai! Battlehawks! to the nice man behind the shop counter.

1989 KevätNormandy continues SSG's Battlefront series. This time the chosen subject is a set of the decisive battles of the Normandy landings. SSI and the other software houses in the field have usually treated the whole landing as a single battle, of course, but SSG's Battlefront system is better suited to individual engagements.

The game contains eight battles, some of them very familiar to strategy gamers: Omaha, Utah and Sword are landing battles and begin on the fifth or sixth of June. Cherbourg, Caretan, Villers Bocage, Goodwood and Epsom, for their part, deal with the attacks launched onward from the beachhead, aimed at capturing important objectives such as Caen, Cherboroug and Caretan.

In true Battlefront style, each battle lasts only a few days, and you never get the time to carry out that satisfying total crushing of the enemy. In terms of realism, though, SSG's games are (precisely because of that) top class.

1991 SyksyAn alliance of aliens has destroyed the Earth, so the mission is to give the whole lot of them a good thumping, purely for revenge. Sadly far behind us are the good old days of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when people still knew how to feed us paranoid attitudes with stylish subtlety, on the principle of "the aliens are infiltrating our ranks to contaminate the bodily fluids of decent citizens". Keep a close eye on the plots of games.

So Battlestorm is the umpteenth addition to the unholy trinity of spaceships, lasers and unidentified flying blobs. The formula, of course, is that the player gets a flying machine shaped like one of those three, it gets flown around above a scrolling background, and the targets for your slingshot are formations of small ships plus a few slightly bigger motherships.

The only marginal rarity is that the background scrolls in all directions. Battlestorm even bears a distant family resemblance to Asteroids. At least if you choose the harder of the two available control methods, in which the ship is rotated by moving the joystick sideways and the throttle is worked by moving it up and down. Alternatively, the ship goes wherever you wrench the stick. It won't make a full about-turn, which is why you have to learn a rather clumsy-feeling stick-twirling technique.

There's nothing to complain about on the technical side of the execution, but all the more in the content. The enemies' squiggles repeat a few dull basic patterns for ever and ever, amen, and there aren't even any decent extra weapons on offer. The aim is not to spread anti-action-game propaganda, but merely to point out that the same thing has been done better so many times that you can't praise Battlestorm without making a laughing stock of yourself.

1989 SyksyThe 31st century - five states are battling for mastery of the known universe. And this war isn't fought with sticks, but with gigantic Battlemech fighting robots whose mere appearance turns the Transformers pale. And these metal giants pack multi-level firepower too! Such is the intriguing setting of Infocom's first role-playing game, BattleTech.

At first the game focuses on Jason Youngblood, a young 'Mech cadet of the Lyran Commonwealth, who is trying to train as a 'Mech warrior on the planet Pacifica. In between his training, Jason picks up knowledge not just of 'Mech skills but also of small arms, medicine and 'Mech technology. Clever Jason raises funds the way that's popular in Finland too, namely by pouring his pocket money into stock speculation. But dark clouds gather on the horizon and, for reasons best left unsaid, Jason is forced to set off on his adventure. Not another word may be said about the plot.

Teeny-weeny Jason toddles across a huuuge map, either on foot or at the controls of a 'Mech, alone or in company. The cities of Pacifica have to be tracked down and the planet mapped as the adventure goes along. The user interface works nicely with the mouse; you only need to touch the keyboard once in a blue moon.

The battles are the spice of BattleTech. The robot-on-robot battles in particular are tactically interesting, since they revolve pretty tightly around heat. Whatever a 'Mech does, the action raises the robot's temperature. If the temperature climbs too high, the robot suffers heatstroke, which in the middle of a battle practically means death. This comes on top of the everyday tactical considerations. And when the fighting starts to get tedious, you can dump the whole lot on the computer to worry about.

Graphically BattleTech isn't strikingly good-looking even on the ST and Amiga, but when the graphics do their job, who cares. The little pictures that pop up now and then liven up the overall look and give the game some graphical flavour. The game was made by Westwood Associates, the regular team for 16-bit role-playing games, familiar from as far back as the Phantasie days.

BattleTech is easy to play and, most importantly, it stays interesting most of the time. Giant robots weighing tons are a refreshing addition to a market oozing with demons and barbarians. Recommended.

1987The sequel to the hugely popular Beach Head is the real deal! The aim of the game is to free the cruel dictator's prisoners and finally to beat the gentleman himself in a tight duel. The game's appeal is considerably boosted by the number of different ways to play. You can play it alone in the role of either the Allies or the dictator, or two players against each other. The game also has a practice option for all four stages.

The game's different scenes consist of a paratroop assault, the prisoners' escape, a helicopter flight and finally a duel on the banks of a gloomy river.

The instructions for the game are good, but in English, of course. You may not notice or learn all the little details just by playing, so in that respect the lack of Finnish instructions is a pity.

Graphically the game is top class: the little figures scurry along at a good clip and even let out a yell when fire from the dictator's troops hits them. The autocrat's ghastly laugh is also great to hear.

Controlling the game's various characters and vehicles is easy and the playability is really good. The only small minus comes from the slight monotony of some of the stages; there ought to be some variety. But war is war and all that!

1990 KevätAll sorts of crazes have been dreamed up on the palm-lined beaches of California, from surfing to skateboards. Beach Volley, i.e. beach volleyball, is a variant of volleyball with two-man teams, usually played on a cosy sun-soaked beach. The rules differ from volleyball in a few ways; for example, you always get a point for winning a rally, and only seven points are needed to win a set.

A sport stripped down this far is a perfect fit for a home computer. The problem of controlling two players has been solved by having the computer take care of the setter's duties. So all that's left for the player to worry about is receiving the serve and smashing the set into the opponents' court. Sometimes you have to settle for a plain old bump, since a low set coming from the back court in particular is hard to hit. You can try to stop the other side's attack with a well-timed jump block.

The game's biggest difficulty lies in timing the jump spikes, and at first it takes a while before you can even get a serve over, especially since the skimpily clad girlies posing at the courtside badly wreck your concentration. Once you finally start getting the hang of the tricks, the long rallies and merciless battles guarantee some real gaming pleasure, even if the computer hands you a 7-0 drubbing. Playing against a mate is, of course, in a class of its own.

The animation of the players has lots of nice details; for example, their eyes always follow the ball, and the powerful body work of a player stretching up into a jump spike looks impressive. There's a constant bit of sizzle in the game, and the sense of speed is played up even further by scrolling that follows the ball.

The tournament against the computer uses a merciless one-strike-and-you're-out system. That's where you'll find the game's one and only blunder - and an all the more baffling one for it. You see, the matches have a time limit, and when time runs out the computer's team is always declared the winner. A pretty unfair way to add to the game's difficulty.

1988A newspaperman's easygoing life takes a turn when the top boss orders the newshound to investigate strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. As usual, things start going wrong right at the start, when the plane belly-flops down in the middle of the Triangle. What to do? Nothing for it but to shoulder the backpack and set off on foot.

There's plenty of ground to explore: after playing Bermuda Project for an hour I still hadn't found anything except a native village, which there was no way of even getting into. Extra detours are also added to the trip by annoying rivers that you can't even jump across, no matter how narrow they are.

Rumour has it that Bermuda Project was nearly two years in the programming. If that's true, most of the time must have gone into drawing the enormous island area. After a couple of hours of play I gave up, because nothing was happening. Whether I was walking in circles without realising it, I don't know and can't be bothered to care. The graphics work and so does the playability, even if the mouse control feels odd at first, but when the sound side consists mainly of the rush of the sea and wandering around the island feels pointless without a map or landmarks, your interest in the disappeared soon disappears too.

1991 Syksy"I have cheated, lied, spied and murdered. The fruits of betrayal are mine."

So beautifully does the back of Betrayal's box wax poetic. The line captures the game's basic idea well: at its heart is the scheming that has nested beneath a medieval power structure. In theory the knights who serve the king and the bishop are there to do the dirty work, like collecting the taxes and clapping troublemakers in the stocks, but the real goal is to crush your rivals and reduce the throne to a puppet government.

You can run the affairs of your one-horse villages however you like, but it's in your own interest to keep population, wealth and defences more or less in balance rather than bleeding them dry with taxes and conscription. Rival knights - some of them possibly equipped with human brains - can be needled by grabbing their villages for yourself and imposing outrageous road tolls. A head-on troop onslaught is also possible when two armies meet. A more crooked approach is to gather evidence of the exploitation your rivals are practising and present it to the ruler.

Only the briefest scratch at the surface of the game's depths is possible here, so obviously this is a superb wargame, its quality guaranteed by the Rainbird logo slapped on the cover. Wrong. Betrayal is a complete flop. The game's user-friendliness has been destroyed with such ruthless efficiency that not even laser-guided bombs could match it.

First of all, you get from one village to the next by hurrying your horsie along the roads, but the joke is that the big map only shows where you were last. Real neat, planning strategy when you haven't the foggiest where you're going. Finding your way through the command jungle, meanwhile, has been made harder by a muddled combination of keyboard commands and menus, when mouse control ought to go without saying.

The battles are a chapter all of their own, where you get to whisk the joystick about in uncommonly stupid bashing sequences. Thank God they can be switched off, in which case the outcome is decided on mathematical grounds. The very last icing on this booby-trapped cake is the game's habit of pushing off into the guru's care to practise transcendental meditation.

Rounding off the amateurish impression is a graphics style lifted off the walls of a primary school art class. There's some comfort in the fact that the idea of the power game is deep, multidimensional and so on and so forth, but you have to strain hard to enjoy it.

1990 SyksyI was already wondering where the game version of Beverly Hills Cop had got to. Many years have passed since Cop 1, and the second one hit the cinemas ages ago too. We can be grateful to Tynesoft because we can once again follow Axel Foley's antics. (Is that something to be grateful for?)

At the start you pick one of three difficulty levels. A press of the fire button brings a large sprite onto the screen, which you more or less have to accept is Axel Foley. In Foley's hand there's a Colt, so the name of the game is easy to guess.

Axel makes his way through a three-layer parallax scroll, shooting the crooks full of holes with his gun. There are three lives, each shown as a heart at the bottom of the screen. Every time a heart drains dry, one Axel dies. A player with quick reflexes will get through this level without much trouble.

In the next stage Axel is supposed to 'crumple' three trucks. Pulling this off takes a jump behind the wheel of a Merc and many magazines' worth of rounds for the Colt.

The driving is done in vector graphics, which are fairly fast to boot. The terrain is rolling and the road pretty twisty, but the Merc holds the road well even in the tightest bends. You can choose between mouse and joystick control. The mouse control is admittedly a bit too sensitive, but that doesn't spoil the ride much. It doesn't take long before all the trucks have been rendered undriveable.

The third level is already trickier. Axel sneaks around a park, plugging a crook or two on the side. Besides the Colt you can use machine guns that somebody has absent-mindedly scattered around the park. This level lags clearly behind the previous two graphically, and the playability limps too. At least they've had the sense to raise the difficulty somewhat. Here too you can choose mouse control, which is perhaps even easier than fumbling with the joystick.

On the fourth level Axel fumbles his way around a maze, looking for lifts to the next levels. In between there's time to free a few representatives of the fairer sex, and while you're at it a few criminals may lose their lives too. Finally the main villain gets snuffed out. This time the 'disarmament' is done with a pump-action shotgun; the Colt has presumably been left behind in a desk drawer.

The maze is done in the style of Xybots and seems pretty clever at first. The first lift is found fairly easily, but finding the second one is already getting tricky. The third floor is so confusing that you really have your work cut out searching. Even the most patient player loses their temper on realising they've been going round in circles for the last five minutes.

The maze suffers from a dreary monotony: all the floors are alike, apart from the colours changing. The gunmen who cross your path now and then are graphically poor and copies of each other. With no variety to be found, wandering the maze quickly starts to get old. The poor playability doesn't improve matters.

If a few little flaws were fixed, BHC would be a good pastime. The maze, for example, would surely have turned out well if it had been made more varied. On its own none of the levels would be much of a game to speak of, but together they make up a tolerable whole.

1991 SyksyDistinctive Software is on a roll once again. The Test Drives, 4D Sports: Driving and Mario Andretti's Racing Challenge testify to something about this programming team's car fever. Now it's the turn of NASCAR cars. Bill Elliott, perhaps the best NASCAR driver of all time, has agreed, surely for a hefty wad of cash, to lend his name to the game's cover. Let's hope he won't come to regret it.

In Finland NASCAR is a completely unknown branch of motor sport. It's raced in fibreglass-bodied cars, usually on oval-shaped tracks: speeds normally sit on the high side of 300 km/h. Elliott has zipped to the record, 350 km/h. When speeds are in that class, the crashes tend to be pretty massive. That's partly why NASCAR is extremely popular in America. Personally I don't get what's so great about circling an oval track for 500 laps with your foot to the floor, when an overtake happens maybe once every 10 laps. Granted, NASCAR demands iron fitness and nerves of iron from its drivers, and overtaking is surely an art form in itself, but for a Finnish rally fanatic (which I am not) NASCAR is an extremely boring sport.

As a game, BENC can easily be described with that same word. Even though the game features, for example, Watkins Glen, which resembles the human intestines, you get bored with the game far too quickly and easily. Tuning the car between qualifying and the race is nothing short of a joke. All right, the graphics look nice, and the other cars are actually very fine indeed, but the background graphics don't dazzle and the music isn't exactly staggering either. The playability is really peculiar, because even if you yank the joystick hard over to one side, the steering wheel turns like a granny on her way to the shopping centre at 15 km/h. So first the car understeers, then, tyres howling, it shoots off in the desired direction. At that point you naturally start yanking the wheel the other way, and the same thing happens all over again. Swerving from side to side seems to be compulsory in BENC.

Don't go wasting your money on Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge; on oval tracks, Indianapolis 500 is still king.

1988"Even a blind software house finds a grain now and then," say the old folk as they check out the latest release from Go!, a label known for its junk games. And indeed the infamous firm's Bionic Commando is a splendid game.

The high standard of Commando is no surprise, though, since the game was converted by Software Creations, the team that made its breakthrough with Bubble Bobble.

The basic idea is older than Moses' father, of course. The player has to fight their way through five levels so that the world may be saved. More powerful weapons and extra bonuses can be picked up along the way.

Sounds old and tired, but the truth is different. The player isn't tied to one fixed pattern of progress, but can try to find the optimal route through the tall levels for themselves. The real novelty is the famous bionic arm. With this stretchy wonder-limb the commando can climb, swing about Tarzan-style, collect extra weapons and of course club the enemies senseless.

On the Commodore 64 the graphics are good. Excellent animation (especially on the arm) and playability honed to perfection testify to careful coding. The screen scrolls flawlessly and the background music is very good. The main negatives are the compulsory multiload and the fact that the commando has only four lives, which makes the game on the difficult side.

The Atari ST, for its part, flexes its muscles with splendid graphics (especially the backgrounds from level two onwards), and the push-scroll doesn't manage to take one bit away from the playability. Lives come in a magnanimous six. A pity that the background music can't be swapped for sound effects. The upcoming Amiga version will presumably be identical, though hopefully with better scrolling.

Whatever the machine, Bionic Commando is a truly exemplary game and a strong candidate for arcade conversion of the year. Recommended without reservation.

1988This time PSS has taken on perhaps the most dramatic naval battle of the Second World War: the Bismarck's first and last voyage. In true PSS style, action sequences have been crammed in as well, in which the player acts as a ship's captain or as the pilot of a torpedo bomber.

The idea of the program is to search for, find and destroy the Bismarck and the German ship sailing with it, the Prinz Eugen. The game is played on a map of the North Atlantic. The Bismarck tries to slip out of Bergen harbour into the mid-Atlantic to disrupt Allied convoy operations. When either the British ships or air or radio reconnaissance locate the Bismarck, the battleships hurry to the scene and battle begins. Torpedo bombers launched from aircraft carriers can also join in pummelling the Bismarck.

The cross-breeding of strategy game and action game that the program is built on doesn't work. Each half seems to have ended up trampled underfoot by the other.

1988Black Lamp is an action adventure. The game's hero is Jack the Jester, a court jester. His task is to return the black lamp of Allegoria, which evil has stolen, to his ruler.

The black lamp has been broken into 12 pieces. Jaakko has to find all the pieces so that evil will release its grip on the kingdom. The terrain consists of forest and houses. You can walk inside the houses, which matters insofar as the pieces of the lamp are indoors. Control is by joystick. Jaakko can also shoot poison-coloured blasts by pressing fire. There are plenty of different critters to shoot. Some need more blasts to go down, others fewer. The English-language manual explains all the actions and enemies in considerable detail.

The graphics are a little smudgy, though pretty and certainly made with care. The flying shots are hard to tell apart from the background. The animation is varied and natural. The composer of the music gets my blessing: in my opinion it is truly top class melodically. The sound effects, on the other hand, are the usual bangs and fizzles.

The programming is flawless apart from one small detail: Jaakko has to be in exactly the right spot to be able to climb up the ladders.

Saving the kingdom was too tough a nut to crack, for me at least. For those who have the stamina to slog away at adventure games, Black Lamp is sure to offer unforgettable experiences.

1990 SyksyMy mood is black indeed, as a coalition of three dragons, for a change, attacks the, ah, once so peaceful kingdom and begins its reign of mingled terror & horror. Who would make a good opposition candidate to restore the normal consensus? Black Tiger, how about you?

Black Tiger belongs to the jump, climb and destroy series. Its baddies are the usual assortment of monsters. The nimble tiger clonks the life out of them with a lump of rock on the end of a chain, and at the same time flings a volley of daggers into the air as well. By collecting keys you get to open chests containing positive or negative surprises.

In this game it doesn't pay to kick old folks, because these old chaps found here and there give you extra time, lives and hints, and the old rascal may even throw up a kiosk to sell better weapons, armour and other junk.

Not even the implementation offers any nastier surprises. The 16-bit graphics are quite successful. The ST's slightly jerky scrolling has been carried over to the Amiga with successful exactness, which will probably annoy many. The sampled effects sound identical too.

The C-64's two-tone graphics don't exactly thrill, but they don't annoy either. Playability is otherwise OK in all versions, but the tiger's ballistic jumping doesn't please: once the tiger jumps, you can't influence the direction or the landing zone during the flight.

Black Tiger is a good game of its kind, if a thoroughly ordinary one. Sadly, games like this sell the best.

1988Having once again lost all my writing fees at the gaming table of the corner dive, I could do nothing but shriek with joy when I got my hands on the latest product in Microlllusions' Micro-Vice series. From now on my hard-earned pennies would stay in my wallet at least as far as the bar counter.

In BlackJack Academy you can play Black Jack, a gambling game distantly resembling pontoon, by the rules of the world's leading casinos. Stakes can range from one dollar to nearly ten grand, and if need be you can also modify the rules yourself as you like.

From one to five gambling enthusiasts can play at the same time, and indeed playing on your own starts to taste of sawdust in the long run. The program won't startle anyone with any graphical splendour, but in user-friendliness it is top class.

Sure, BlackJack Academy is quite nice for trying out how well different strategies work, but it brings no cure for the actual gambling itch. Slowly the blood is starting to boil in my veins again, and when the fees for this magazine too land in the bank, I'll have to hurry to buy my monthly Mustin Murkina dog food before the gaming tables open.

1989 SyksyOne of the things that spurred me to buy my ST back in the day was the PD game Megaroids, which was a fine copy of good olde Asteroids. Other good clones besides it are Asteroids De Luxe (Atari) on the ST and Space Battle (Anco) on the Amiga. So much for history - the newest Asteroids game is present-day reality.

Blasteroids is Atari's modernised Asteroids, in line with the current trend of favouring new versions of old classics. For starters, the ships come in three size classes. The little dung beetles are nimble, but have modest shields and firepower. The medium-sized ship is middling at everything except firepower, where it is strong, while the biggest ship is heavily shielded and fairly well armed, but as graceful as a one-legged elephant. In two-player mode the big ship and the little ship can dock with each other to form a fun little artillery unit. And the asteroids are no worse than petri either. The grey boulders correspond to the old basic asteroid, while the red ones are otherwise the same but leave behind an energy crystal that boosts the ships' shields if you manage to collect it. The blue asteroids just swell up when hit, until, having had enough, they start sulking and come to a stop. And of course a countless number of space monsters and energy-sucking leeches float about in the spheres of the universe.

Destroyed monsters leave behind special weapons, my favourite of which is the 'death blossom', which works exactly like its model in The Last Starfighter. The ship spins and fires at a tremendous rate until the screen is empty. Once all the stages of the current level have been cleaned out, the tango of death with Mucor begins. Mucor is a cheeky green blob who is destroyed by shooting his appendages off completely, every last bit.

Blasteroids is a good-graphicked, good-sounding, playable coin-op conversion that is almost as addictive as Asteroids. That's recommendation enough for any game at all.

1988Nexus is testing whether its wings will carry it in the field of destruction games. The previous attempt, Hades Nebula, didn't get very flattering reviews out in the world, but Blazer tries hard to polish up Nexus's shield. And partly succeeds, too. The idea is old and considered safe. Stick the poor player at the controls of a ship and line up endless numbers of assorted critters on the other side. But since the idea had started to lose its kick, something new had to be invented.

Shoot-'em-ups have started imitating the Nemesis arcade game by giving the player the chance to modify their craft along the way. By collecting certain kinds of icons you can add, say, more powerful engines or meaner weapons to the ship. Blazer jumps on the bandwagon with moderate success. The graphics are handsome, but only as far as the backgrounds go. The ship itself gets lost in the backgrounds because of poor colour choices, and the enemy hordes rolling in on you aren't exactly the best designed either.

The music is worth a mention. Three different tunes, and all of them very high quality to boot. The tune that starts playing when the player throws themselves into battle is especially rousing and gives new oomph to the hand gripping the Terminator joystick. It's worth keeping the music on during the game, too, since the design of the sound effects was pushed into the background when the audio side of the game was being made.

The stylish title screen and good music give the trigger finger reason to get the game going at full tilt. The pretty backgrounds and rousing action keep the interest up for a good while, but the unclear icons and ugly sprites do their trick in the end and the power switch gets the boot. Nexus is improving all the time; the next release might already be a good one.

1990 KevätAll good games are often clones of other good games in one way or another. If somebody for once comes up with an original idea, it gets cloned. The same goes for Tetris, the only game ever to come from across the eastern border.

Besides BlockOut, i.e. three-dimensional Tetris, there's also the Finns' very own clone on the market, Coloris, which is already spreading beyond our borders too, and more are on the way.

BlockOut is done in vector graphics - what else? You try to cram pieces of different colours and shapes into a grid that looms far away at the end of a tunnel, by spinning and twirling them around both their horizontal and vertical axes. When the grid is full, it disappears. Naturally, that's the whole point of the thing.

BlockOut takes a while to learn before you can properly make out how the pieces will fit. Helping you put them in place are horizontal lines that lead all the way down to the end of the tunnel.

In the Flat Fun setting you pick the game up addictively fast, since only flat pieces are used. Out of Control, with its more than thirty pieces, is horrendous, and 3-D-mania is somewhere in between the two. The three-dimensional pieces come in heaven knows what shapes, and the knobbly bits sticking out every which way are impossible to master, at least not right away. Fortunately the game has a practice mode.

BlockOut has no counter to tally how many full grids you've managed to complete. A pity, since in Tetris at least that's a far more important piece of information than the points, which pile up in some vague fashion.

There are options for just about everything. If you want to speed the game up even further, you can move the grid closer. Or change the size of the floor. Or set the pieces dropping on their own at a terrific pace. Each variation has its own high-score table, which keeps the scores stored permanently.

In terms of playability BlockOut is good, and the graphics are fitting. Rotating the pieces works best with the keys, since the mouse can only be used for moving them around, not for rotating. The pieces clunk into place with a sound effect.

Don't start playing too late in the evening. It might go on until morning.

1988Blood Brothers - the story of two brothers' mission of revenge. The lads' parents were squashed in an attack by the Scorpions, and the boys decided to take revenge. Weeks went by gathering equipment, and then the assault began: they descended into the bowels of Scorpia.

The game is even dumber than it sounds. A run-of-the-mill maze adventure where you shoot everything that moves and collect ammo and other extra gear. Still, the game would be passable as it stands if the whole shebang hadn't been wrecked by two things. Only two-player mode is possible, and the second player has to use the keyboard.

The graphics look miserable. The bumbling about of Lego men slightly rounded at the edges brings to mind some ancient relic. Luckily the animation at least works. Therein lies the best part of the game: the recoil of the guns. The characters get a proper jolt backwards when they shoot.

Blood Brothers is a middling shoot-'em-up, and so bland that it drowns in the sea of middling games without leaving any trace of its visit.

1990 KevätHere comes the second contender already, stepping up to take on Dungeonmaster. Can Bloodwych pull off what Galdregons Domain didn't have the muscle for?

Bloodwych is set in a large castle, where the player has to find four crystals. With these you can either banish evil for all eternity, or else the other way round, if goodness gets on your nerves. Having a choice is always a positive thing.

The player controls a four-strong party of heroes in three-dimensional corridors. Most interesting of all, two parties can roam at the same time, either helping each other or making each other's lives miserable. Party members can also be split off from the rest of the group and left, say, behind a corner on the lookout, so that nobody sneaks up and jumps you.

Control is handled with icons in the style familiar from Dungeonmaster, with the bonus of being able to chat with whoever you run into. The magic system is simple. The spellbook shows the spells available to you, and by putting more magic points into a spell you increase not only its power but also its chance of success. The combat system, on the other hand, somehow feels too simple.

Graphically, Bloodwych is no match for DM. Although the castle has a good deal more stuff in it than Dungeonmaster's spartan corridors, most of it just serves as scenery with no particular function. The monsters you meet hardly convince, staying stubbornly sprite-like, and the sound effects are pretty feeble. So it never gets anywhere near the dense atmosphere of the game it's modelled on.

Nevertheless, Bloodwych is a very good game, with two-player mode offering interesting possibilities, and for anyone who bought the little Amiga it's fine consolation while the piggy bank saves up for extra memory. With a little more design work BW would have given Dungeonmaster a real run for its money, but even as it is, it'll keep you busy through the gloomy autumn evenings.

1990 SyksyIt's a pity that adventure/role-playing games like Dungeon Master have, because of their size, remained a treat only for owners of bigger machines. Now, though, C-64 owners also get the chance to have their share, as Bloodwych is converted to eight bits.

Zendick is a very evil being and wants to destroy the entire universe. The Bloodwych, a brotherhood of wizards who ruled before Zendick cast them down onto the astral plane, aren't too keen on this madness, and intend to put an end to it by linking their minds with four heroes, who then break into Zendick's stronghold.

The game works very much like Dungeon Master, and it's controlled with a pointer and various icons, the view being a three-dimensional picture through the character's eyes. Something has been left out in the conversion from the Amiga version, though, among other things the Halls of Heroes, and the adventure begins straight in Zendick's stronghold.

The graphics are good, but the sounds can't create a proper atmosphere. The game is split into modules two or three levels in size, and it only loads when you switch modules. The upshot is that there's no coming back once you leave a group of levels behind.

Also original is the two-player mode, in which each player gets their own little band and the screen splits in two so that each player gets their own play area. On the minus side you could count the very weak sound effects and the game's narrowness compared to, say, DM (the enemies all walk on two legs and all the places look very much alike). But be that as it may, the eight-bit machines will never get any closer than this to the magic of Dungeon Master.

1990 KevätAerobatics is fun, at least if you're watching it on a hot summer's day while licking an ice cream. Making an aerobatics simulator fun is trickier. Of course, if the speed turns your insides out and you can smash the plane into the middle of the crowd just for kicks, then maybe it's fun. Blue Angels is not fun.

The 16-bit versions are supposed to have vector graphics and varying camera angles, but these have been pruned out of the stunted C-64 version. What's left? On screen there's a display panel in which a teeny plane sprite zips through squares while another sprite shows what position the plane ought to be in. The player's job is to keep these two figures on top of each other and in the same position. There's no fine control over the movements, so you're either turning or flying straight. Apart from this idiotic reaction test the game has no other content at all, so the review could end right here with the closing comment that BA is crap, don't buy it.

So you kept on reading anyway? Well then, let's tell you some more.

There are three menus' worth of flight manoeuvres. You can practise them either in the simulator or "for real". In the simulation the screen shows nothing but a slalom through squares bent out of wire. In outdoor practice the squares are moved onto the control panel, and the window shows the plane zooming along ahead and a spinning horizon. There's not much time left over for admiring the view, but then there's nothing worth seeing in the plane sprite anyway, and the landscape is one endless putting green.

After a test flight you can gawp at a cute little line graph showing how far short of the ideal performance you fell. After an air show you have to make do with a bare error percentage. But nobody cares about that anyway, because after a single session the game is fit only for the archive.

1990 SyksyThe Lynx, small enough to hold in two hands, is an ingenious device. On top of its astonishing graphical and musical abilities, it is so far the only games machine with built-in zooming. In other words, you can pile any number of objects onto the tiny screen and have them change size almost seamlessly, the same way as in, say, Afterburner. At last we can bid farewell to the jerky, deserted 3D landscapes of home computers and enjoy breathtaking views that until now have only been on offer in the money-gobbling monsters of the arcades.

Blue Lightning is a straight-up Afterburner copy that is every bit the equal of its model, if we overlook the missing hydraulic seat. The idea is to hurtle toward the horizon in a jet, slinging rounds and auto-locking missiles in the direction of the enemy.

The formula has at last been adapted into a version you can actually enjoy. The rolling green moors and the other scenery flashing past below are worth seeing all on their own, but on top of that so much hardware comes storming at your eyes from the ground and the air that sweat trickles into your eyes, your fingers get pasted to the side of the machine and your backside to the chair. By far the most hair-raising leg is slaloming through the inside of a canyon with your wings grazing the walls.

The game won't necessarily hold its appeal for very long, because although the theme has been nicely varied, it's the same old blasting from start to finish. Its trump card, however, is that it makes effective use of the Lynx's unique technology. 3D shooting this smooth and visually impressive would be utterly impossible to pull off on any other machine. If you own a Lynx, you ought to own Sininen Salama too.

1991 KevätHaving ploughed through every jet plane imaginable, the software houses turned their gaze to the First World War and its noisy, slow and clumsy propeller planes. First onto the test bench is Blue Max, dragged straight over from the United States, which has nothing in common with that old C64 game.

This new Blue Max is a flight simulator done in three-dimensional filled vector graphics, in which the player gets to fly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers. It is even within the realm of possibility to get the Red Baron's red triplane under you. New features compared with other simulators include, for example, the chance for two players to fly at the same time, on the same side or on opposite sides. This has been achieved by shrinking the view of the landscape and splitting the screen in two vertically. Those who don't care for action can sink their teeth into the game's strategy section, in which the player moves squadrons around on a map and the computer handles the dogfights.

There's more, too: eight different aircraft that differ clearly in their flight characteristics. A video recorder function that tapes your flight, which you can 'admire' afterwards from several different camera angles. The multiple in-flight views that are a must in today's flight simulators, 256-colour VGA graphics and sound card support are of course there as well.

Blue Max is crammed so full of functions and menus that it very nearly pops. Things haven't been taken to wild extremes, though; instead the design has (according to the manual, at least) kept the fun of playing in mind the whole time. And they have even succeeded in this. The numerous functions don't get in your way with their complexity during flight, so the player can concentrate wholeheartedly on knocking enemies out of the sky.

You can control the plane with the mouse or a joystick, and you can also choose between realistic and less realistic flight. The player can even choose whether the bullets fly exactly where the crosshairs point or whether you have to be able to judge the lead yourself. If you're used to a full instrument panel, you can bring that up too at the press of a button, but for those after realism, just an airspeed indicator and the crosshairs will do.

The VGA graphics look extremely fine, but they need a powerful PC to be tolerably fast. As for sound cards, the game supports the GameBlaster and the AdLib. Even with the sound cards, though, the game's audio side isn't exactly startling, just a certain amount of engine drone and machine-gun rattle. The PC's beeping isn't even worth talking about.

The versatile and complicated functions and menus may scare off a first-timer, but beneath the cold shell lies a game that thinks warmly of its player. Blue Max is an excellent investment for someone getting to know flight simulators, and the grizzled veterans won't feel left out either. Let the scores speak for themselves.

1988After a spell of melodramatic staring at BMX Kidz's ultra-fancy loading screen, sweet strains à la Rob Hubbard drifted to my ears. The man has gone one better than even Skate or Die and digitised a clean bass sound plus a GO sound. Go G-Go Go G-G-Go! About the high-score music I'll say nothing, because it was made by - yours truly.

Push the stick left and you move forward. The fire button makes the bike lift its nose. Press the button at a ramp and the guy bounces into a hermetic jump. On the first track you don't need to fool around at all, but the difficulty rises as your skills grow: on the second track you have to manage one successful jump and one wheelie (what might that be in Finnish, I wonder?). The third requires two jumps, and so on.

The computer-controlled competitors are annoyingly skilful, so there's plenty of opposition. Along the way you can collect energy and impact resistance. Every time you crash into something, your impact resistance goes down. Energy, for its part, drains automatically, and that's just how it is: when you're tired you haven't got the strength to pedal. When impact resistance hits zero, the program announces the end of the race in street English. Slang crops up a lot in BMX Kidz. Not enuf trix, rad.

BMX Kidz leaves you feeling extremely restless. I warn against playing this game for more than 10 hours straight - I myself came down with a so-called fit of the squirms.

All in all, the playability is very good. Wotta fun!

1988BMX Simulator and BMX Simulator Pro are the brainchildren of Richard Darling. Like his brother, Riku can knock out really beautiful graphics and mega-precise code. BMX Simulator came out first; the Pro version is an improved edition of the same idea.

In the Simulators you pedal around a screen that stays put. The first version has two riders; you can take on either the computer or a friend as your opponent.

The Pro version is, as far as I know, the first action game in which four players can play at the same time. Two play on the keyboard and two with joysticks. At first I doubted whether the idea would work, but having tried it I found that the keys have been chosen really sensibly: the players sit facing each other with the computer sideways between them.

In both Simulators you have to ride several laps of the same track within a set time. Whoever fails to make it to the finish drops out of the game, and the computer carries on.

The BMX Simulators truly can be called simulators, because the programs are extraordinarily precise about the bike's position relative to the terrain. Uphill is harder to pedal than downhill. The bike also behaves annoyingly true to life.

Simulator One has seven tracks to ride. The tracks are perhaps too easy, since even I got round all of them in an hour. But then there's still the two-player game and its challenges.

The Pro version has 15 tracks in total, five of which fit in memory at a time. So the tracks have been divided into different terrains: Dirt, Desert and Quarry racing. The terrains therefore have to be loaded separately.

BMX Simulator Pro actually consists of two separately loaded games: Standard and Expert. Standard is a sort of practice game in which the riders don't collide with each other. That makes it easy to get started.

So that your interest holds all the way to the Expert version, Standard only shows four tracks from each terrain. That is exactly why I've been hammering away at this game for a solid week.

Playing Expert is hard, because the riders mustn't touch each other, and when there are four guys on the track at the same time... oh boy! In Expert you can choose your bike's tyres and sprockets yourself. The choices affect speed and cornering.

BMX Simulator Pro is a really versatile program that is sure to keep you entertained for a long time. I warmly recommend it!

The music in both is perfectly bearable. The sound effects in the first version are considerably better; pedalling sounds like pedalling. In the Pro, on the other hand, the effects have been kept to a minimum. Even a crash sounds mostly like a sauna simulator.

1990 KevätBomber's central idea is the chance to try out bombing runs in several different aircraft. The C-64 line-up has three out-of-the-ordinary choices: the Mig 29 Fulcrum, the F14 Tomcat and the F5E Tiger II, which are introduced at the start in superbly drawn pictures. This time the F15, the F16 and the other more familiar F's are left back at the depot.

The planes are armed with the usual Sidewinders plus a freely chosen mix of Maverick missiles and bombs suited to ground targets. Later missions may offer other weapons too. You can't choose your bombing missions freely, which either lengthens the game's life or doesn't, since there's a risk of premature boredom.

To begin with, your options are limited to free flight and bombing the terrorists' headquarters, and at this stage there's not yet a trace of any airborne enemies. If you manage to complete all the missions, you can design more of them. Interest is kept alive by the chance to swap mission disks with your mates.

On the technical side, Bomber goes through the compulsory figures of the sim. You can follow the plane's flight from the control tower, from a satellite or from a freely chosen point whose distance you can zoom in and out. A special feature is the chance to get acquainted with the view from a falling bomb. Other less often seen details are the refuelling stops needed on long flights and the tactical map shown after a mission, which lets you see the route you flew.

As for technical achievements, it's worth mentioning that the game has curved vectors, e.g. in the planes' engines and wheels.

C-64

Converting a flight simulator with filled vector graphics to the C-64 is a bit like hawking Mercs in Romania, so the makers at least aren't short of optimism. Besides, the battle for market share is heating up, since the world is already crammed full of sims, each more amazing than the last.

The landscape is pretty featureless and the graphics update rate is somewhere in the one-second ballpark, but at least the feel of the controls is within tolerable limits. For carefree flying about, the C-64's slowness doesn't bother you, but hitting a target is a whole other matter. Even an experienced pilot faces agonising moments when the plane seems to crawl, the control inputs are too coarse, and the distance to the target is left to guesswork.

Converting Bomber to the C-64 somehow feels like an oversized undertaking, but well, it got done, and you're welcome to it. But one thing kept nagging at me: seeing as the game is called Bomber, why didn't anyone think to put in a couple of juicy bombing runs with a nuclear payload?

Amiga

Graphically the game is really fine; I've never seen more gorgeous instrument panels. On top of that, all the objects in the game are drawn with a great many polygons, the record being somewhere around 130. The sound is naturally the usual whoosh of jet engines, but the title music is digitised guitar strumming that lasts commendably long, even if you can hear the joins.

So the outer shell is in perfect order. Now it's time to talk a little about the downsides. The biggest minus is to be found in the playability department. Thanks to the complex landscapes and record-breakingly detailed aircraft, the screen update is really slow. I mean REALLY slow. What annoys me most is how the action gets slower and slower the moment there's even a little more stuff on the screen.

Despite the slowness, Bomber is a fine example of where things are heading. The mission editor is only the beginning; I don't think it'll be long before the player gets to design their own plane and test it in missions designed by someone living on the other side of the world. The future looks rosy for simulator fans.

PC

Depending on the machine, the PC's Fighter Bomber either wipes the floor with the Amiga version or it doesn't. If you've got a powerhouse with a 20-25 MHz 386 processor humming away on your desk, FB is practically a must-buy. On slower machines you can skimp on the detail of the landscape and aircraft when installing, so the game's speed doesn't suffer too terribly.

Unfortunately it's typical of English software houses not to take any sound cards you might have into account. So the sound is the same nasty whining and beeping that PC owners have to put up with day in, day out.

Thanks to the considerably faster screen update, the PC's FB is a downright joy to play. In other respects too, the PC version generally feels better done and nicer to use than the other versions.

1989 SyksyVeteran programmer Tony Crowther has always had a soft spot for fresh and quirky ideas, which he has carried out with varying success. Bombuzal definitely ranks among his most brilliant brainwaves.

The game's hero is a cute little roly-poly whose purpose in life is to blow up bombs. The levels are put together from tiles, on top of which are scattered bombs of various sizes and other natural phenomena, such as teleports, remote-controlled Bombuzal clones and plenty more. The tiles come in many types too: on grooved ones you can push bombs around, you can't stop on ice tiles, and cracked tiles disappear when you walk over them.

To get to the next level you have to destroy all the bombs, and on top of that you'd better still have solid ground under your feet after the final ruckus. At first the game is very easy, but it gets harder bit by bit as the levels grow in size and new elements join in. The game has several hundred levels, so at least the fun won't run out halfway. Designing that many would have been a pretty mind-numbing job for one person, but Crowther solved the problem ingeniously by using 'guest stars' such as Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook and Jon Ritman.

Amid all the gorging on new inventions, the player has luckily not been forgotten. The laid-back mood is helped by the use of passwords, which suits this game unusually well, since it would be rather nasty to wind through 200 levels again just because the joystick happened to slip a little on level 201. What's more, you can eye up the playing area either at an angle from the side or straight from above.

Bombuzal is staggeringly close to perfection: cute graphics, an inimitable idea and flawless playability. If you really go poking around with a stick, you can find something to grumble about, sure enough. Firstly, the whirring noise stuck into the background is irritating and completely unnecessary; in fact, it seems like a bug. And secondly... well, nothing springs to mind right now.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that despite its cuteness the game isn't really suitable for the very youngest players, since it takes a fair amount of logical reasoning.

1987My name is Sam Harlow; you may even have heard of me. In 1934, while working as a private eye in New City, I landed on organised crime's hit list. In the same ruckus my wife was kidnapped, and I, among other things, got knocked out cold and strung up from the ceiling to dry.

My life hung in the balance countless times before I managed to work out who was behind the murder attempt. In fact, I became so famous that they even made a computer game about me, called Borrowed Time.

Borrowed Time is a graphic adventure game that also contains animations. The aim has been to make playing the game as easy as possible by keeping keyboard use to a minimum. The right-hand edge of the screen is reserved for the most commonly used commands, words and compass directions, as well as the save and load commands. By picking from among the words with the joystick, you can play the game for quite long stretches without touching the keyboard.

The game's vocabulary is by no means dizzyingly large, and the parser used wouldn't win any prizes either, but the plot is interesting and fast-moving. By saving your game often, dying constantly, trying everything you can think of and making threats with a gun, you'll get the job done all right.

All in all, one of the most entertaining graphic adventure games in a long time.

1991 KevätA quick glance at the back of the box leaves the impression that Botics is an action adventure using isometric 3D perspective, but you couldn't be more wrong. What we have here is a real oddity in the world of ball games. The pitch is a box viewed from above at an angle, with a narrow goal at each end and a moving bar that does the job of a combined bat and goalkeeper. So the game is a kind of cross between Breakout, tennis and football.

Matches use five arenas, with play starting in the middle one. If the opponent scores, you move one arena towards your own end, and if you manage to score yourself, you advance in the opposite direction. This complicated-sounding idea can also be put another way: to win you need a two-goal lead.

To put it briefly, Botics is unbelievably monotonous drivel. Whacking the ball about is far too vague to be enjoyable, since it isn't always even clear at what height the thing is gliding. On top of that, the structure of the game is the height of dreariness. It makes no difference at all whether a match ends in a win or a loss, since either way the game doesn't go anywhere. No league system, no cup matches, no nothing. There are, mind you, no fewer than 80 difficulty levels, but who cares.

Someone could have pointed out to this game's designer too, in good time, that not every flash of brilliance that pops into your head is worth putting into practice.

1987(B.D.II, B.D.III, B.D.Construction Set)

Back in the day, Boulder Dash was one of the first top American games to reach us. The hero of this intriguing game is Rockford, a tiny cave creature whose job is to collect diamonds from sixteen different caverns.

Each cave is about six screens in size, so only part of it is visible at a time. Once the required number of gems has been collected in the first cave, Rockford gets through a secret door into the next one. Rockford digs a way through by moving in four directions and pushing boulders out of the way.

You have to be careful with the digging. A falling rock can squash poor old Rockford flat, and the diamonds are often tucked away behind some thoroughly awkward excavation. Extra colour comes from the fireflies flitting about in some caves, which turn into diamonds when they end up under a rock! A slowly growing green amoeba is also a nuisance in some caves. Rockford has to wall it in with rocks before it grows too big and turns into boulders.

All in all, the different caves offer very varied tasks, and many of them take a fair bit of thinking before the best approach becomes clear.

Therein lies an extra problem, since each cave has a set time within which Rockford must get out of it.

You can start the game from any of several different caves, as you choose. The graphics are excellent; only the clumsy square shape of the fireflies is a bit baffling. There are five difficulty levels, and they hold plenty of challenge even for an experienced player.

Boulder Dash II and III are exactly the same kind of game; only the caves are different, offering ever more challenging adventures for Rockford's fans. Boulder Dash IV once again has 16 new levels, but on top of that it also lets you build your own caves and games. And oh boy, is it great! Designing your own levels is easy and interesting, and you can save a home-made game of as many as 20 levels to disk or tape.

A recommended game for anyone with the slightest interest in brainwork!

1991 SyksyIncredible things happen when the cutesy-wutesy little sweetie-pie's beddy-byes time comes round. Nathan, who by day adapts to his role with utter goo-goo babyishness, vanishes under the blanket, lightning flashes, and out crawls Brat, decked out in a leather jacket, Ray Ban shades and a baseball cap, warrior of dreams and lord of all toys.

The player is by no means Brat, unless they were badly brought up, but rather Nathan's guardian angel. The idea is fairly peculiar. The playing area is a maze of ramps viewed from diagonally above, which scrolls steadily downwards while Nathan toddles along at the same pace. The player's job description includes signposting Nathan onto the right path by picking commands from an icon menu and tossing them onto the kid's route.

At the same time you also have to look after the safety of the journey in general, for example by blowing up boulders, building bridges and putting a weight on top of a box so that the jack-in-the-box doesn't pop out and wake the nipper up. Side activities also include scooping up baby bottles, coins and other items that add to the general well-being, provided they happen to lie conveniently along the route.

Brat's idea doesn't work without a limp, since the game is mostly a test of your mouse hand's speed and accuracy. As everyone knows, the mouse is too imprecise and unreliable a controller for this sort of thing: it's always in the wrong spot on the desk and there's never enough room for it. The other weakness is that Brat is a mechanically advancing chore that mainly makes the player tear their hair out. They've gone a bit too far in taking away freedom of action and choice.

Brat may be original, but it's not fun enough. The graphics and sound, for their part, are pretty much neither here nor there, apart from the cute intro and intermission animations, which feature digitised comments burbled by a Real Live Little Rascal. A borderline case that squeezes out a B-minus, so the makers have nothing to be ashamed of.

1988Straight out of the world of plastic action figures: the valiant Native American super-sheriff Bravestarr!!!

Tex Hex (Evil) has kidnapped the Shamen (good) and intends, with his help, to awaken the giant monster Stampede, his ultimate aim being to conquer the planet New Texas within nine days. Who could help? Yes, who...? Bada bada bada Bravestarr, that's who!

The game itself consists of Bravestarr walking along the streets of New Texas while huge, fast hordes of villains come at him. Shoot the crooks and they leave behind blobs that give BS more power for his gun, stop time for a moment and make other nice things like that happen. Bravestarr can also drop into buildings and ask around for tip-offs from the public on the Shamen's whereabouts. The instructions give the impression that our heroic sheriff has some sort of rocket saddle - well, it never caught my eye.

I have seen a few of Go!'s earlier games and was not impressed. Nor am I now. Bravestarr is miserable. The graphics as such are perfectly passable, but there is neither rhyme nor reason to the game. There is just a massive number of enemies, fed in on a continuous supply the whole time. Thanks to some bug, the bullets are just as happy to pass straight through as to hit. At no point does any interest in the game get a chance to develop. I'd sooner play with the BS dolls.

Go!'s whole idea, after all, was originally to bring really high-class, top-notch and extremely good-looking games to the market. At their very best Go!'s games have been just barely tolerable, so much for the big talk. U.S.Gold could quietly shut down the whole outfit and concentrate on bringing good Yank games within reach of Europeans.

1987Kitted out with fine graphics and good music right from the start, this game really is something special. It is also a sign of programmers striving to get away from the tedious old killing games.

The program contains five different games. The first four are mainly for practice, and the fifth is a combination of them. In the first three the player has to be able to recognise different break-dance steps; in the fourth you have to choreograph a dance to fit the music.

The fifth and final game brings all the others together. In it you go through all the earlier parts. At the end, unlike in the other parts, you can also make it into the "Hall of Fame", in other words the hall of honour, which is a Top Ten list.

As such, games like this are good. Every player gets over their destruction-game frenzy at some point, and then starts looking for something new. Breakdance is one example of the new. There are, however, small shortcomings in the game's execution; for example, the music is polyphonic, but it sometimes becomes extremely hard to follow.

1990 KevätSo the sneaker-swinging games have found their way onto the PC as well. And here I was hoping the PC would at least be spared those. The American Software Toolworks (previous game Life And Death) crushed my hopes, however. Bruce Lee, star of a few karate, judo or some similar thumping flicks, has been promoted to the name above the title of this game, and best of all, Software Toolworks doesn't even have to pay the man royalties for the game, since the bloke has been lying dead for years now. So the game's name is mildly ironic.

The game starts right from the beginning, that is, in the training hall. The player can practise kicks and punches, and pick a means of control (joystick or keys). The keyboard is the better option, since there are REALLY a lot of moves, and PC joysticks aren't yet at the same technical level as the sticks on the Amiga, C-64 or ST.

As a special feature the player can define one macro key, into which you can stick three moves in a row. It's slick in a fight when, from a single button, Bruce first slips a sharp right straight smack in the opponent's face, then a nifty spinning kick to the stomach and finally an explosive flying kick right on the nose. If everything goes like clockwork, the opponent is lying on the canvas very quickly indeed.

After the training hall the player is ready for the mission, at least in the player's own opinion. The instructor, however, disagrees, and the player has to prove their competence in two sparring bouts. These sparring bouts are where the road of most would-be Bruces comes to a dead stop, since the computer-controlled sparring partners are embarrassingly skilled. What's more, the PC isn't really suited to games like this, where the game has to react to the player's command within a fraction of a second.

There isn't even as much playability as in the dreariest C-64 karate games. And then once the opponent manages to drive the player into a corner and starts dishing out combinations, the player's Bruce can't do a thing any more. Every move you start is cut short by a quick counter slashed out by the opponent.

Despite the poor playability the game isn't a complete dud. You do need patience, but if you've paid full price for the game, you'd think you could find the patience too. The graphics aren't dazzling, but perfectly passable. The "music", on the other hand, not even a pig could listen to without squealing, and the game doesn't recognise sound cards, not even if one walked up to it in the street and punched it on the snout.

The difficulty, the poor playability and the ghastly sound don't exactly invite a rematch, but the difficulty can be beaten with practice, the playability perhaps likewise, and the sound can be switched off. So try before you buy.

1988Bubble Bobble is yet another coin-op conversion. Out of Taito's original arcade game Firebird has made a thoroughly decent jumping game.

The leading roles are played by two cheeky little baby dragons, Bub and Bob. As in Mario Bros, two players can play at the same time, which brings double the fun. The idea is to hop about using platforms floating in mid-air and eliminate bugs that could easily be mistaken for something out of Dig Dug.

The dragons can blow bubbles. When a moving bubble hits an enemy, the enemy ends up trapped inside the bubble and can no longer move except by floating. If you kick the enemy at this point, it starts ricocheting around the screen, finally stops somewhere and turns into fruit. Collecting the fruit isn't essential, but it earns you points. Squabbling over the points is the most fun part of the two-player version!

After playing for a while I noticed that you can jump on top of the bubbles. Because of this, two players get on better than one.

Every now and then special items appear on the screen, and collecting them leads to strange phenomena. You can, for example, skip five levels ahead or get extra omelettes to eat. If you hang about on one level for too long, along comes Baron von Blubba, who is a really nasty bug! The game has 100 levels, which means you'll still be blowing bubbles next month!

Once the game starts, the first thing that grabs your attention is the really humorous graphics. The dragons arrive on the scene inside a bubble, comically rolling their eyes. When you blow a bubble, the dragon opens its mouth and reveals its only tooth. At this point I nearly died laughing.

The program's technical execution is top class. What puzzles me most is that the bubbles are characters and not sprites. You can blow loads of them - even fill the whole screen! The dragons obediently do what the controls tell them. Bubble Bobble's playability is top class. The sound effects are the only minus for this amusing contraption - they really are only average.

1987Buck Rogers, which became a classic in the arcades, was released for the Commodore 64 last year. Now the hero has been brought back to life on MSX micros.

In Buck Rogers the player explores a newly discovered cluster of planets in a spaceship. The first planet has electric pylons that you must fly between. Once you have flown between enough pylons, you move on to the next stage, where alien flying-saucer mines appear on the planet. You can either dodge them or shoot at them, which earns you points.

In the third stage you come up against hopping space aliens. Shooting them racks up your score too. You must remember, though, that building up your score is not the main task; flying between the electric pylons is, so that the assigned mission gets completed. After the third stage you move out into space, where besides the space mines you face their mothership, which must be destroyed. If you survive this, you advance to the next planet, where the opposition is tougher than on the last.

The game's graphics are really smooth, and the flying has been given a sense of three dimensions. Graphically, the MSX Buck Rogers is even better than its Commodore 64 counterpart. The game shows the direction MSX game graphics ought to be heading in.

The sound has suffered at the expense of the graphics and has ended up rather modest.

The ship can be steered with either a joystick or the keyboard. The game feels good, especially with a joystick. On the keyboard it is easy at first to press the wrong control key, but fairly quickly playing on the keyboard starts to go smoothly too.

On MSX micros, loading a game from tape is handier than on, say, the Commodore 64. The loading details are shown on screen, and, Spectrum-style, a picture can be drawn there for the duration of the load. What's more, this game at least had been recorded on the two sides of the tape at different speeds: 1200 baud for a poor cassette recorder and 2400 baud for a good one.

All in all, as a classic space game it is one of the best of its kind. Buck Rogers is a recommended purchase for everyone who likes this type of game.

1991 KevätThe Earth is in decline. Whatever pollution and overpopulation haven't destroyed, the Russo-American Mercantile, or RAM, is trying to finish off. Only the New Earth Organization, led by Buck Rogers, stands in the way of destruction.

Buck Rogers is SSI's computer take on TSR's new role-playing game. The first thing to smack you in the face is screen after screen of different abilities that you have to put points into. It's worth poring over the manual, since some of the skills are vital, some this game never uses and some it uses once or twice. There are a few races, and these can then become warriors, pilots, engineers, medical staff and rogues.

Roughly speaking, Buck Rogers is a copy of the AD&D games. In the same way you blunder about mainly in 3D corridors, sometimes fighting too much, sometimes too little. The man-against-man brawling is a straight clone of the AD&D games, the differences being penalties for zero gravity in space and combat leaning towards longer-range weapons. Spells are replaced by an assortment of grenades.

This being a SciFi game, spaceships clash too. And this is the weakest link in the whole game. Naturally you never actually see the enemy ship, so your options shrink to closing-or-opening the distance, shooting and, once close enough, ram-or-board options. A considerably more tactical approach would have been welcome. Mind you, BR isn't exactly a thorny tangle of problems in any other respect either.

The graphical differences between the PC and the C-64 don't affect the playability; on the C-64 there's of course that familiar disk flipping.

Buck Rogers is quite enjoyable to play, but this business of releasing the same game under a different name is starting to get on my nerves, especially when they can't even be bothered to improve the system significantly.

1990 SyksyEastern sport is one of those subjects that pop up on home computers at regular intervals. But Budokan is no ordinary karate botch-job. Behind it is Electronic Arts' Michael Kosaka, who by ancestry alone is the right person to come up with the most versatile game on the market, and the one that most authentically strives for the spirit of budo.

Budokan ties the most aggressive of the Eastern disciplines up together in one bundle. Karate needs no introduction, and probably neither does Kendo, which is the Eastern version of fencing - no real killing instrument is used, mind you. In Nunchaku, on the other hand, you flail about with short sticks joined by a chain. The implement, incidentally, was used in days of old for threshing grain. Perhaps the oddest is Bo, in which you jab at your opponent with a cane stick.

You can train in the disciplines on your own, against a master or with a friend. Nothing stops opponents from choosing different disciplines, which makes the bouts particularly interesting - a seasoned karateka against a novice kendo-stick swinger is a pretty well-balanced pairing. The fighters' strength and stamina affect their performance, so reckless thrashing about will get you nowhere. The game's biggest challenge is the Budokan tournament, where you can run into some truly exotic disciplines.

There is an unbelievable number of different moves, 30-40 in each discipline, and all of them consistently beautifully animated. The hardest ones need two wrenches of the stick and a well-timed press of the fire button. You have to grind away at them for a really long time before they start to come off, if they come off even then. There is just enough erratic behaviour in the program that the timing often comes down to pure luck. If you seriously want to master all the moves, you'd do well to learn to play with the keyboard.

Eastern sport wouldn't be complete without Eastern music and rock-garden aesthetics, and both are indeed there, with an authentic feel. The sound is by who else but Rob Hubbard, whom the Brits miss so wistfully. Among the less pleasant features of the audio side is the turbo loader, which wrings an exceptionally grating racket out of the disk drive.

Budokan is at the absolute top of the combat sports games. The avid joystick sensei needn't think twice about where to put their money.

1989 SyksyBuffalo Bill's Wild West show drew crowds like crazy in the 1880s. Tynesoft has taken the bull by the horns and made a sports game of sorts out of the subject. The events are knife throwing, sharpshooting, staying on a wild horse, rescuing the stagecoach, calf roping and steer wrestling.

The whole affair has been handled with real style. Accompanied by eye-catching graphics, the program asks for the number of players and their names. There can be from one to four players, and all the while skilfully made Wild West music plays in the background. A lot of trouble has gone into the music: each event has its own theme tune.

In the opening menu you can pick any event, or even all of them. The events are loaded as a multiload, but fortunately you can play every event as many times as you like.

Knife throwing demands accuracy, good reflexes and a smidgen of luck from the player. The target is a beautiful Indian girl tied to a round, spinning wooden frame. The closer to the girl you throw your knife, the more points you rack up. If the knife hits the girl, the screen turns red with flying blood.

In sharpshooting the player has to shoot cardboard signs popping up from the desert as quickly as possible. The signs carry pictures of outlaws, women and sheriffs; shooting the women and sheriffs earns you a telling-off.

Staying on a wild horse isn't one of the easiest tasks. At the bottom of the screen there are arrows pointing in every direction of the compass. The player's job is to wrench the stick in the opposite direction to the one shown by the linearly growing arrow. With the right tactics the guy might stay on the horse's back for as long as five seconds...

In the stagecoach rescue your wrist is put through a tough test, Decathlon-style. The idea is to ride after the stagecoach robbed by the Injuns by waggling the stick from right to left for all you're worth, and then have a fistfight with the redskins.

Calf roping and steer wrestling are pretty much the same kind of event. On a sideways-scrolling screen, the player tries to catch the critter and wrestle it to the ground as quickly as possible.

All in all, Rodeo Games is quite a fun way to brighten up your evenings. The game is well made and nice to play in every way: a serious option when buying a sports game.

1988Elite is known for seeming to bite off more than it can chew with its arcade conversions. Taking the risk pays off, since almost without exception the company pulls it off superbly. But how will it go this time, given that the arcade Buggy Boy shows the track across three monitors and the graphics are as fast as they are varied? Is a home micro up to the same job?

In Buggy Boy you do what you'd expect to do in a car game, i.e. try to get round the track before time runs out. Unused time is converted into bonus points and extra time. Extra points come from driving through point gates and knocking down flags (pedestrians would have been a better idea).

Gates marked TIME give you extra time, as you might well expect. You can make your sand flea of a buggy hop by driving over a fallen tree, and driving over a rock or a stump puts you up on two wheels like K.I.T.T. in its best days. So that things aren't too simple, the track is full of rocks, trees, fences and so on and so forth, which you mustn't so much as drive into. There are five different, varied tracks, complete with tunnels, bridges and banked bends.

Buggy Boy is really well done. The excellent graphics scroll smoothly, the sound effects are good and the playability is tremendous. You can't tell the ST version from the arcade game, and even the C-64 version stretches the machine into whole new dimensions. Buggy has a good feel to the controls, it looks good and the difficulty is just right. The programming is careful and there don't seem to be any bugs in this boy. Then again, there aren't three screens either.

Elite takes the points home. Buggy Boy is an excellent arcade conversion, and we need more like it. After this, driving games will never be the same again.