1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1991 SyksyYou'll remember those little coloured fuzzballs with big eyes and sticky pads on the soles of their feet, which every desperate company handed out at trade fairs for small children to stuff in their mouths. Yes, the very ones that turned up after the fair in the most amazing places, like the fridge door, a school bag or the cover of Laura Palmer's diary. Well, now they've been made into a game, and the package comes with yet another of those sweet/irritating stick-it! balls.

Creatures is a captivating game. Who could help falling head over heels for a little fuzzball whose foul breath kills from several metres away! After clearing just two levels the fuzzball gets thrown into a torture chamber, and that's when the fun really starts. Along the way, though, the fuzzball can collect smaller critters for a witch, whose potion made from the critters gives the ball an even more effective grilling breath, in proper Mr Hyde style. And in due course the ball gets to fight demons and rescue its friends.

Creatures really is a captivating game. As soon as you start playing you notice how much attention has been paid to the drawing and animation of all the characters and to the jollity of the backgrounds. Different-looking monsters move in different ways, and after taking a hit they flash for a little while. This is absolutely vital, since later in the game there are monsters that can only be destroyed with a particular weapon. Moving the fuzzball around is effortless too, and even pulling off extremely precise jumps doesn't cause too much trouble in the game.

Both the graphics and the game's plot have a clear cartoon-like spirit, further backed up by stranger-than-usual sound effects. The game also has plenty of mocking and even black humour for those who appreciate that kind of thing.

There's no point writing any exhaustive summary of the game. It would only be an overlong list of words of praise anyway; Creatures is quite simply a really good game, and we hope to see more like it.

1990 KevätToday in MikroBITTI's cookery school we are making a tasty game. We take one Operation Wolf. We cut out the scrolling as unnecessary. We move the camera back so that the commando hero fits entirely in the picture. We season the brew with the chance to collect more powerful weapons and Voila! We have Cabal.

Considering that Ocean has OpWolf II, a.k.a. OpThunderbolt, on the way, you might wonder why Cabal has seen the light of day. Playing it clears the matter up. The C-64 OpWolf was, relatively speaking, very good, but for one reason or another Cabal wipes the floor with it.

The killer, bouncing about mostly along the bottom edge of the screen, terminates enemy soldiers with automatic weapons and grenades. But the nasty baddie goes and throws tanks, helicopters, jet fighters and other nastiness into the fray. Luckily, eliminating these earns you machine guns, bazookas and other bonus junk as a reward. Buildings shield the commando from enemy fire until they crumble under the tornado of lead.

The sprites are excellently defined and animated, with the background graphics a notch on the ordinary side. The brisk rattle of the machine gun and the other effects give the playing the beefiness you'd want. Odd in itself: even though the game is controlled with the joystick, this form of control works surprisingly well even when the action speeds up.

That little creature that relishes simulated killing, lurking inside the human hide, smacks its lips contentedly after a helping of Cabal.

1991 KevätCadaver's back story is a familiar one: a dwarf barges his way through a castle with the ultimate goal of bumping off a wizard.

Cadaver really does stand out to its advantage from the classic eight-bit action adventures. There are hundreds of objects you can move around, and the plot is rich and varied. As someone who hates supremely surreal 'drop the carton of buttermilk into the pea soup to get the atom bomb' games, I was delighted by Cadaver's sensible puzzles, although on the later levels you could talk of a certain degree of unfairness. When you've spent an hour trying to crack some problem in the most far-fetched ways possible, it really does wonders for your ego to discover that the solution was actually really simple and obvious all along.

The interface runs mainly on the joystick, apart from the odd time you have to grope for a couple of keys. I might have wished for a better-designed way of using objects.

Cadaver abandons hand weapons altogether, and all the weapons that work are thrown weapons or spells. The accuracy is about what you can expect from an isometric game: nothing to boast about, especially as there's no way of telling when you've hit something. Stupidly enough, there are spare suits of armour and swords to be found, but you just can't use them.

Luckily the emphasis is more on problem-solving than on combat. Our English colleagues in particular have slated Cadaver for its lack of combat, since your average Brit apparently can't live without a simultaneous attack by a million monsters moving at warp six.

The Bitmap Brothers' skill at pixel-torturing is of the same high standard as ever. The whole thing is, if not exactly exceptionally good, then at least extremely pleasing. There are a few sampled effects, the best being the monsters' ethereal death scream; otherwise the audio side isn't all that hot.

Cadaver skilfully steers clear of cliche: whatever you kill generally stays dead. A map of the rooms you've visited draws itself automatically, and you can also save the game whenever you like. That feature ought to be standard in every game that's even slightly complicated, but it just isn't. Excessive saving is kept in check by the fact that the operation costs more each time, which irks the over-users of the step & save technique. In any case, the emphasis shifts from traipsing back and forth over the same routes to solving new problems.

Cadaver is one of the best action adventures in ages, and I for one have got seriously hooked on it (once or twice my faith has wavered, especially at the end of the famous level two, which just wouldn't seem to crack). More!

1990 SyksyFamiliar to home computer owners, this package simulating quintessentially Yankee youth pastimes has been incarnated on just about every machine, right down to the Lynx. Nothing surprising about that. The game's subject matter works as a trigger for images that sell: Californian beefcakes boarding about in garish shorts, shapely bikini beauties, blazing sun and bronzed skin.

Unusually for a sports game, CG doesn't demand furious waggling of the joystick, but mastery of controls that are both versatile and convoluted. Compared with the original version, the graphics, the sound and even the playability have hardly been changed in any direction at all.

Foot Bag, or kicking a hacky sack about, was the most interesting event at least on the home computers, but in the Sega version it has been done poorly. The chap's joints are so slow that the ball gets away from him on the first badly aimed kick. Doing skateboard tricks on the ramp is perhaps the best event in the package, but the awkward control commands don't exactly become second nature right away.

Roller skating and BMX biking are also among the better ones. In the former you whizz along a sidewalk full of litter, manhole covers and other obstacles, while in the latter you perform acrobatic stunts on a hilly track. The surfing is still somehow bearable, but the apathetic tedium of frisbee throwing hasn't turned into anything else in the Sega version.

Played with a small crowd, the California games are fine time-killing fun, but played alone it's hard to hold back a yawn. Despite its success, California Games is in my opinion the worst of Epyx's sports series, but you're free to disagree.

1989 KevätHave you ever wondered what you'd say if E.T. happened to ring your doorbell? In the near future, as interstellar travel becomes more common, there's bound to be work for interpreters between the different races. And Captain Blood will do nicely for the basic course.

Captain Blood's plot has been made seriously complicated, but boiled down it consists of collecting Blood's clones from the tens of thousands of planets in the game's galaxy. Only returning the clones back into Blood will save the captain's ever-decaying physical frame.

When Blood's ship, the Ark, arrives in a planet's orbit, you can use the various switches to select, say, a surface scan done in fractal graphics, which looks quite nice but is completely useless. If you like, you can also destroy the planet, or else send the organic Ooorx probe down to it.

The Ooorx's flight over the planet's surface is depicted in truly gorgeous fractal vector graphics. On some planets you're harassed by defence lasers, which start locking on to the Ooorx if you fly too high. The aim of the flight sequence is to find a chasm at the far end of which a genuine inhabitant of the planet is waiting, and a cursor showing the right direction is a great help in this task. And now we get to the very heart of Blood. You can converse with the alien using a symbol library containing dozens of icons. Needless to say, the conversation is at times wildly abstract (ME WARRIOR DEAD GENETIC).

The idea, in any case, is to try to pump them for information on where the clones are, but Infogrames has swung its axe straight into its own nuts. Thanks to the vast profusion of icons, the conversation demands quite some linguistic genius before you find anything out. And to everyone's great delight, all the information you gather is disposable, since the game is different every time. Well, at least you won't get bored of the same old alien races. Apart from the conversation there's hardly anything else to Blood, and there's no point hoping for some invigorating shooting. To pass the time you can transport ("Beam me up, Bloody") the local on board your ship and ferry them to another planet, or even kill them.

Blood's implementation is truly top class, which surely explains the game's sales success. On every machine the graphics are at the top end of the scale. Even the overlong hyperspace and planet-destruction sequences can be skipped if you want. The sound is hard to knock, either. A superb Jarre piece opens the game, and the aliens' "speech" is really brilliant and easily thrashes the Commodore 64 version of Little Computer People. And now that we've got onto 8-bit: even its Blood has pretty nice pictures and sounds.

Despite its gorgeous trappings, Blood doesn't offer a sufficiently rich and varied stimulus environment. For anyone whose hobby is communication difficulties, Captain Blood is a must-buy, but everyone else can only be recommended a trial play. Lest the little captain end up weeping tears of blood in the Gethsemane of the family home.

1989 SyksyPsyclapse, which puts out middling games under Psygnosis's wing, has finally struck a vein of gold - well, partly at least. Captain Fizz Meets The Blastertrons is the game's full name, and behind it hides a blend of Ikari Warriors and Gauntlet. A good ten levels of mindless slaughter and fun (same thing?) await Captain Fizz, as soon as the player bothers to press the mouse button to get rid of the loading screen and its satisfactorily good music.

Compulsory two-player mode is a feature you don't see very often. You see, CF is almost (according to the press release, totally) impossible to play through alone. Further on in the game the players have to change the position of some sort of switches to get through the force field, and turning the switches can't be done on your own. If that doesn't convince you yet, let's also mention that played solo, CF is a pretty dull game. Besides, when playing as a pair the firepower is doubled too, and consequently so is the destruction dealt out.

The heroes adventuring outside the screen see the action from directly above the dudes bobbing about on the screen. Frankly, the graphics don't exactly caress the eye; even I at first took the Captain and his comrade for assault vehicles before it dawned on me that they're super-trained commandos. The music and sound side also feel rather unfinished, if you leave out the disco beat pounding away behind the loading screen (no, it's not hip hop). There isn't much learning the hard way either: you don't need to bury yourself in the manual if you don't want to, as all the most important things become clear after a couple of trial games.

Captain Fizz doesn't look, let alone sound, like a particularly massive game, but with a mate alongside it shows its claws. A bit of numbness sets in further into the game, when the enemies get unpredictably tough and progress stalls. So: not for loners.

1988Every now and then a game comes out that hits you like a sledgehammer to the head. Carrier Command, a brilliant strategic combat game, is one such game.

The battleground is a fictional group of islands and two identical super-carriers, one of them unfortunately in the hands of the bad guys. The aim is to capture all the islands and/or destroy the other carrier. Why capture islands? Well, because you can set up robot factories there to produce raw materials and finished goods (fuel, weapons). To protect the supply chain you can build robot defence stations. Carrier Command is a topical game: you can fire a virus bomb into the computers that run the enemy's factories.

The carriers' armament consists of surface-to-surface missiles, launched via a camera hovering in the air, and a powerful laser cannon. For defence the ship can use classic flares and robots whose sole justification for existence is an eagerness to draw in the missiles heading for the ship. The carrier can also launch Manta multi-role fighters and Walrus amphibious tanks, which feature an autopilot, among other things. Both can be fitted with weapon systems as well as a payload.

Carrier Command was programmed by 3D graphics specialists Realtime Software, whose track record includes such classics as Starstrike I & II on the Spectrum and the PC version of Elite. No wonder, then, that Carrier's filled vector graphics literally knock you off your feet. Everything moves really fast and completely without jerking, no matter how much stuff there is on screen or how complex it is. Nothing like this has been seen before, not even on the 16-bitters.

The game has a pleasant and above all practical icon control system. You can control it with the keyboard, a joystick or a mouse alike. The only thing you can really slate Carrier Command for is the long pauses that go by while the carrier moves from one island to another. Microprose-style time compression would have been welcome.

This is a classic game that absolutely belongs in the collection of every 16-bit machine owner. The eight-bit versions, if they come out, will be done with plain vector graphics only, and the speed is hardly going to be in the same league either. That's life.

1987Carries Force is a war strategy game. It takes you more than 40 years back in time, to the most important moments of the Second World War. The setting is the Pacific. The player gets the chance to refight the famous naval battles of Santa Cruz, Midway, the Solomons and the Coral Sea. The game can be played with historical or randomly chosen starting positions. There are many difficulty levels.

In this game the player knows nothing of the opponent's moves. The radars are too weak to see a distant enemy, which has to be found with the help of search planes.

This game calls for a lot of strategic thinking. The player may accidentally send the wrong ships against the enemy. They can then easily be destroyed. You must remember to make plenty of use of your air power. It always pays to keep at least one squadron in the air at all times, so that it can fend off attacks by the enemy's bombers. The Japanese player usually has more ships, but these are usually balanced out by the greater strength of the Americans.

The game gives you the option of looking at a map. As in other strategy games, this is done through a screen-sized window that shows part of the whole area. You really do have to make use of this map when launching air strikes, since it is used to direct the air squadrons. The naval task forces keep to their own assigned courses. Changing course does not require the computer map.

Entering moves is different from normal games. Instead of single-key commands and a map that is on view all the time, the screen is normally in text mode the whole time. As such this dampens the atmosphere a little, but with the maps that come with the game you can picture the situation.

The maps give you a clear picture of the battle area. The game's makers have, however, forgotten one important thing. The maps don't come with any counters that would let you easily keep track of the state of the game. I fixed this myself with little bits of sticker, on top of which I placed a small scrap of paper. The paper had the number of the unit in question written on it. This way you do end up with a clear map.

Carrier Force is a game for thinkers. It feels tedious, especially when you don't know where the enemy is. Searching for enemy units is in fact the most frustrating pastime this game has to offer. At the same time, though, it can also set your nerves tingling, since you can sometimes find the enemy in quite surprising places.

The program itself has a few annoying features. The whole game is built around Basic. That in turn slows the game down, as the computer works out its replies carefully. Then again, most strategy games are in Basic or compiled Pascal, so that enough program code will fit into a small enough space.

The idea of the game is good. Its shortcomings are the slowness and the lack of counters. As a whole, though, the game is something out of the ordinary.

1990 SyksyThree Freescape games have already seen the light of day, so you'd think the three-dimensional system in question had had its day. Not a bit of it: Incentive slaps Super Freescape down on the table, bringing more credibility than ever to the pixel landscapes. In Total Eclipse you explored the innards of a pyramid; in Castle Master it's the turn of a medieval castle, where the crackpot wizard Magister has imprisoned half of the player's soul.

The playing area really is a Castle and not just a series of mazy corridors. From the very first seconds, the game's virtual reality takes hold so strongly that everything irrelevant outside the monitor's frame ceases to exist. First you admire the handsome facade, then you march in across the drawbridge, pop into the courtyard to take a look at the stables and the church, clamber up spiral staircases, wander about the underground catacombs, and so on. The sightseeing tour also reveals that the previous owner didn't have much respect for historic architecture. The castle even has a swimming pool and a modern bathroom with gents' and ladies' toilets and a washbasin with gold-plated taps.

An enormous number of working details have been squeezed into the castle, most of which are there purely to amuse the player. For example, you can flush the toilet, and you can make the smith's forge glow by working the bellows. More important, of course, is solving the problems. Most of them are the usual business of hunting for keys and stoning spirits, but there's room for some little logic nuts to crack as well: pressing buttons, trying out Herculean strength, giving some obstacle a shove in the right spot, and that sort of thing. This Dungeon Master-style straightforwardness is a good trait in that the player's curiosity and perseverance are more decisive virtues than brains.

Despite the intricacy of the surroundings, the graphics update rate has been pumped up to just the level where most of the time you don't pay it any attention at all. More bothersome are the rather crude controls, made especially uncomfortable by the mouse's tremendous sensitivity and the uncomfortable design of the icon used for moving. Even this cause for grumbling disappears once you get hold of magic that lets you zip straight from one doorway to another.

The game's weakest link is its underpowered sound. The music doesn't thrill enough and the effects are pretty rough too. It should also be mentioned that the teasing clues hung on the castle walls and the hilarious poem in the manual were written by Mel Croucher, the Grand Old Man of the games industry.

It takes a good long while before you've combed the castle's labyrinths forwards and backwards. Even after that you can go for the maximum score and try playing as a character of the opposite sex. To be honest, I was already beginning to doubt Freescape's vitality, but Castle Master flushed my prejudices down the sewers of the deepest catacombs. Nosing around a strange interior hasn't been this much fun since Dungeon Master, and what's more, you get a castle of your very own thrown in for a ridiculously low price.

1989 SyksyWhen the king has drunk the poison, there's nothing for it but to send the most revolting muscleman in the realm off to fetch the cure. The tableau recounting the stages of this epic trek is divided into six acts: the corridor of death, the dragon Olisos, the underground river, the Jibba monster, the encounter with Zandor and the triumphant return.

In the first part our hero lugs his muscle mass along a corridor that scrolls in three dimensions and swishes at bats with his sword. A couple of times his progress is halted by a bigger monster whose spewed fireballs have to be returned with controlled baseball technique. In the second part our hero spears an impressive-looking pink dragon that spews fireballs and grabs about with its great big mitts. In the third part you steer a canoe through a stalactite cave that scrolls in three dimensions. And so on.

The game's graphics are pretty spectacular, at least when they're not moving. The animation of objects flying towards you has been skimped on, and the overall impression is drearily flat anyway, which makes distances hard to judge. Nor is the scrolling of the corridors particularly convincing: they ought to move towards the viewer, but in fact they seem to scroll outwards. A strange effect.

At first you get the impression that there's plenty of content in the game, but its parts have been implemented with such minimal playability that you could really classify Castle Warrior as an animated comic. Still, I'd sooner read even a bad comic than play a sticky, frustrating non-game like this, which has the makings of a mediocre demo at best.

The five-minute theme tune sets the mood and raises great expectations, but in the end the game's only interesting feature is its Spanish origin.

1991 SyksyIf I weren't short of money, I'd jolly well build a magnificent castle instead of a poky little detached house. And the next time the neighbour complains that my pet leopard Kirk has scoffed both Musti and little Mikko, the "oh dear, what a shame" lament will most certainly be replaced by a vat of molten lead. But dreams and bank balances rarely meet, so I'll have to make do with Interplay's castle-building program, Castles.

The player is the king, and his aim is to build a castle (or several, depending on which level you've picked). And that's easily done: you choose a suitable mix of the required tradesmen, design the castle and put the lads to work. The castle rises little by little, the faster the better you know how to use your workforce. At the same time you have to keep your finances in order and buy food for the winter. About once a month the proceedings are interrupted by some supplicant or other, or some other disgruntled element, at which point you get to exercise your royal prerogative, which runs on the ABC technique. These episodes form a kind of story in the background, one of which is, say, a Robin Hood variation. (Hint: pity is a sickness)

And then every so often hostile Celts come at the castle. This part is where Castles' biggest weaknesses lie: the battles are even simpler than in Powermonger. The player can use archers and infantry, with strategy amounting to placing them in the right spot. After that they behave independently. For example, if you mix up east and west, then in the worst case getting the lads to lay into the enemy remains a pipe dream. What's more, the eager mob charges at the enemy as soon as it sees it, so that's it for tactics.

Stupidly enough, the troops have to be placed pretty quickly or else they go unused, meaning that by the time you've fetched a cup of coffee, some pathetic ragtag band of a couple of Celts has levelled the entire castle. Usually the player's army slaughters the whole gang before they even catch sight of the castle. Even once the castle is finished, when it has to withstand a bigger attack, eliminating the kindly Celts is no problem at all. The castle's layout or anything of the sort wouldn't seem to have any significant tactical importance, apart from the moat.

The graphics are generally interesting, with animated little men pottering about and fighting. The isometric castle can be viewed from two different directions and from above. The user interface is mouse-based and works in a perfectly OK way, though a better one could have been knocked together too.

Castles would be a truly splendid game if the warfare section had been made more varied with proper sieges and battles. As it is, it's a sort of charming, but in the long run tedious, Lego brick simulator.

1990 KevätThe traditional platform game is the true staple fare of console gaming. In Castlevania a strapping hero snatches the whip from his belt and forces his way into the bowels of a gloomy castle to take on knights, bats and other horrors. By putting out torches and smashing bricks you find hearts, which restore some of the exhausted hero's vitality. There is also more powerful equipment to pick up, such as extra length for the whip, a spiked mace and various throwing weapons. As usual, each level climaxes in an epic battle with a largish killing machine.

The secret of success is careful progress and precise timing of your weapons. When the hero is laid low you don't have to start the game from the beginning, which adds greatly to the playability, since the later levels are pretty tough. Both movement and weapon handling feel oddly sticky, which can cause frustration in tight spots.

The graphics are suitably gloomy, but because of the wealth of detail the effect is a little muddled in places.

Minor gripes aside, Castlevania is certainly a good game. Using a long whip or a spiked mace as a weapon is a commendably original and workable idea, but it is also the only detail worth raving about. Unfortunately, with Nintendo platform games you can't avoid using Super Mario Bross as the yardstick, and it is embarrassingly superior.

1987"Gee-Whizz! The enemy has built the CK-23, a fighter that operates from orbit, and we haven't got one. The balance of power is going to be badly upset, unless we send one man to the island where the prototype is. He could, say, blow up the island and steal the prototype's blueprints!"

"We have just the man, Sir!"

And so I found myself on a dark island, an assault rifle on my back and the fate of the Free World in my hands. I have eight hours to complete the mission before the sun comes up and it's game over for me once again.

I supposedly have an image intensifier in my helmet visor, which presumably explains why the landscape looks like vector graphics. If only I could find the resistance scientists' terminals, so that the mission would start to make some sense.

Catch-23 depicts a mission behind enemy lines. You can get around the different parts of the big island not only on foot but also by shuttle, with stations almost everywhere. A piece of cake, except that there are far too many enemy patrols, men and tanks alike, to stay alive for even five minutes.

The instructions are excellent and clear. The vector graphics move fast enough and the game promises enough depth, but ... The shooting has gone badly wrong. You see, within a couple of seconds the poor commando has to get the sights onto the enemy and pull the trigger, and with a joystick that isn't so easy. Sooner or later death comes, as sure as death and taxes.

This one detail sinks a promising game. It's stupid that a game this big should come to an end over one little slip on the joystick. Catch-23 is still worth a try if you reckon you're the fastest joystick-handler in the world.

1989 KevätIn our series on sports games of every stripe, we now present the Stone Age episode. What Epyx started with Summer Games, many have since carried on with Olympic games of their own. Caveman Ugh!Lympics is Electronic Arts' take on the subject.

In Ugh!Lympics, Stone Age cavemen measure themselves against each other in the events of mate-tossing, running-away-from-a-tiger, fire-making, bludgeoning your mate, dinosaur racing and jumping over a dinosaur. As usual, you can choose from 1-6 different players, and there's a practice option. What all the events have in common is a high rate of joystick wear and huff-puff grunting.

The Olympics open with mate-tossing. In this event you try to fling your neighbour off to the back of beyond by waggling the stick faster and faster, which is naturally extremely tiring. The next event is the tiger run, in which only the very fastest escape being eaten. The screen is split in two, with the players shown in one half and the tiger in the other. You can try tripping your pal so that the tiger doesn't go without its lunch. And once again the joystick gets waggled ever so thoroughly from left to right.

The art of making fire is important. In this event you rub two pieces of wood together and blow on a pile of leaves when sparks appear. Now and then you can whack your rival over the head with a club if they seem to be getting too far ahead. And this activity carries on into the next event too. The club fight is in fact the most fun event of all. Two Neanderthals stand on a high slab of rock and try to knock each other out cold. You can fool your opponent by pointing at the sky and saying "look, a bird"...

In the dinosaur race the competitors sit on top of a dinosaur and waggle the stick to get the saurus moving. Along the way you come across rivers and rocks that have to be jumped over. Knight Rider-style, the saurus also has a turbo boost, which is activated by patting the saurus gently on the head with a club. Too much use of the turbo can, however, be the death of the saurus.

The last and hardest event is the forerunner of the pole vault, the dinosaur vault. The player tries to jump over as tall a saurus as possible by taking a hard run-up. Once again it's the wrist joints that take a beating. A failed jump guarantees a well-fed dinosaur.

Well, yeah, it's quite fun, I suppose. It's just that there have been a whole lot of sports games on offer. I for one am slowly getting fed up with all these stick-waggling games. The graphics in Ugh!Lympics are big and clear, in places even delightfully funny. You could actually see the game as some kind of send-up of Epyx's Olympic games, especially judging by the intro demo. The music grates and is generally awful, but then I don't expect anything else from an American game.

There's nothing to fault in the technical implementation of Ugh!Lympics. Joystick movements always get an instant response, and the programming is precise in other respects too. I do still recommend trying it out before you think of buying.

1987Interceptor's Caverns of Sillach is a copy of Synapse Software's game Fort Apocalypse. The idea of the game is to collect robots from the surface and from the caves. These robots have to be taken to a base, where they are rescued for good and vanish without so much as a thank-you. The craft the robots are collected in is a flying saucer. The saucer has the peculiar habit of slowly "trickling" downwards if you don't move it anywhere. The enemies in the game are other craft and small flying contraptions. An additional hazard in Caverns of Sillach is the Earth and the Moon, which move back and forth and make getting around harder.

The game's graphics are run-of-the-mill and not especially pleasant to look at. On the plus side there's a good-quality loading screen and scrolling text during loading.

The colour choices in Caverns of Sillach are moderately successful, although some of the colours give too low a contrast and so blur into one another.

Apart from the music, the sound in Caverns of Sillach is miserable. The game plays music during loading and at the start of the game. It also contains a speech synthesiser, which is pretty wretched. The game loses its appeal fairly quickly because of its sameness.

1990 SyksyIf your best subject at school is history and you know everything about Julius Caesar and Kleopatra, and not just from Asterix, then Centurion was made just for You. World conquest has never been this much fun or this effortless.

You have at your disposal one army of a couple of thousand men, and with it you are supposed to conquer the world. That, at bottom, is Electronic Arts' Centurion. The game was designed by Kellyn Beck, who designed Defender Of The Crown, Rocket Ranger and S.D.I. for Cinemaware. So it's only natural that the game is afflicted with Cinemaware-ishness. Nice graphics and sounds, but not all that much to do.

World conquest is a project that goes like this: move the army into the country to be conquered, watch a little battle animation (which you can influence a bit yourself), tax the yokels out of their markkas, bring the army back up to fighting strength and move on to the next country. Well, it's not quite as simple as that, but nearly. In battle you have to choose a tactic for your army. With one particular tactic it's almost impossible to lose, which makes the fighting ridiculously easy. The thing with taxes is that the people start getting jumpy if taxation is steep. So at first you can keep a stiff tax rate for a couple of years, and when the people start revolting, you just drop the rate low for a couple of years and everything is fine again. Once twenty-odd years have gone by, there should be enough money in the treasury to build an enormous fleet. Then just load a big army onto the ships and point the prow toward England. On the easiest difficulty levels Centurion is absolutely ridiculously easy; only the two hardest levels put up any kind of resistance.

The fly in the ointment is the whining citizenry. The Romans, you see, are mad about circus entertainment and are forever demanding gladiator fights, which taxes the treasury horribly. There's a solution for this too: let a foreign invader take the capital, Rome, once, then win it back, and the citizens will have had their fill of gladiator shows for a few years. Restless citizens can also be pacified with chariot races, which works out cheaper. In the game you can even try to seduce Kleopatra, who incidentally looks exactly like Elizabeth Taylor.

For a strategy game, Centurion is unusually clear and pleasant. You don't even need to glance at the manual; you'll get into the game without it in no time flat. Mouse control is a straightforward and quick way of controlling things, and the fine pictures and nice music certainly don't get in the way of playing. The game does, however, stay superficial (cf. Cinemaware disease), and the initial spell lasts a few hours, in which time you'll manage to play it through a couple of times. For those interested in war/strategy games, Centurion guarantees a nice, soft landing.

1990 KevätWhat do a roped ring, Sylvester Stallone and The Champ have in common? Why, boxing, of course. The sparse ranks of Amiga boxing games have received a well-aimed addition from Linel.

Boxing is boxing, so that's it for the game concept. The rules of boxing can be found in the manual.

In Champ, play progresses logically. The fledgling man-feller first has to fight his mates in the street, until a manager picks him up to train at the gym. The gym's training programme consists of skipping, the heavy bag and the speed ball. These affect the boxer's attributes, strength and stamina. The aim is to reach the international arenas and the world championship.

At last you get into the ring with a real opponent. The men shake hands and the referee signals the start. There are several moves to choose from - three blocks and seven punches. On top of that, every now and then the men grab hold of each other and thump away at the tummy, as is customary in proper boxing. The referee is on the ball at every moment and points out fouls. The count works too.

After a sufficiently well-landed punch the opponent goes down flat on his face and takes a count. At the top of the screen are the hit counters and the fighters' energy. If the energy drops to zero, the next hit is a knockout. Once the bout is decided, the referee shows the winner in the classic manner and the screen shows a slow-motion replay of the final seconds.

The game state is saved automatically to the original disk after every bout. Because of this the original has to be left un-write-protected all the time, and of course you can't make a backup of it. Oh, the viruses! The menus do give you the option of making a separate data disk for the game state, but I for one couldn't get it to work; instead the machine hangs, classically. That kind of thing smacks of a rush to get it finished, and it leaves a bad taste in the user's mouth.

Graphically Champ is quite fine. The boxers could be a tad bigger, but the backgrounds and animation just melt in the eye. The sounds have been picked with care and well digitised. At the start of the game there's a superb animation, the credit for which goes to the supervisor of Rocky IV. The intro music is also from Rocky and has been done in a mediocre way. All in all Champ is a perfectly decent representative of its field, i.e. a worthwhile choice of boxing game when there isn't much else on offer right now anyway.

1990 SyksyDungeonmaster: many have tried to copy it, nobody has come anywhere close. Until now. Chaos... started out as a few extra levels for Dungeonmaster, but the FTL boys got carried away and cobbled the sequel together into a completely standalone game that doesn't need the original DM. The downside, of course, was that we got to wait a whopping couple of years for the sequel. But boy, was it worth it!

CSB begins like the Bible: in the beginning there was darkness, but instead of the Spirit of God, a dense crowd of the purple worms' big brothers moves upon the void. That's a bit unfortunate, since the band of heroes is as naked as it is unarmed. So let 'Let there be light' be your opening line. And then you realise that there's no getting away: a closed door blocks the way. Once you get through this, the fun and games are over and the difficulties begin.

So Chaos wasn't that easily squashed after all. The crafty Chaos Lord had a dungeon vault built, divided into four parts. Each of the mazes of the Fighter, the Ninja, the Priest and the Wizard leads to a central pillar in which corbum has been embedded. This pillar sucks mana out of the world and will in time bring about the destruction of the entire universe. The corbum has to be removed and thrown into the FUL YA pit to be destroyed.

Technically, Chaos Strikes Back is identical to Dungeonmaster. Apart from the new monsters and items, the menus and the rest of the graphics alike are completely familiar.

There is one big difference in the game. Dungeonmaster was tied to its levels, meaning that to make progress it was enough to keep burrowing your way further down. In Chaos the game flows 'freely' from one level to another, and the risk of losing your bearings is in a whole other league.

Dungeonmaster and Chaos alike are splendid examples of the role-playing game that makes real use of the computer. Both are entirely mouse-controlled (although in time-critical spots the keyboard is a necessity). The handling of items and other objects is a triumph of ergonomics: not one of the clones has come anywhere near it. The graphics are brilliant, the effects too despite their sparseness, the game's design and execution perfect.

Moving is done by clicking the mouse on the arrows at the bottom right, and fighting is simple too. At the right-hand edge of the screen there's a menu in which the weapon or item each hero holds in their hand appears as a silhouette. A click of the mouse brings up a menu from which you choose how to use the item or weapon. Bows, slings and shuriken can be thrown; swords and other close-combat weapons have more or fewer possible ways of striking depending on fighter level. The use of magic items and ropes is chosen the same way as well.

Magic is vital in Dungeonmaster and Chaos alike. Spells are formed by combining different runes in the magic menu above the weapon menu, and there are a little over twenty of them. Chaos, by the way, doesn't explain what the runes mean, let alone provide a spell list, so DM experience is essential.

The right mouse button brings up a screen for the individual hero, where you can feed them, check their levels, gauge their need for food and drink, load their quivers and examine items.

Gaining experience is logical: wizard and priest levels build up through casting spells, fighter and ninja levels through fighting, and not in some idiotic 'training halls' or in front of 'boards of examiners'. Experience points aren't even displayed.

The Utilities disk that comes in the package lets you do all sorts of neat things. The least noteworthy is the CSB demo, in which the Chaos Lord frolics in the bowels of a volcano. The character editor turns an old DM save disk into a starting setup for Chaos. The old characters are, however, stripped of every last piece of equipment, sob! If your DM saved game either contains heroes you consider too feeble, or else you simply don't have one, you can visit the prison in Chaos to fetch heroes of roughly Adept/Expert level and make a party of them. Real hard men use RE-INCARNATE.

When Chaos first came out, many of our foreign counterparts claimed that you could only stay alive with a DM party of heroes. That's b*llsh*t. The character editor also includes a small paint program with which you can make the heroes look however you like.

The most interesting option is the oracle. If you run into an unsolvable problem in the game, you have to save, quit and let the oracle analyse the saved game, whereupon it gives you murky hints. Thank God for that, because measured against the problems in CSB, Dungeonmaster didn't really have any.

In Dungeonmaster, on the lowest levels, a tear might come to your eye and a couple of swear words might go flying at the cruel programmers. In Chaos Strikes Back the floor gets wet and the swear words fly in dense flocks. The game is so full of treacherous traps, 'impossible' places and general unfairness that back when it came out, solving it at times seemed purely hypothetical. It did get solved, actually half by accident: a party of heroes at death's door happened to flee through the right door and just barely managed to kill a couple of demons on the wrong side of it too. And the corbum pieces were found on the survivors as well. I have to admit that the ending was a mild disappointment. The second time round too.

Since there's no shortage of crayons, let's draw you a picture: if you haven't played Dungeonmaster, don't start with Chaos. It is not meant for rookies.

One of Dungeonmaster's best features was the escalating difficulty. The player was, as it were, guided into the game's world, and the writings on the walls gave valuable hints. Chaos starts out hard and carries on feeling nearly impossible, without any easy, ego-boosting problems.

As for the allure of Chaos and Dungeon Master, let it be said that I got a fine excuse to play DM through in order to get a party together for a fresh run through Chaos. The project after that, naturally, was to play Chaos through with reincarnated characters. A classic.

1989 SyksyWith the ST-Amiga triumph rolling on, it's probably time to check what games publishers mean by a 16-bit budget game.

The disgusmatrons have kidnapped Princess Chardonnay, and she has to be rescued by flying through four fiiiiendishly difficult levels. First you fly through a meteor storm and shoot down five disgusmatrons, then you weave between pillars, and next it's insanely interesting to flit about between squares. Finally you fly through a tunnel full of pillars and once again destroy five disgusetceteras. Since the whole round then starts again from the beginning, it would seem that Princess Chardonnay may as well start learning the disgusmatrons' language.

The fast vector graphics can't hide Chase's fundamental flaws. When we talk about the ship's steering sensitivity, "sensitivity" is the wrong word. Watching it, many a stone sledge feels like an acrobat. A more serious flaw is the game's basic dullness and lack of imagination.

If you know how to program vector graphics in the first place, you could have smuggled a game in around them too. Even a budget-grade one.

1990 SyksyFirst there were driving games, then vague mixtures of shooting and driving came into fashion, until finally somebody realised that chasing other cars is the most natural thing to add to a game's content. Taito's coin-op Chase H.Q. is the most famous pioneering work of this game idea. The player takes the role of a detective tearing around in an unmarked car, and the task is to crumple wanted speed maniacs flat.

The Sega version is oddly feeble, right down to the bleepy music. The road scrolling in three dimensions certainly has a sense of speed, but it turns in strange little hops and the camera angle is too low. The controller's range of buttons has dwindled to gears, accelerator and a turbo knob, so there is no brake, which is really irritating on tight bends. When you finally get the villain into view, shoving it off onto the verge is quite a tiresome operation. You can't afford even the smallest mistake, because otherwise the crook pulls so far ahead that catching it is hopeless within the tight time limit.

After a bit of feeling your way you start to get a grip on the game, but it doesn't manage to pump enough adrenaline into your bloodstream, even though in theory everything should be in place: pieces fly off the opponent's car as it bursts into flames, there's an illustrated arrest sequence, the road even has junctions, and so on. In my opinion Sega's Battle Out Run is a better take on the same subject, even if its content is slightly more anaemic.

1990 KevätAnd so game genres evolve, one tiny notch at a time. It took a couple of years to add the option of road violence to the typical Outrun format. In Chase HQ the black car is driven by cops who, within a time limit, have to catch up with the criminals' car and then shove it off the road. So much for originality.

Despite the lack of it, the Amiga Chase is actually excellent. Clear samples, good graphics and splendid playability keep sucking you back in front of the screen. Then again, either I'm hellishly bad or the time limit is far too tight, but without the Continue option I wouldn't even have seen the criminals' car. The car is teeny-tiny compared with the coin-op and the roadside graphics don't always match the speed, but I didn't find these bothersome.

Sadly, the C-64 version is another story altogether. Judging by the general slowness and the single-colour graphics, the game has apparently been sucked straight out of the Spectrum. The cars are at least coloured, in their own strange way, but the three-dimensional effect never materialises, and neither does the playability. A plus, though, for the fact that in principle all of big sister's features are in there all the same.

Considering Ocean's other C-64 output, Chase-64 is an incomprehensible blunder, but Amiga owners should enjoy this good example of its genre.

1991 KevätWhy bother making new games when there are old ones already? Bolt a II on the end, and maybe a few changes to the game as well, and business booms and the money rolls in.

The cops drive a sweet sports car that even has a turbo, and arresting criminals is a neat matter of smashing their car to a pulp. Chase HQ II differs from its predecessor only in the shooting ability the co-driver has been blessed with, to counterbalance which the puttering crooks toss Molotov cocktails onto the road. The arrest process is made easier by extra weapons pushed on you by a support helicopter.

CHQ II is a nice enough looking and playable, if still too difficult, coin-op conversion. It's worth considering buying if you don't own the first one, in which case you can spend your money on something new and never seen before.

1991 KevätThere's no shortage of choice among chess programs, but nobody has made the choosing easy, since Infogrames' Chess Simulator is the umpteenth contender with the words 'winner of such-and-such tournament at such-and-such time' emblazoned on its box.

On the outside CS looks exceptionally neat, but the businesslike first impression is slightly spoiled by a comical speech synthesizer with a French accent. The number one complaint is the same as with most chess games. Apparently not every designer has yet managed to get it into their thick skull that moving a piece must not work by having the mouse snatch it up and drag it along, because dragging pieces across the board makes the pointer sluggish.

CS's menus come nowhere near the luxury of Chess Master, but everything essential seems to be there. The most important, of course, is adjusting the difficulty level by changing the permitted thinking time. You can also choose between a weakened playing algorithm and one that steamrollers you with its full artillery. The more advanced features include expanding the opening library and measuring ELO strength, which seem to be found in most of the new generation of chess games. The only clear shortcoming is the program's inability to solve chess problems of various kinds.

There's one feature of CS I don't really understand. You see, it was programmed by Oxford Softworks, who recently shoved their own chess program, Chess Champion 2175, onto the market. And a closer look does show that Chess Simulator is practically the same program in a different wrapper. There isn't even any noticeable improvement in playing strength. It even includes the familiar 3D displays with alternative piece sets, although the teddy bears have simply been swapped for African sculpture. Among the features dropped from the program, on the other hand, is the intuitive mouse control, which would have cut out all the pointless clicking of the mouse and shoving of pieces.

CS is an excellent chess program, but the choice is a really tough one if the shelf also holds Chess Champion 2175. That one has a hair more user-friendliness, but on the other hand CS may contain improvements that are hard to spot. Best to reject both and buy Chess Master 2100.

1988In this game you are the white king. You have a symbolic army under your command, and your goal is to defeat the armies of the Black king. The idea of the game has clearly been copied from Archon, that's how much these two games have in common.

The armed forces consist of the following units: pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, a queen and a king. There are eight pawns and two of each of the others. The exception, of course, is the king and the queen, of which there is only one. Each unit type moves differently and a different number of squares, and if a piece moves onto a square containing an opponent's piece, it can "eat" it.

A horrifically brutal way to settle disagreements!

The goal is not, as you might imagine, the complete destruction of the opponent's troops, but getting the opponent's king into a position where he cannot move without being eaten. This is called "Mate". "Check", which the game takes its name from, is on the other hand a situation where the king is threatened.

Unfortunately chess does not include any brisk shooting, or even real-time movement; instead each side moves its pieces in turn. As a result the game is rather slow-paced and will appeal at most to a few strategy types.

As with Pacman, the first chess game has been followed by numerous clones, of which this Chessmaster would seem to be right up there with the very best. There are lots of different options, and a whole disk's worth of game library comes along too. The graphics are good, but the lack of animation has to be marked down. Oh boy, what they could have made these eating scenes look like! As consolation, the Amiga and ST versions do at least talk.

All in all, this "chess" seems to be such a slow-paced game that the whole genre is hardly likely ever to achieve any great popularity. The best way to play the game in question is still with a ruler and lots of rubber bands for shooting the pieces. This, in fact, is the only game option Chessmaster lacks.

1989 SyksyInitial expectations really weren't high: on the cover a young whippersnapper who looks about 14 is swaying about waving a submachine gun bigger than himself. The back cover does at least mention that the player controls a character called Elliott. That at least raised my expectations, since I thought The Untouchables was a good film. The game wasn't called The Untouchables, though. Could U.S.Gold be saving the licence for some other game?

Anyway, my hand groped the disk out of the case and slapped it into the drive. At that very moment my eye found something in the case that was eye-ouch!-catching. Whatwhat? The name of the programming team made me think twice about whether it was even worth loading the game. The gang responsible was the Spanish TopoSoft, whose previous game MadMixGame was an average Pacman clone.

The first attempt left an even more horrible aftertaste in my mouth than I'd feared: I pressed the fire button and the game froze! There's the wonders of coding for you. Second time round we did at least get going. So, you control a policeman called Elliott in 1930s Chicago, whose task is to enforce Prohibition, i.e. destroy the illegal booze stashes. So says the manual, anyway. In actual fact the character scurries along a horizontally scrolling landscape and shoots everyone who comes his way. Uuuuuurgh!

The instructions give no info beyond a lame background story and a list of keys, in case for some reason you want to play from the keyboard. The graphics are nowhere near the best that can be wrung out of the C-64 - just look at Renegade III, say. The music is so bland that you don't even notice it. The only nice trick in the game is that the player's lives are shown as the number of spectators in a theatre (the game is, you see, like a film that people are watching), and every time the player dies, one spectator leaves. It makes you wonder how even those four spectators wandered into the theatre in the first place. To use an old joke, one can finally note that a fitting new name for TopoSoft would be the Untalented.

1990 KevätThe car chase is a stock cliché of action films, but it has been used surprisingly rarely as the subject of a game. Unless I guess wrong, the makers of Chicago 90 have drawn inspiration from a certain cult film in which the world record for wrecking police cars was set. Well, that's Blues Brothers, of course. The laid-back, bluesy intro music, where the toughest horn section in the computer world lets rip, already points that way.

You've probably guessed already that in this car game a couple of tons of sheet metal get crumpled before you can say Jake and Elwood. And best of all, you can pick your role from either side of the law. If you want to be the gangster, you get a red Ferrari under you and the aim is to wriggle out of a ring of six police cars. Playing the police works like this: all six patrol cars are under your command, one at a time is steered with the joystick, and the others can be ordered either to follow the gangster or to set up a roadblock.

The stage for the manhunt is a cityscape, neatly shown from diagonally above. More information comes from a map of the city and a simplified three-dimensional view from behind the windscreen. The ingredients of a proper chase are howling tyres, bullets drumming on the rear panels, dashing handbrake turns and, of course, rip-roaring pile-ups. Chicago 90 has them all.

Then the bad news. The steering feel is non-existent, when commanding the police cars you have to wrestle with the stickiest mouse control in the universe, the random Sunday drivers are so dim they can't even turn at the bends, and the scrolling breezes into the final qualifying round of the international jerking championships. The basic idea is so strong, however, that not even weak programming quite manages to spoil the fun of playing.

Chicago 90 is an annoying borderline case. Sure, it's a shambles worth experiencing, but it leaves an unfinished taste. If you want to play cops and robbers, at least you don't have to agonise over an embarrassment of choice: Chase H.Q. or Chicago 90, take your pick.

1987Cholo stands out from the crowd. Firebird has long been my favourite company, thanks to the original and long-lasting games in its "Gold" series. And now Cholo joins the company of such evergreens as Elite and Sentinel.

...The only problem is the radioactivity on the surface. But hah! The radiation would actually allow surfacing - the real problem is the droids that rule the surface. A bunch of "volunteers" hand-picked by the main computer have tried to solve the problem, but in vain.

The job calls for a professional. Your own hide isn't directly on the line, since the droids you control from a terminal do the heavy lifting.

Rizzo The Rat, a droid armed with a medium-sized ion cannon, is your key weapon. Rizzo can stun other droids and hack their circuits, turning them into new recruits for the Freedom Army. Igor The Hacker, Anneka The Fly-Eye and many, many others will be needed before the surface belongs to humans.

Cholo is hard to pigeonhole. It's some sort of crossbreed of Paradroid, Mercenary and Hacker, and the depth to be found in it effortlessly swallows those worthless licence tie-ins whole.

The city is full of mystery, adventure and atmosphere. The city map that comes with the game shows interesting locations, but how do you make it all the way there? The graphics are rather successful vector graphics. They could be faster, but they do the job all the same. Not much sound has managed to squeeze in.

Cholo is a very, very interesting game. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that Cholo isn't to everyone's taste either. It's to mine, and that's enough for me.

1987Choro Q gives every MSX owner the chance to find out what the job of a multi-storey car park stevedore feels like. The aim is to drop the cars to the ground from a three-storey car park. There's one car at each edge of every floor, and the clearing out has to start from the top one. The player gets a heap of their own that looks like a VW Beetle. Handling the rattletrap is fairly easy.

The game starts on the bottom floor, where two other cars come at you and have to be jumped over. If the player manages to crush an oncoming car by jumping on it, that earns bonus points. Bump into the cars at the edges by accident and the player is destroyed. On the next floor a new enemy car lies in wait.

A nasty surprise can happen when the player is changing floors and an enemy car appears just after you've jumped. Then there's nothing left to be done. The player is destroyed.

When you finally make it to the top floor, you just have to methodically shove the cars off and take care not to tumble down after them yourself.

Once the unlucky customers' cars have been piled up on both sides of the car park, the next lot in need of a parking space get in and the game gets a little harder. You can keep an eye on the car's fuel gauge to make sure you don't run out of go-juice.

Cheerful background music plays during the game, and the other sound effects are nice too. Graphics-wise the game is relatively good, and there's nothing to complain about in the colours. All in all the game is perfectly playable, even if it's nothing top-notch.

1989 KevätThe year is 1922, and a letter has arrived from dear old Dad. Unfortunately, all it means is that the family's treacherous servant Richard has probably bumped Daddy off. Vengeance lives. Complicating matters, Neil Hardric has used Daddy's time machine and fled into the past. So the first task once you're back at the family manor is not only to find the time machine but also to figure out how to get it going. After that, all you need to do is scour the past and find Richard, and possibly Dad as well.

Chrono-Quest is the first adventure game published by Psygnosis, and it fits the Psygnosis line well in the sense that the most important aspect of adventure games, namely the graphics, is excellent. The price for this is four ST disks or three Amiga disks.

Chrono-Quest's undeniably best feature is the non-need to use the keyboard, since everything goes very nicely with the mouse, Icom Simulations style. All the icons you need are on the right-hand edge of the screen, and the inventory is shown along the bottom. Only moving around is a bit clumsy, since it isn't done by clicking on a door, and the compass rose doesn't bother to tell you which options are available either.

The game's French origins show every so often. Even a Fenno-Mongol can spot the weird Frenglish sentences, but the meaning comes through all the same. The real drawback, though, is the mouse cursor's varying grab area. Sometimes you can zero in on an object from centimetres away, other times irritating precision is required.

In any case, Chrono-Quest, though it can't match kindred spirits such as Shadowgate, is nonetheless a pretty good adventure, and the language skills it demands should certainly be within Finnish capabilities.

1990 SyksyI suppose this counts as progress too: first adventures were nothing but text, then pretty pictures were slapped on as decoration, and today's games run almost entirely on graphics. Chronoquest Two's system works in the same style as Future Wars or The Quest for the Timebird: you pick information out from among the pixels with the mouse.

The game's plot is about time travel, and it carries on from where the previous instalment left off. After the hero has solved his father's murder, his time machine develops a fault and whooshes off far into the past. The idea is to find enough metal objects, which are then chucked into the machine's fuel tank.

You could build almost anything around this basic setup, and that is just what the game has done. The player is flung about with unusual abandon from one place to another, for example into the boat of Odysseys and to witness a certain happy family event on the outskirts of Beetlehem. Picking up metal along the way is easy enough in itself, but you need exactly the right amount in the right order.

The game's execution is perhaps even too simple. It's really a series of pretty pictures, now and then with a snippet of animation and digitised speech thrown in. The icon control has only a handful of basic commands, and even those change depending on the situation. Rather odd is the lack of a quit option. So you'd better save your position straight away, so that you don't have to reset the machine every time you get stuck. The game comes on no fewer than four disks, so at least the graphics for thirteen eras have been squeezed in; as for the content, I wouldn't vouch for it.

The game left a somewhat hollow feeling: is this just a demo, or is there some proper meat to chew on in it as well? Surely Psygnosis isn't losing its grip? It does make you wonder, when lately the company has even started using old science fiction book covers drawn by Tony Roberts, Ian Craig and the like on its packaging!

Such a drastically oversimplified product might suit those who have never even heard of adventure games yet.

1991 SyksyChuck Rock's plot contains a harrowing lesson based on real life: if you concentrate too much on goggling at the TV, the neighbourhood lout comes round and steals your wife. Abduction was particularly effortless in the Stone Age, since all it took was a sufficiently heavy wooden club.

And so the founding father of manly slob culture must set out on a perilous trek to fetch back his beloved laundry-hanger. On screen, this subject matter, touching as it does on profound eternal themes, has taken on all the trappings of a thoroughly conventional jumping game. There's not a trace of tedious cliché, however, thanks to the stupendous comedy and all-round likeability.

In keeping with popular misconceptions, the terrain is populated by saurians that have no business in the flint age, which Chuck shoos away either by thumping them with his outsize belly or by booting them with his foot. Chuck can also snatch a boulder up into his arms, which can be used both as a shield against air attacks and as a missile.

Core, which has fumbled badly at actually putting its games together, has for once managed to produce an effort about whose technical side there is nothing bad to say. To be more precise, Chuck Rock is absolutely gorgeous. Areas several screens tall scroll beautifully in two layers and everything runs smoothly with clockwork precision. The cartoon-styled graphics have been polished into a feast for the eyes, and they carry a strong charge of down-to-earth yokel humour. The terrain is also full of amusing surprises that break up the monotony of the basic idea. For example, when passing underneath a huge brontosaurus you have to watch out by the hind legs, so that the beast doesn't squirt a load of guano on top of you.

Furthest off target is the music, which mainly succeeds in irritating your auditory apparatus. Otherwise the game is a real bull's-eye from Core, even though it's a typically frustrating bit of platform bumbling and there's no real originality to be found beneath the surface.

1989 SyksyCYAFT 2.0 is only for truly hardened simulator fans. Former F-19 and F-16 pilots needn't creep up on the game rubbing their hands, because at Chuck Yeager's insistence there is not ONE DROP of violence in the game. CYAFT is just a 'Trainer', as the name itself makes clear.

If there's no tight dogfighting and no tricky missions, what keeps your interest up? The programmer and Chuck Yeager have apparently figured that meticulous simulation of flying is enough. Alongside MicroSoft's Flight Simulator III, CYAFT is the only simulator in which aircraft behave exactly as they should.

If need be, the game can teach you to fly any of some twenty aircraft; you can also test your skills in air races, slaloms, canyons and formation flying.

As for different aircraft, CYAFT has just about everything possible, from First World War propeller planes all the way to the new X-29 experimental aircraft and the F-117 Stealth Fighter. There's even a space shuttle! As a small minus, let it be mentioned that the different-looking cockpits come in only three basic models. So the F-16 fighter and the space shuttle have the same controls and instruments. The game also has an automatic camera mode, which records your flight in the machine's memory for as long as your computer has free memory left. Afterwards you can watch your flight from absolutely any angle.

Although all this may well sound great, messing about with the game comes down to taking off and wriggling around in the game's small universe. At first, at least. After a while you notice how much fun flying really is, even without MiGs on your tail. The flight lessons, formation flights and air races, with their dozens of possible viewing angles, keep your interest up for a surprisingly long time.

On a PC fitted with an EGA display you can choose a resolution of 640/350, which gives really sharp definition. The game naturally slows down visibly, but if the speed isn't enough, you can choose a lower resolution, which speeds things up. And as I said, you can peer at your own plane from absolutely any angle during the flight.

Since this is a game done in vector graphics, a lot is demanded of the computer before the horizon tilts smoothly and realistically. As for the sound side, it's best not to say much of anything.

CYAFT 2.0 is a simulator in the true sense of the word. Without combat, though, it's boring as hell in the long run. Luckily Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator, made with the same technology, is on its way, and that one at least has combat.

1991 SyksyFamous test pilot Chuck Yeager lent his name to a flight simulator an eternity ago. In Chuck Yeagers Flight Trainer you got to fly the most interesting aircraft imaginable, but with one shocking shortcoming: no weapons. Now that shortcoming is finally being put right.

CYCT is split into three eras: the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. There's a legion of aircraft, but only the following can be flown by the player: P-51 Mustang/Focke-Wulf 190, F-86 Sabre/MIG-15 and Phantom F4/MIG-21. Each war has some twenty missions in either side's machines.

The most interesting thing is the chance to create missions yourself and throw any planes you like into them. Can an FW-190 shoot down B-52 bombers? Can it even catch them? Could you have steamrollered the Third Reich with a Phantom? These and many other questions of the same sort are answered with a little fiddling.

Chuck himself dishes out tactical advice before the flight and during it too, albeit so well digitised that even through the Adlib I thought the cat was tormenting my records again. The program's sort-of-training character also shows in the inclusion of a video recorder, with which you can go back over the highlights of your flying career and save them to torment your mates with as well.

Anyone who has wrestled with Stormovik or LHX will experience an uncanny deja vu phenomenon with this game. The same guy has evidently been digging through his stock of routines and graphics again. Those vector contraptions don't exactly thrill after Red Baron's "you can even count the rivets" realism, but as a bonus even a feebler machine can manage to run the program.

The biggest shortcoming of Chuck Yeagers Combat Trainer is that the player still flies alone. In principle CYCT offers the same as a legion of other sims, just with different planes. The hair-splitting realism has been toned down enough that even someone who has played less with flight sims stays in the air.

1989 SyksyThe circus has come to Pleiers Heiven. The audience can look forward to idiosyncratic sagging on the tightrope, tail-heavy trick riding, death dives from the trapeze and a close follow-up of man-eating tigers at mealtime. For the players, the circus on a micro offers the fate of an amateur doing a professional's job.

1-4 players can take part in the game, preferably humans. Being in a gang of computers feels awfully orphaned, and the game's most essential offering, having fun together, turns awfully one-sided. Schadenfreude is the best joy only if its target knows how to appreciate spite.

Although Circus Games is extremely easy to learn, sovereign mastery of it takes dogged practice. Performing circus stunts without the proper coaching lends the game its comic side. The various death dives form a semi-official act on the programme, and taking part in it sets off hysterical hilarity.

Various animals are an essential part of the circus. Besides the elephant tripping about on the title screen, the game has managed to squeeze in a horse and tigers. The former is for practising trick riding, and the latter have to be persuaded that feeding time is still a while off. The game character survives his spills from the saddle without external injuries, but you'd think banging your head on the floor would be unhealthy in the long run, so this event can't exactly be called non-violent either.

Cracking the whip, you steer the stripy cats round a small obstacle course. If your lashes hit the cats too often, the cats lash back. Next on the programme comes something very rarely seen in a real circus and eagerly awaited by the littlest members of the family: a people-eating simulation.

The best-implemented event in Circus Games is the trapeze jumps. Well-timed transfers from one trapeze to another, and plunges into the safety net after a misjudgement, have that certain something you've lately waited for in vain from the kind of game Circus Games represents. In this event you really come to appreciate the option of a replay of your last attempt.

Weighed as a technical achievement, the game lands mercilessly on the growing heap of mediocrities. As a choice of subject, though, the circus setting is such a bullseye that even Tynesoft hasn't managed to destroy its magical pull entirely. As a family game, Circus Games is excellent.

1988The cleverest and smartest among you will of course have guessed straight away that Clever & Smart are known in Finland as Älli ja Tälli. The Spaniard Ibanez's heroes are presumably fairly popular too, since albums seem to trickle out every now and then.

And the Germans have cobbled together a game about this duo, whom some people even find funny. They have to find Dr. Bacterius. So much for the plot.

Clever & Smart is a truly international game. You can choose German, English or French as the game language. The instructions are in both Swedish and Norwegian, and to crown it all, even with the instructions the game is all Greek. The importers have thrown in Finnish instructions, which unfortunately are just as full of errors as the originals.

The way the game works is baffling, to say the least. Ä&T can wander around the town, buy disguises, find objects and do all sorts of more or less cool things with the aforementioned. When Ällitälli moves into the sewer network, the sprites grow even bigger and more recognisable. Death comes from a number of causes, but I really wasn't always clear on why the scythe swung.

The graphics are fine, I'll give it that. Even on the C-64 the duo is easy to recognise. The sounds are the usual sort, and luckily there's no background tune jangling away the whole time.

Clever & Smart seems to be a perfectly decent and even varied arcade adventure that fans of the genre should give a test play. Especially if you like baffling games.

1990 SyksyScrape the leftovers of Quedex off the table, stir in a couple of new ideas and send a big-eyed, frown-wrinkled rubber ball skating around the mazes. There, in a nutshell, are the ingredients of Cloud Kingdoms. This time the one who has fallen under the spell of ball-rolling is Dene Carter, best known for the game Druid.

The job of Terry, the little green bouncer, is to collect the crystals stolen by the evil Baron von Bonsai from the corners of levels floating above a bottomless abyss. Helping the fiercely glowering hero along are keys, extra time and the rest of the standard maze-game furniture, but there's room for something more original too. By touching a wing icon you can flap over walls, and after picking up a paint pot you can build floor over the empty spots for a couple of seconds. It also goes with the genre that progress has to be made difficult by every means possible. At the nastiest end are the vanishing floors and springy rubber walls that shove the ball about just like in a pinball machine.

The thirty-two levels are grouped into clusters of four, of which you only have to clear one. The freedom of choice is a good idea, since the difficulty of the levels ranges from almost bearable to sickeningly torturous. Even among the early levels there are unbelievable contraptions bordering on the impossible, which aren't even worth attempting. Unless you happen to be a junior-league table tennis champion at the peak age for learning motor skills. Even in the easiest levels it's hard to escape nervous symptoms, the reason being the far too twitchy acceleration tuned into the little ball's turbocharger. Poor Terry's sense of balance is nothing to boast about either, since it's irritatingly easy to totter off into the void.

Behind all the bouncing there are eye-pleasing graphics whose style suits the game's playful mood splendidly. Among the special effects, the neat-looking layer of cloud scrolling beneath the level deserves a mention. The sound consists of tootling tunes in keeping with the spirit of the game and the usual effects.

The game has a smooth, slickly flowing feel, but its creator has forgotten that fun matters more than challenge. You either like Cloud Kingdoms or you hate it, depending on how much frustration your poor nerves can take.

1987So Cobra, then, is this C-grade Judge Dredd whose job is to rid the world of crime. The chief villain in this game is Nightslasher, whose dastardly plan is to flood the games market with Z-grade licence products. Can Marion Cobretti save the poor consumers from this horrifying fate? Do the consumers even want to be saved? Cobra is a surefire subject that would sell the game even if it were a Rambo clone with new graphics. But that, by golly, is one thing Cobra is not!

Unfortunately. Instead, Cobra is an almost straight rip-off of Green Beret, lacking only the green hat's flawless execution. The world's least Stallone-looking sprite clomps forward bit by bit while crooks twice as fast hurl knives and axes and atom bombs. Every now and then the unarmed Cobra accidentally (you bet!) kills a passer-by and tries to find not only photo model Ingrid but also a Jatimatic with a laser sight, not to mention other weapons. The best weapon, though, is the power switch. Cobretti's health is shown as a hamburger, which is in fact the most original thing in this game. Ah, the flower of humour - it never wilts.

Cobra is yet another entry on the overlong list of worthless licence games. Ocean's next game will probably be Rocky IV, with an empty cassette inside a pretty package. That's hardly going to hurt sales. The people get what the people buy. Licence games are a disease - what's the cure?

1990 KevätCobra Triangle was produced by the British Rare, which has an interesting history. Originally the firm was known as Ultimate, but that renowned games house mysteriously vanished, changed its name and started concentrating on games consoles. In its day Ultimate's trademark was the use of a diagonal overhead perspective, and Rare too seems to have taken a liking to the same technique.

CT's subject is speedboating, which it tackles from a great many angles. At first you slalom leisurely along a river channel taking potshots at other boats. Halfway along you come to a junction where you can handily choose the order of the following levels. After that there's all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff on offer, such as bouncing over ramps, boating against the current and precision shooting. The sea-monster slaughters crammed in among it all are perhaps a slight lapse of style, but each to their own. You have to keep getting better gear for your under-equipped tub so as to stand at least some kind of chance on the later levels.

One of the most original events is mine clearing, which works like this: the player tows mines to the other end of the course while a computer-controlled boat tries to snatch them for itself. Protecting swimmers has a similar sort of idea but with the roles reversed: the computer's boats try to kidnap the little fellows paddling about in the middle of the booms while the player lays down covering fire with the fury of desperation.

A game this cleverly thought out could be praised for the length of a six-hour marathon speech, but then we come to the eternal questions surrounding the difficulty level. You can somehow still swallow the levels varying illogically from extremely hard to boringly easy. In fact, that sort of arrangement gives the player welcome breathers. But crossing the waterfalls on level eight, for example, is such a precise business that it isn't necessarily fun any more.

Luckily a little frustration doesn't spoil the game, since it has so many good points all the same. There are 25 completely different courses, the playability has been carefully honed, and even the graphics and sound have lots of neat touches that create a polished impression. CT is one of those games that you regularly curse to the lowest pit of hell, but a minute later there you are playing it again with your eyes gleaming.

1987Codename Mat is a grandchild of the good old traditional Star Trek, and the game has changed a lot in ten years, though not necessarily for the better in every respect.

When good old Star Trek was made, people hardly knew what a joystick was. Now, on the other hand, they do, and it shows. The slow-paced space adventure done in character graphics has turned into a three-dimensional space war tearing along at the speed of light. But the game still has all the old basic features: there are two "map rooms", you destroy the enemies in the same sector, you search for the mothership, etc.

The execution in Codename Mat is good; the joystick in particular is put to use in an almost exemplary way. The graphics are good considering the speed of the game. And there's plenty of difficulty too: succeeding at Codename Mat takes a lot of learning and practice.

Because of its history alone, Codename Mat is one of those games that you can get some version of for every computer. For the most common computers there may even be several different versions from different makers. Codename Mat does not pale beside its rivals.

1988One of the best games from Strategic Simulationc Inc, the king of strategy games, is Colonial Conquest, which is set in a period of rapid human development, the age of colonial power. The aim, as the name already suggests, is to acquire colonies, whose revenues buy armies, which conquer new colonies, whose revenues buy more armies... And on the side you wage war with the other colonial powers.

Six superpowers take part in the race for colonies: Germany, Russia, Japan, England, France and the USA. All the other states that appear on the world map are neutral for as long as they haven't been conquered.

In the best SSI style, the game has three scenarios to choose from: standard, 1880, i.e. the race for colonies, and 1914, the brink of war. In the standard scenario none of the colonial powers holds anything at the start except its own country, its army and its navy. In the 1880 scenario everyone already has colonies, and finally, in 1914, the world war gets into full swing in both Europe and Africa.

The different nations have different prospects of world domination. The soldiers vary in quality, and equipping them costs money; the same goes for the navy. British soldiers are the best in the world, but they also cost the most. They're good at winning, but if a battle is lost, the losses are huge too, whereas Russian soldiers cost only a third of what the British do, but are vastly weaker. The British likewise have the best navy, and it is also the cheapest to build. The Germans have the best chance of winning the game, if only because of the size of the army they start with. And since their soldiers and navy are the second best and relatively cheap, you can put a fighting force together quickly.

With Colonial Conquest SSI has departed from its usual way of making games and made the game almost entirely playable with the joystick. Only moving on to the next phase and looking at the scores or the war tables requires the function keys. The playability is, accordingly, really good.

Each game round lasts a year (not in real time), during which there are four movement phases. In one phase an army can reach the lands of a neighbouring country, and a navy can get even further. At the turn of the year there is a build phase, when the player, with the money from their colonies, can buy army in lots of 10,000 men ($200,000-$600,000), have a navy built ($300,000-$700,000), fortify their colonies (which doubles their defensive strength), give economic aid to states that are still independent, send out spies and try to bribe independent states over to their side.

There isn't much to be said about the graphics in this game. To non-strategy-fanatics this game is an abomination. The same goes for the sound. There isn't any. Not much, anyway.

Almost all strategy games are Games, but CC is The Game among StrategyGames. Ease for the beginner, challenge for the professional, quick to pick up for everyone. And if you've played the game a lot, it's nice to present alternative solutions to the problems of colonialism in history class.

1990 SyksySilmarils, representing the younger generation of the French family of game houses, shoves its own take onto the swelling heap of graphic adventures, with the action set in the manly heroic landscapes of the Wild West. Fur trapper, ladies' man and frivolous spendthrift O¡Brian has caught wind of a gold mine on Indian land. So off he goes at once, so that he can carry on squandering money and charming the ladies.

The hero, brave and gallant, trudges through landscapes that change a screen at a time, hacking up Cheyenne Indians and assorted beasts of the forest and blasting them to dust. To begin with, dangling about his person as decoration are a rifle, an axe and a knife, but you can get more by collecting the Indians' valuables and lugging them to the local travelling trader. Besides roughing it in the wilds and climbing mountains you can also try shooting the rapids in a canoe, but the point of this action sequence never really became clear.

The player's headaches are mainly choosing the right route and making sensible use of the arsenal. The muzzle-loading shooting iron, for example, is a tad clumsy in close combat. Anyone thirsting for logical puzzles may find Colorado a slight disappointment, since the game is little more than an adventurous bash-'em-up, though a fairly varied one for all that.

As is typical of graphic adventures, in the side-on landscape you can also move into and out of the screen. Getting round rocks and stumps is irritatingly illogical. Sometimes, for example, you can't move down even though the way is clear, and yet you can move diagonally down. Besides, it's pretty ridiculous that a burly backwoodsman supposedly snuffs it if he plops into the rapids from a height of one metre. When steering this brittle-boned hero it's handiest to stick to the keyboard, especially as you have to fumble for the function keys every now and then anyway.

The presentation is tidy, but the approach is impersonal and the result a bit too much of the usual middling standard. And by the way, why do enemies always have to splat into smithereens, when it would be much classier for them to keel over dead in the dust?

Colorado is a decent enough effort from Silmarils in itself, but this time that crucial "must play it through" spark was missing.

1990 KevätAvesoft's strapping, lustily kicking firstborn is a Tetris-style puzzle game. Cloning Tetris is a somewhat reckless wander along the fringes of the courtroom, but Coloris, developed by Pertti Lehtinen, is an interesting borderline case in that an original variation has been built out of the basic elements of the Russian model.

In Coloris you drop vertical bars three pieces tall into a box measuring 7x14 squares, and try to put off the moment it fills up. Each of the pieces in a bar is randomly one of five colours, and their order can be switched with the fire button.

The idea is to arrange the bars so that at least three pieces of the same colour line up side by side or vertically, at which point they disappear. The more pieces you manage to clear at once, the better the reward: one or more rows are removed from the bottom of the screen, and on top of that you can get a "joker", in which all the pieces are the same colour.

The joystick lets you adjust how fast the pieces fall, which is taken into account in the scoring. Braking seven times earns you a penalty row that pushes the floor up. In true Tetris style the game gradually speeds up, and in the end you're in full-blown panic. Besides the basic game there's also a quick game to choose from, with a hundred-second time limit and a box floor that rises relentlessly.

The clear, unfussy graphics have one interesting feature: the scoreboards and the tubular frames of the box seem to stand a couple of centimetres proud of the screen. A couple of hours of staring only strengthens the illusion. Graphics wizard Harri Granholm has created the three-dimensional impression purely through shading and choice of colours.

The background music tailored by the Amigos team, using soft marimba sounds, creates a focused mood, but since it's so short the effect is repetitive and nagging. A touch of international colour comes from the Norwegian title music, which sets the mood in the vein of the Alien theme.

There seems to be a small blunder in the counting of cleared pieces: in long chain reactions the program doesn't take all the pieces into account. Whether the machine runs out of fingers to count on or something else is wrong, either way the player is rewarded with fewer joker bonuses than the instructions promise.

Tetris-like games have an almost supernatural ability to hold your interest for hours on end. No point even trying to work out why. Let's just settle for saying that in Coloris all the pieces click into place.

1990 KevätOnce upon a time there was a game in which a lone man dashed through a dense swarm of enemies, gun rattling and grenades blasting, to rescue his fellow soldiers. And in no time more of them came along, until the world was full of clones of this game called Commando.

Years and years later, the owners of 16-bitters also get to make the acquaintance of this old classic. Commando is the absolute basic model of its kind: there are no extra weapons, and the only thing you can collect on the battlefield is grenades. Nor is the conversion particularly successful. The graphics are OK as such, if strangely colourless-looking. The playability wobbles, especially in that the grenades pack roughly the destructive power of a penny banger.

Regrettably it has to be said that time has passed Commando by. As a budget game it would be an excellent choice, but it's not worth paying full price for.

1990 KevätIf you remember the C-64 game called Theatre Europe, you already know roughly what kind of game Conflict Europe is. So what we have here is a strategy game. The player's task is to defend Western Europe against the aggressions of the great people of the East. At your disposal are troops from several different countries, the air force, special forces (germ warfare and other nasty stuff) and, of course, the last resort: nuclear weapons.

The game is controlled smoothly with the mouse. Moving troops around and handing out supplies to them is child's play, with the mouse whistling along the tabletop. Some functions are annoyingly tucked away behind keys, which really grates, especially when you've settled into an extremely comfy position in your chair and have to lean over to the keyboard.

Launching nuclear weapons demands even greater effort. The player has to leaf through the manual and dig out the launch code, and typing it in gets the big baguettes flying. Do bear in mind, though, that nukes are not a good solution: at least as many missiles come whooshing back from the other side, if not more.

For a strategy game, CE uses the Amiga's capabilities surprisingly well. The graphics are quite nice, and the colour-animated mushroom cloud in particular is really neat. Little digitised animation clips spice up the game nicely and now and then make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The sound, sadly, consists only of digitised weapon clatter and the humming and clicking of computers (???). As I said, the playability is in good shape, although all the functions could have been moved over to the mouse.

Conflict Europe will at least charm fans of war/strategy games; for everyone else it may be a waste of money. An excellent representative of its genre.

1991 SyksyWar rolls across the desert, the people of Israel are fighting for their existence... Will people still be strolling about the sunny kibbutzim tomorrow, or will the Arabs be herding their camels among the ruins?

SSI serves strategy fans a truly delicious sequel: Red Lightning was superb and unprecedented but regrettably poorly executed in a few respects. Now we witness a miracle: the feedback has been taken seriously, and the mighty game system has been perfected and grafted onto a new war, the showdowns between Israel and the Arabs. You get to puncture Arab armoured camels either in the war of 1973 or in a hypothetical clash in 1990. Peace conferences are unheard of, and who would miss them anyway, as long as the war is going well?

Norm Koger Jr. has done a thorough job revamping Red Lightning's system. Everything still affects everything: fatigue, supply, traffic jams, chemical weapons and so on. But the list doesn't end there: the new features include, among other things, attack helicopter units, transferring troops from one unit to another (Israel only) and striking weak units off the ration roll.

Changes have also been made to the use of the air force, but no improvements were needed. Depending on the era, different aircraft types are available, each with its own characteristics for different missions. The planes can do anything from winning air superiority to strikes against ground troops or supply lines. In the combat phase, planes on strike missions can destroy enemy air bases, anti-aircraft missile batteries or troop formations. An interesting addition is the display of your own and the enemy's losses.

Supply, too, marks a big change from common practice: units on road hexes get supplied twice as well as those on off-road hexes. This presumably simulates the scorching heat and sand of the desert.

In both scenarios Israel is at a severe disadvantage, at least in numbers of troops, though not in quality. The Israelis are indeed capable of really stubborn resistance in every respect; for example, in 1973 the Arabs' 840 aircraft against Israel's 380 don't really cut it... Perhaps quality counts for something too?

Even so, a two-front war is not much of a treat; Syria and Egypt, plus the antics of Morocco, Iraq and the other Arab states, keep you busy enough as it is. If Jordan joins in too, opening a third front, the Chosen People start to have a problem... Losing ground comes back to bite you in many ways: fighting spirit drops, stockpiles dwindle and the air force loses its airfields, which comes back to bite you as squadron fatigue.

In true SSI style, the manual is superb. But what on earth do my eyes behold: the back pages hold only a handful of tables, and ones that are unnecessary for the game at that. The rest are scattered all over the manual. As if that weren't enough, the tables are small and almost unnoticeable to boot. Where has SSI's famous manual-making skill vanished to? Or is Koger the culprit, seeing as Red Lightning's instructions were muddled too?

The manual, then, is the only weak link in a superb game. All of Red Lightning's cock-ups have been fixed, new inventions added, and the result is one of the best strategy games money can buy. The Amiga and PC versions are completely identical; the PC (a 386, admittedly) thinks over its moves in less than half the time the Amiga takes.

1990 KevätWhere can you drive if you've got a 68-tonne Königstiger tank with a 110 mm gun? Anywhere you like. So now even this ancient joke has been converted into a game.

The original Conqueror, as you know, is an Archimedes game, released by Superior Software more than a year ago. There was talk of an ST/Amiga conversion, but that's where the data ran out. Then out of the blue a 16-bit version of the game came rolling out, and from the German Rainbow Arts of all people.

There's a dozen tanks: four Allied, four German and four Russian. Opponents are chosen according to historical fact, so a USA-USSR international match isn't on.

Conqueror offers three game levels: arcade, strategy and a halfway house between the two. In the easiest version the player controls one tank, and the idea is to survive ever-growing numbers of ever-better enemy tanks. In the in-between mode more of your own tanks join in, and the ultimate goal is to sweep the field clear of enemies. In the strategic section the idea is to hold a particular objective for a minute without letting enemy tanks even get close. Extra options are artillery fire and a reconnaissance plane, at the cost of points. Points are used to acquire new and better tanks. The player can command at most 16 tanks.

The robot tanks are bossed around on a separate map screen with a rather meagre stock of orders. Besides the destination there are two: go and stop. You don't need any more than that, though, since the tanks know how to defend themselves when they meet the enemy, even to the extent that a little tank takes to its tracks if it runs into a big bloke. You can switch your command tank freely.

If Virus's controls made you cry, Conqueror goes one better. The tank is steered one track at a time, and on top of that you control the turret and the gun elevation. There are three different control options, but practice is required, and lots of it. Two players can control the tank at the same time, one driving and the other looking after the turret. Arguments will probably arise from the fact that both of them can shoot. Thank the Lord, when playing alone you can hand either the driver or the gunner over to computer control. I drove with the joystick myself and let the machine do the shooting, which worked quite well.

Conqueror is no simple shoot-'em-up. The tanks have four armour values, for front, side and rear armour alike, a speed that varies with the terrain, and the gun has both a range and an armour penetration, which means any tank at all can take quite a lot before it's left smoking in the landscape. You see, even a hit takes into account both the distance and the angle of impact. There's none of the real joy of quick destruction.

The first glance is startling: Conqueror looks just like Braben's masterpiece Zarch/Virus. The graphics are actually better than in Virus. The rolling landscape is filled with realistic-looking trees, rivers and roads cut across the terrain, and cute little villages with their churches and houses add colour. Everything in the landscape can also be destroyed.

The attention to detail familiar from Virus rules Conqueror. The tank leaves track marks, the shells leave a smoking crater, and so on. Only the small size of the visible playfield and a certain lack of ergonomics keep Conqueror from rising into the true-classics league.

Conqueror is not a simulator (unless tanks repair their damage in 20 seconds), nor a shoot-'em-up, but an interesting hybrid that is guaranteed to appeal to only a smallish portion of gamers. Like Virus, it will become a cult game.

1990 KevätDriving games and coin-op conversions were the hottest buzzwords of the Christmas games market. Combine the two, and shouldn't the end result be a REALLY big hit? Not necessarily, as Virgin's Continental Circus demonstrates.

In the arcades the game was called Continental Circus (based on a translation error, it was supposed to be Circuit), and you squeezed yourself into it as if into a real Formula car. A sort of visor was slapped over your eyes, and through it the game looked three-dimensional. The effect wasn't all that successful, mind you, so it's entirely fitting that nobody even set out to attempt that kind of trick on the home machines.

Teque, whom I loathe deeply, has turned out reasonably decent work. There's plenty of speed and feel, and for once the car even looks like it's doing the dizzying nearly 400 kilometres per hour the speedometer claims. The scrolling of the scenery is excellently done and creates a sense of speed much better than many other driving games.

Oh, what do you do in the game? Well, you drive a car. A Formula car, that is, and the aim is to slip a metal rocket wobbling on four wheels all of twenty-odd notches up the results table, until the player is sitting on the winner's podium. In neither version is this particularly easy. The track seems to be far too narrow, or else all the cars are too wide. Anyway, the game starts off fairly easy, but then gets harder all too quickly.

Graphically both versions make fairly moderate use of their host machines, but there's no point expecting anything massively jaw-dropping. The audio side doesn't startle anyone either. The playability is quite all right; the car does go where you steer it, so if the game isn't going smoothly the fault lies with the player. The difficulty ramping up far too fast, and the frustration that follows, do kick any idle urge to play to the kerb for good, though.

If you're looking for a fun driving game, you'd do well to consider Chase H.Q. or Turbo OutRun. This isn't a bad game, but there are better games to spend your money on too.

1987In our series "Gremlin's Flops", this time we bring you Convoy Raider. The plot offers nothing new: war has broken out and your country is in danger. Once again the heavy burden of defending it is laid on the player's shoulders alone. At your disposal are Seawolf, a deadly accurate missile against aircraft and other missiles; Exocet, a video-guided rocket against sea targets; and a submarine-killing helicopter that can drop depth charges on top of enemy submarines.

For a bit of variety, the whole shebang is for some reason set only on coastlines. This little detail doesn't, however, give the game what it's missing, namely excitement. The graphics are truly unimaginative; the colours are perhaps the only thing where imagination has been used, and then some. The sprites are vintage '82, and the control system is nothing to cheer about either.

On the music side things are, if possible, even worse. There isn't even a token scrap of music, and the sound effects are extremely dry and don't do their job. Feeble little pip noises and lousy hissing hardly make you want to crank the volume up. Where has Gremlin lost all its skilled music programmers?

Taking all of the above into account, you might think this was the worst game of all time. But all is not lost, not by any means. Surely the profit-maximisers will soon think of re-releasing this shoddy Beach Head imitation as a budget game too. Next to this, even Miami Vice feels playable. Why is rubbish like this still being made?

1989 KevätIn one fell swoop, The Pawn punched Magnetic Scrolls through the wall shielding the consciousness of the text-game-playing public. Guild Of Thieves and Jinxter cemented MS's place alongside Infocom as a maker of the world's best text adventures. The latest game, Corruption, has however received mixed reviews in foreign computer magazines.

The Corruption package contains a disk, a casino chip, the usual manuals and an audio cassette. The manuals don't shed much light on the task ahead; instead, the player is urged to plunge headlong into the game world. After a few minutes the game asks the player to listen to the enclosed audio cassette, and the plot begins to unfold.

It turns out that your boss at work has framed you for a serious crime by conveniently cutting up tapes of your conversations, recorded in secret. Your task is to prove your innocence while dodging the police and other authorities, and at the same time to expose your boss's drug dealing.

With a plot this exciting, it's a pity that the game leaves a muddled feeling behind. Firstly, the text has small inconsistencies, and secondly, Corruption is outrageously difficult. When even the English complain about how hard the game is, is it any wonder if Corruption is nearly impossible for Finns? The graphics aren't up to the usual MS standard either. The manual contains hints, but they're no help at all to those who don't know the language. None of this means that Corruption is a bad game - quite the opposite. It just isn't what we've come to expect from MS.

1988Reviewing games isn't always a treat. Sometimes, after playing a hundred thousand badly made botch-jobs that all look like one another, you start to lose your faith in the future of computer games.

But as if on order, along always comes some original, fun and well-made game that breathes new faith into the doubting joystick wrist. Cosmic Causeway is just such a game.

Cosmic... is the sequel to Trailblazer, released last year, which got a good reception, and rightly so. Strangely, part two is even better.

In Cosmic Causeway the idea is to get through 24 endless tracks with a big ball within a time limit. Your progress is hindered or helped by holes and squares of different colours, which have different effects on how the ball moves. Some slow you down, some speed you up, some you can't get through, others make you jump and some reverse the joystick directions. On top of that there are walls with only one gap you can get through, and even the chance to race along the ceiling when there is one.

What's more, some Space Harrier has been stirred into the game, dragons and all, along with Nemesis-style collecting of power-ups. The result is a soup that not only looks good but tastes good too.

The graphics are truly astonishing. You'd hardly believe the C-64 could squeeze out this kind of power. The scenery races and swerves very convincingly and incomprehensibly fast. The sound is top-notch, and the Holy Trinity is completed by the playability. Cosmic Causeway is a very good game, simple enough but suitably difficult. It probably won't appeal to everyone, though, but it's worth a try.

1987There has been an explosion at a big nuclear power plant, and the plant's reactor is heating up. The player has to guide a strike team of eight androids to the reactor core and push the graphite rods down, so that the whole magnificent works doesn't melt itself a shortcut to China.

The androids have to be guided through every level of the plant. The reactor isn't found until the eighth level. Each level is divided into rooms, and you can change levels by lift, by matter transporter or by dropping through the floors of collapsed rooms. The rooms hold all sorts of practical stuff that's worth collecting and stashing away for later.

The graphics are neat, the pixels on the screen don't flicker and the music doesn't get on your nerves; there's no music in the game, you see. The other sound effects are non-existent too.

The game was fun to play. It has good help screens, and you don't even need the manual to learn the game. CtM offers pleasant action for those who like long adventure games.

1991 KevätMicroProse's latest simulator leads its players into the world of international espionage, skulduggery and Bond-style outfits.

To fans of simulators, Sid Meier is a familiar name. The man has been on MicroProse's payroll right from the very beginning and has designed many a hit game for the company. Covert Action, however, is a step into such difficult territory that the game doesn't quite fully achieve its aims. (Yes it does! NN)

The player steers a super-agent called Max Remington. The first name can be short for Maxwell or Maxine, depending on the player's sex. Making use of the archives and know-how mainly of the CIA, but in an emergency also those of some other intelligence agency or terrorist gang (without asking permission), Max has to solve crimes, prevent new ones from happening, wipe out terrorist organisations and much more. A sort of main goal has been set: arresting the leaders of 26 terrorist organisations, which isn't terribly easy, since they are of course lying low like moles in moose-hunting season.

Being on an intelligence service's payroll is no easy job. The work includes, among other things, identifying faces, code-breaking, tapping phones, wild car chases, breaking into closely guarded buildings, photographing the contents of safes, etc. etc. You also have to decide which leads to follow and which to leave be.

All of the above has been packed into Covert Action. In practice the game divides into several sub-games, in between which you make choices, travel from place to place and draw conclusions.

There are four sub-games (or five, depending on how you count). The most action-oriented is infiltrating an enemy building. You get to take along five items from a moderate selection: an Uzi submachine gun (a pistol is standard issue), grenades (stun, gas and fragmentation), a motion detector, bugging mikes, a camera, kevlar armour, a gas mask and safecracking gear. It pays to give a little thought to how you kit yourself out: on a plain arrest run you put your money on firepower, and on a spying job on gathering information.

This sub-game is not your standard formula shoot-'em-up: Max can crawl, jump over furniture, rig grenades into two kinds of booby trap besides throwing them, photograph documents, break into computers and plant mikes. If the idea is to gather information, you have to cover your tracks so the other side doesn't suspect what's going on. The shooting isn't pixel-precise: it's enough to be turned roughly towards the enemy.

The same formula is also used if someone tries to assassinate Max in the street. If Max is hit twice (or four times, if wearing the armour), our agent is taken prisoner. Release comes by escaping or by agreeing to an exchange for an arrested agent.

The other sub-games are decoding coded messages, which is based on letter substitution, and phone tapping/car bugging, in which you slap circuits onto a circuit board while avoiding the alarms. Each of these three sub-games is interesting in its own right.

The dullest is tailing a suspect with two cars: the graphics are bland and the action uninteresting. Luckily it's up to you how you get your information.

In Teittinen's view, Mr Meier has taken a spartan line with the game's execution. The graphics are nothing much to praise and the music is pretty muddled too. The user interface is muddled even at its best, and messages from contacts slide past your eyes unread. Of the sub-games, phone tapping calls for a good massage of the grey cells and the car chase for quick reflexes, as does breaking into the criminals' headquarters. The game offers enough to do and puzzle over for many an evening, but only if the world of the secret agent appeals to you.

Nirvi, on the other hand, is well and truly smitten and argues back: although the graphics are only EGA standard, apart from the car section they are presentable, but the music is a jumble of noise. The effects (AdLib) are OK. The game itself is fascinating, especially if you dump the easiest difficulty level once you've got used to the format. The grey cells get a proper feed, and so does the craving for action. A thoroughly successful and well-balanced game.

Because of the difference of opinion, both scores are given separately, first Teittinen's, then Nirvi's.

1990 SyksyCommando themes are the coin-op makers' safest store of ideas whenever they get that nasty "gotta come up with something" feeling. Sega's two-player Crack Down is related to Ikari Warriors, except that the screen is split vertically into two halves, in which the buddies Ben and Andy, each in his own half, make mincemeat of the evil Doctor K's brainwashed troops.

In the top-down mazes the aim is to plant a few time bombs and then nip smartly off out of there. The chaps can also sneak along with their backs pressed tight against the wall, which is a handy skill indeed in the hail of bullets in the narrow alleys. The weapons are a cannon and a machine gun, used in that order until the ammo runs out. With the super bombs you can flatten a whole company. After that all you have left is your fist and a combat boot in a very large size.

The first thing that strikes you is how small the visible area is. There's a radar to help, but you rarely have time to glance at it. When an enemy gets in close, which is hard to avoid, the hero automatically starts jabbing with his fists, usually at thin air. In a way the enemies are surrounded by a dead zone in which you can't do anything. Add to this a fast pace and endlessly replenishing reserves of soldiers, and it's no wonder that while you're still learning, death comes every couple of seconds.

Despite the difficulty you quickly get into the routine of the early levels, but in the later ones you're in serious trouble if there's no second player to give covering fire. At times you get the downright feeling that the player isn't being given any chance at all.

On the outside the game feels polished: the graphics are colourful, the action-movie music is catchy and even the scrolling is fairly tolerable. The playability doesn't quite reach coin-op levels of smoothness, but you'll still play CD without a grumble, at least for a while.

Crack Down doesn't exactly wallow in plot - the task is to destroy the evil Doctor K's stronghold by planting three bombs in predetermined places on each of its sixteen levels and moving on to the next level before they go off.

The game can even be played by two players at once, cooperatively, mostly in the style of Gauntlet: shooting enemies, opening chests and (of course) planting bombs. Besides a heavier bazooka, the arsenal contains a machine gun and a pile of grenades. You can get more gear if you happen to find some in the chests lying scattered about. Hand-to-hand combat is also possible if an enemy gets too close.

Besides ordinary moving and fighting, the players can also press themselves against a wall, which protects them better from enemy fire. Surprisingly enough, a relatively large amount of artificial intelligence has been packed into Crack Down's small enemy sprites - on first appearing in the play area they glance around looking for the player - and if there's none to be seen, they set off to patrol their surroundings. The enemies also only see straight ahead, so taking them by surprise from behind is perfectly possible.

Although Crack Down isn't especially varied, you still enjoy playing it, accompanied by good music. The action is fast enough and there's enough challenge to glue the player to their chair for a reasonably long time. For those who like Gauntlet, a bit more of the same sort of thing, in a better wrapping.

1989 KevätCrash Garrett is a different kind of adventure game. The events unfold comic-strip style, and the graphics carry more weight than the parser that interprets the text. The story's gallery of characters appears as photo-like slices that splat onto the background complete with speech bubbles. The onomatopoeic sound pictures such as POW, BAM and CRUNCH look as if they had been torn straight out of the Dark Knight's own comic series. You can happily follow the game for long stretches without any pressing need arising to take an active part in the course of events.

The main character is Stonewall Garrett, who flies odd jobs in a single-engine light aircraft and gets innocently tangled up in a Nazi race-breeding project. The flying hero's nickname, Crash, describes in more than one way both how the game goes and the likely fate awaiting Garrett, plane and all, in the thick of the game.

Harmless little bits of naughtiness have been slipped into the story to refresh the spirits. Among other things, Garrett has trouble reaching an understanding with the lady passenger about which joystick ought to be used to fly the plane. And then what about the Fuel Ejection Button?

The graphics are in places superb and original. In its execution, the game's opening music is one of the best I've heard, and it sounds just like an honest-to-goodness real march-type thing. On the minus side, let the record show the idiotic parser and the speech-impaired synth that mumbles through Garrett's mouth and does duty as the prompt.

The game can be sincerely recommended to the slightly slow, and to those who read even their Aku Ankka comics eight times over before moving on to spelling out the text.

1987Destruction games of one kind or another have been the idea behind almost all the old game classics. Towards the end of '84, however, production of these "destroy-it" games dried up, and the reason was obviously that people had grown sick of shooting games. Now "Crazy Comets" is trying to win over buyers by offering a better-than-average shoot-'em-up.

Like other shooting games, the idea is perfectly clear: all the heavenly bodies in the universe have gone mad, and the universe is turning into pure energy. The player has to destroy all the heavenly bodies so that major damage can be avoided.

A small element of suspense has even been added to the game. Every now and then rescue capsules come at you out of space, and you score points by collecting them (not by shooting them). Otherwise you just have to shoot everything that moves, of which there are five different kinds in all.

The game is divided into levels that get harder as the game goes on. After each level the heavenly bodies grow bigger faster. The size of the bodies, in turn, is tied to their speed, so the speed goes up along with the size. When it hits its peak, the bodies are dead certain to crash into the player's ship.

The graphics in the game have been put to rather feeble use. There are colours, sure, a custom font and lots of flickering "crazies" - mad heavenly bodies. The only real bright spot was the neat background, where the stars in the sky spin round and come rushing towards you.

The music is that well-known, infectious sound-chip racket that practically forces you to play another game.

1991 Syksy"Our Narc really is better than yours," said the U.S. Gold man to the Ocean man. The most clued-up game experts have already guessed that Crime Wave contains criminal-hunting through horizontally scrolling street scenery, icon-collecting and other familiar stuff, the difference from Narc being that no arrests are made: the street is simply swept clean with no pangs of conscience.

Once the action has been given its initial shove by the kidnapping of the President's daughter, the rest is sheer slaughter. The weapons, topped up with ammo icons raining down from the sky, prettily rip the crooks to shreds, especially when you lob a missile into the mix, which puffs a merry cloud of arm and leg pieces into the air. The very same implement can also be used to trash landmarks such as cola machines in the hope of drugs and other evidence.

Controlling this wholesome rampage has its little snags. The jumps and crouches, performed by tapping the joystick up or down, don't sink straight into your reflexes. Just as tricky is getting characters who sail about along the depth axis into the line of fire. The same goes for dodging bullets that get lost against the background. These discomforts, however, pale beside the shoddiness of the programming.

As the number of people and hardware moving on screen grows, the screen update slows down in direct proportion, until eventually you have time for an afternoon nap while the scrolling jerks along to the next frame.

The intermission episodes that give glimpses of the plot use digitised black-and-white animations, which concentrate particularly on presenting the beautiful Brittany from the front and from behind, but the actual game graphics are flat. The sound offering stops dead at the admittedly beefy whumps coming out of the rifle and the missiles.

The reasonable difficulty level and the curiosity-piquing intermission animations coax you to the screen for a while, but they're not enough to make up for the fact that Crime Wave is an ST port cobbled together with a couldn't-care-less attitude in a take-the-money-and-run spirit.

1991 SyksyThe Cinematique system developed by the Frenchman Paul Cuisset had its beginnings in Future Wars, graphically superb but spare in content, evolved in a Sierra-like direction in Operation Stealth, and the third development, Cruise for a Corpse, takes the system yet another step further.

The backbone of the plot is a traditional Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. Inspector Raoul Dusentier's Mediterranean cruise isn't spent waxing his moustache and lounging under a parasol, since the host gets bludgeoned to death and the culprit has to be rooted out. In practice this is done mainly by rummaging for clues, eavesdropping on conversations and interrogating the other guests.

The playing area is a mere five-deck tub, but even that has more than enough to rummage through. Admittedly, the places are mostly crammed with pointless junk, which you sniff at by clicking with the pointer, whereupon a menu of options pops up. If there's nothing sensible to be done, the inspector often kindly announces the item required, be it a size 14 screwdriver or whatever. The character also has a general tendency to drop hints by commenting on his surroundings.

Right down to the opening intro, the game's execution is in an entirely different class from earlier Cinematique products, and it approaches the Lucasfilm style. The most remarkable thing is the hero's animation as he walks towards the player, since he grows until he finally fills the whole screen. Some sort of vector graphics has evidently been used for it. They've just gone rather too far with the smoothness of movement, since the chap is tiresomely slow in his movements.

The game's worst fault is that an inexcusable amount of playing time goes on pointless wandering and head-scratching. With murder cases the hardest part is getting started anyway, i.e. working out what's relevant and what isn't. For patient souls who enjoy challenges that demand brainpower, Cruise for a Corpse is pure manna.

1987Next up, then, is the final stretch of the Second World War in Europe, that is, the battles from the Normandy landings all the way to Germany's bitter defeat. This program is a nice one to dig into, because two of SSI's Second World War games simulate battles that form part of this game. So for once you can really judge how the programs measure up against each other.

Crusade is a real-time strategy game, and unusual in that, despite this, two people can play it at the same time. The units are given simple orders, which they try to carry out as best they can. Depending on the situation, the unit commanders may also have to act on their own initiative.

The game consists of four different battles, which can be played either separately or as one big lump. This is a very nice option, since a player who gets fed up with one battle can move on to pummel the enemy on brand-new fields of battle.

The screen graphics have been done quite neatly, although the scale is too small, even if the map can be scrolled. This seriously limits the player's opportunities for self-expression. When you can't put more than one unit in the same spot, the result is often a traffic jam caused by a single division in an awkward place.

The program also lets you take a look at the situation across the whole of northern France at once. Especially when playing over a large area, this offers a splendid way to survey the overall picture.

The instructions are thoroughly entertaining, containing among other things, to the pirates' delight, a list of passwords for getting the game started. The only pity is that the instructions contain no information whatsoever about loading the cassette version. On top of all the other good things, loading is also pretty awkward. After choosing a battle, you see, you have to wind the tape to the start of the file holding that battle's data, and with any luck turn it over as well, and there is no mention of this anywhere.

1989 SyksyCurse of Azure Bond starts like any old Saturday morning. You wake up at the inn, you remember nothing and all your stuff has been taken. What does raise eyebrows, though, is five strange marks on everyone's wrist. What to do? Where to go? And that's where the plot summary ends, so as not to spoil the fun of playing. Let it be said that events quickly start rolling under their own weight in SSI's sequel to the AD&D adventure Pool of Radiance.

COAB uses an almost identical system to Pool. For those unfamiliar with the previous instalment, though, let it be said that mostly you move through the scenery in the 3D style familiar from the Bards. Battles, however, are fought tactically on a field that takes its shape from the surroundings. If you like, the character(s) can fight under computer control.

There are differences too. Outdoor movement is menu-driven, with the party tied to moving from town to town. Most of the towns are in menu form, meaning there's no 3D trudging about. An incredible improvement, though, can be found in the CAMP menu under the name FIX. It gets the party's clerics memorising and casting healing spells until everyone has been healed. Another big improvement is the much greater speed of computer-controlled combat.

Characters can be taken from Hillsfar or Pool, or you can create your own. New characters start with 25000 experience points and old ones lose ALL their good equipment, sob! Both paladins and rangers have been added to the character classes. Both MU and Cleric spells go up to level 5, and as extra spice there are level 1 Druid spells, so the AD&D fanatic ought to be reasonably satisfied.

To mention the technical side, the graphics are generally better than the predecessor's, and the whole game eats up six disk sides. Loading becomes a problem if your disk drive can't cope with SSI's turbo.

Curse is basically the same game as Pool with a different plot. Considering Pool's high standard, that's more or less a compliment. Hillsfar is forgiven; Curse is a truly excellent and interesting and so on and so forth role-playing game, which has left an inch of dust on top of the ST-Amiga. If only someone would tell me how to get Monder's pieces from here to eternity.

1991 KevätPuzzle games are a very fashionable phenomenon, especially the ones with blocks in them. Beneath its exterior, embalmed in Egyptological mysticism, The Curse of Ra hides a thoroughly simple basic idea. Bustling about the screen is a sacred scarab that removes hieroglyph-decorated tiles in pairs, somewhat in the same spirit as the patience game played with oriental Mah Jong tiles.

Our little hero from the creepy-crawly kingdom has a couple of problems. First, a pair of blocks can only be removed when they are in the same column or row. So the pieces need a bit of rearranging, which in practice works by the beetle hopping aboard and whizzing off somewhere else.

The second problem is that the path has to be kept open and at the end you have to reach the tile marked with the ankh symbol; otherwise there's nothing for it but to wonder and twiddle your chitinous limbs. It's easy to end up in a dead end, since there's no way of telling from the top which pieces can be moved and which are glued to the floor. Complicating the solution are special blocks such as teleports and disappearing platforms.

The game has two versions of the same idea. The simple logic section has a hundred levels in which you can ponder and mull to your heart's content. Its flaw is a slight mechanicalness. The levels don't always even contain any trick; the solution is just thoroughly straightforward shuffling of pieces.

In the action section the game has been made harder in that the scarab can tumble into the void, and a tight time limit is there to torment you. To stop you learning them too quickly, the levels even come in random order. The action game's weakness is that the difficulty has been created with entirely the wrong tricks. In a puzzle game, dying because of one wrong move of the controls is something of a lapse in style.

Ra falls between two stools in that it lacks the spell of Tetris-style games pared down to the bone, but on the other hand it doesn't give the grey matter enough of a workout either. The best thing on offer is a relaxed, patience-like style of play.

1991 SyksyGame plots always tend to slip into raving about doomsday traumas when nobody can be bothered to get stuck into any intellectual finesse. The name refers to an AI-controlled, autonomous defence system which, following Linkola-style logic, concluded that the surest way to maximise security is to wipe humanity out of existence. So the job is to cram yourself into a gigantic cyborg suit of armour and go and yank the plug out of the wall.

In the vector-graphic complex of over 400 rooms, you mostly pitter-patter from place to place, pummelling a dense population of gliding, sliding and walking heaps of tin. It's good, of course, that the player has something to do besides getting lost in the mazes, but the amount of action doesn't go with the cyborg's wretched handling. The trouble is that the metal lump seems to be wearing roller skates, i.e. the longer you push the stick, the faster you end up spinning on the spot. To top it all, the opposite steering movement that comes naturally from the spinal cord isn't registered until you've returned the stick to the centre in between. Even less frustration than this would have you hurling your movable possessions at the walls.

The environment brings Freescape to mind, but the price of the large number of rooms is a sterile impression. Now and then you might bump into some nondescript lump whose purpose is fun to puzzle over. Extra fiddliness has been added by cramming into the helmet's illegibly designed instrument panel a huge number of weapon, energy, camera, repair and other systems, which are controlled with muddled keyboard commands. From little LEDs and symbols sprinkled here and there you're supposed to be able to read which mode you're in and which systems are on.

Cybercon III is suffering from a bad case of mega-itis. The challenge is massive and the presentation impressive, but the execution collapses into laboured clumsiness. That's just the way it is: with Nethack-type character graphics, this game too could have been made to run smoothly, and there'd have been room for some actual content in there as well.

1988Space pirates have raided the Federation's depots and made off with valuable minerals, jewels and the latest battle hardware. The Federation has ordered you to recover the goods and take them to the storage depot within a set time. The pirates, however, have activated all of the planet's defence systems (they look mostly like lumpy bogeymen), which have to be destroyed just like the pirates themselves.

The idea of Hewson's shoot-'em-up sounds bad, and at first glance it doesn't even look anything special. After a while, though, you can't easily tear yourself away from the game.

Cybernoid is a baffling blaster. Without the music it might have stayed fairly mediocre, but the music lifts the game to brilliance. Jeroen Tel's incredible tune plays constantly in the background, stopping you from ever leaving the computer. You play Cybernoid almost just to listen to the magnificent music. Even after switching the machine off you often catch yourself whistling the tune.

As such, there is nothing new or special in the game. All the elements are familiar from before, but in the heat of the game you hardly notice. The ship has four different weapons at its disposal, an invisibility field and a seeker. But each of them can only be used for a limited time, except of course the laser.

Stick around long enough and you'll see everything. Even these nothing-new games can sometimes turn out to be something good. The biggest credit, though, goes to the music; in few games is it this mind-shattering. All in all, Cybernoid is the best shoot-'em-up released in quite a while.

1989 KevätIt's part two we're dealing with, as the name itself says. I got to know the first Cybernoid as the Amiga version, so it's interesting to compare it with this cassette-driven C-64 sequel episode.

The plot blatantly repeats part one: some galactic-law-dodging lads have once again levied their own tax on the Federation's storehouses. As a seasoned professional, the player is sent to give the crooks a hiding and fetch the loot back. To help out there's a joystick-controlled space moped and a heap of weaponry.

The cybernoid flits about the cave system, and you move from one room to the next in a flip of the screen, so no scrolling of any kind. Every room usually holds a more-or-less assorted bunch of antisocial elements: gun turrets, missiles, flying pirate ships, plants, creatures and horrors and other oddities, which are either avoided, destroyed or bypassed. After picking off pirates you can collect the cargo they leave behind. Then you just advance from screen to screen and try to push on towards the next level.

After playing for a little while you notice that usually the only way forward is to come up with a suitable tactic, which usually means choosing the right weapon for the right place. The number keys let you choose from seven different weapons, each with a limited amount of ammunition. Along the way, besides refills, you can also pick up some genuinely extra gadgets, such as a defence ball that circles the ship or a rear gun. Of the more unusual items in the standard armoury, the tracers deserve a mention: they set off crawling along the walls of the room and destroy whatever gizmos get in their way.

Right, and then that comparison with the Amiga Cybernoid. The one made for the C-64 is every bit as nice to play as the Amiga version. The playability doesn't snag, and the graphics, considering the machine, reach a really successful end result - at its best, stuff flies about the screen really nicely, and the stylist responsible for the artistic design wasn't born of yesterday's cybernoid. And the muzak is ordinary 64 muzak, thumping and all. There are, though, too few sound effects, good as they are in themselves.

Cybernoid II is a perfectly respectable, solid action game that is nowhere near as tiresome as it might look from the outside. Suitable as a relaxing snack between meals, and why not for longer spells of play too.

1987Cyberun is an Ultimate game, and the first one distributed by U.S. Gold. The game has a space theme, for a change. Your ship is seen from the side, and it stays put while the screen scrolls around you.

As is typical of Ultimate, the instructions that came with the game are long but tell you next to nothing. So at first, playing is a truly frustrating business of groping around in the dark. The ship is as sluggish as a Commodore 64 disk drive, and the enemies come at you out for blood. Soon, though, you find add-ons for the ship that speed up your movement and give you more firepower. The help is certainly needed, because the planet, and its caves in particular, are really vast. The objects you find attach themselves to your ship, after which you can use them. Picking up some objects, however, requires other objects. After dozens of games even the mission starts to take shape: you have to build a transport ship and collect Cybernite crystals.

The game's graphics may not be among Ultimate's best, but they're still better than in the games of many other makers. The screen scrolling has been done excellently. There's not much you can say about sound on the Spectrum, of course, but at least the title music is pretty good.

Once you've got past the teething troubles, the game grows more and more fascinating, so it's hardly going to sink into oblivion after the first game.

1987Planet Earth is doomed for the millionth time. A gigantic asteroid is on a collision course, and the scientists who set off to investigate have gone missing. A cyborg is needed to help: half man, half machine (in other words, just like anyone who plays with home computers too much). But what do you know, the asteroid isn't an asteroid after all but an alien spaceship. The rest is probably obvious to everyone.

The setting is a grand one. Cyborg can explore the insides of the asteroid and hook itself up to computers, and at the wrist there's muscle, a handgun and a little computer. There's plenty of scope, and you can even save the game. (Though it didn't work on my disk version...) A sure-fire hit, then?

Speaking purely subjectively, the game's programmers ought to be stood up against a wall and shot as a warning to the rest. It's truly magnificent how, if you really want to, you can completely water down even the best of ideas. At the start the game is so hard that your interest drops off fast. The one and only time I did get something done, Cyborg then refused to come back out of the computer link. Needless to say, the instructions aren't exactly a help.

The precision needed to examine objects is down to the pixel, the enemies are about as believable as in Cobra, and the Veil of Mediocrity hangs over the whole game. This is a real pity, because Cyborg would have all the ingredients a classic needs, but what you're left holding is a mediocre action adventure.

Playability aside, Cyborg is technically of a high standard. The graphics are good and the sound is passable. It may be that there's even a good game lurking beneath Cyborg's surface. Maybe by playing and playing and playing the truth would come out. But the world is full of games, so why waste time on a dud?

1990 KevätAccolade's The Cycles is simply Grand Prix Circuit on a motorbike. And there's nothing wrong with that, since GPC was a perfectly good game. The game hasn't been cloned quite directly, mind you; one more dimension has been added to it, namely the up-and-down direction. Now the tracks buck wildly under the bike and you can't help trying to peer over the next hill, even though you know full well that stretching your neck won't do any good.

If you've played Grand Prix Circuit before, you know what it's all about. If not, here's the gist of the game in brief: according to their choice, the player is seated behind the handlebars of a 125, 250 or 500 cc motorbike. After choosing the difficulty level and the length of the race, off you go to burn rubber on tracks located around the world. The goal, of course, after hard practice, is the world championship.

The most important thing in a game like this is naturally the sense of speed. The programmers haven't managed to pull this off quite perfectly; instead the game feels a little odd and jerky, and sluggish in general. Even though according to the speedometer the bike is flying down the main straight at 250 km/h, the scenery doesn't whizz past at a matching pace. In the long run, though, this only bothers the most critical of players.

The sound side is just the drone of the engine and the occasional squeal as the tyres spin along the "slippery" asphalt. The game's intro music isn't exactly top-drawer; the Amiga is capable of MUCH better. There's nothing bad to say about the playability, but there's no need to praise it to the skies either.

The Cycles on the PC is roughly the same, but naturally the PC loses heavily on audio, thanks to its massive single-voice beeper. You have to give Accolade credit, though: the music in the PC's The Cycles sounds two-, even three-voiced at times. A bonus is that the game understands the AdLib sound card, and the intro music really rocks along with the card's help. The minus, then, is that the game does NOT use the card during play; instead the motorbike's whine is left to the PC.

All in all, The Cycles is a better game than Grand Prix Circuit. If you liked GPC and both Test Drives, this one is a must-buy too.