1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1990 SyksyThat unruly rascal of particle physics, Albert E. himself, has been whisked from the far side of the theory of relativity to boost sales of E-Motion.

Those who count on their fingers needn't panic, though, since E-motion's game idea is deceptively simple. The game is like billiards in which, instead of swinging a cue about, you steer the ball directly. The balls living on the playfield have to be nudged together, while taking care, mind you, that their colours are the same.

When balls of different colours meet, the same thing happens as to a careless holidaymaker down south: new balls are born. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since by collecting a ball still at the larval stage you can pick up extra energy. Unfortunately the balls' childhood is very short, and before long the playfield may well be full of cheerfully coloured ball populations. A pity, since you only get to the next level once the playfield has been scraped clean.

Nor is there any time to waste, since little by little the balls go critical and explode. A ship with full energy can take one wallop, mind you. The real laughs come from the obstacles on the playfield and especially from the fact that the balls are often tied with a rubber band either to each other or to the player's ship. And what fun that makes, as anyone can imagine for themselves. The fun is dented by having to start the game from the very beginning every time, but to balance that there's a two-player option.

The ST-Amiga graphics are a spartan but fit-for-purpose attempt at raytracing. The balls move and the rubber bands work just as they should. On the Commodore 64 the colour coding has been replaced by symbols, and sadly neither the movement of the balls nor the playability is up to the big brothers' standard.

Apart from a password option, something indefinable is missing from E-Motion, but after the millionth essentially identical jump-shoot-collect game and the quadrillionth horizontally or vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up, modest games like E-motion that actually contain an idea taste remarkably good.

1991 KevätThe lot of the policeman of the future is not a particularly enviable one. Criminals - often addled by radiation to boot - are everywhere, and their favourite targets are the ordinary uniformed police officers patrolling the streets. That is why the elite police unit ESWAT was founded, which is a bunch of cops fitted out with the instincts of a psychopath and the reflexes of a cobra.

Frosted with cybernetics, the ESWAT squad is, in other words, every boy's very own Robocop army. With the help of an armoured suit and a high-powered gun they are now supposed to clean the criminals off the streets. And they take no prisoners. The game is suspiciously reminiscent of Ocean's Narc, which has much the same idea. In playability and sound, though, the C-64 ESWAT beats Narc, even if the differences aren't huge. ESWAT's animation, colours and backgrounds are more polished. As a bonus, ESWAT has not only a two-player mode but also the chance to vent your rage on nasty skateboarders, so in a head-to-head comparison ESWAT draws the longer straw.

The Amiga ESWAT is unfortunately no masterpiece of programming skill. The colours are oddly washed out, and the sprite design is nothing to brag about. The animation has apparently been designed on the principle of 'less is best', which really doesn't hold true in games. Luckily the cyber-policeman obeys the joystick after a fashion. The extra ammo has been placed in such screwy spots that as a rule I didn't manage to pick it up.

ESWAT is quite fun as a pastime, no more and no less. Although we really have seen too many of these advance-and-shoot and thrash-the-boss games already.

1991 KevätGames that realistically simulate a large-scale space programme haven't been seen all that much yet, so Tomahawk's new release pushes its way into a nicely spacious little gap in the market. Still, I would rather have wished for a NASA simulation made by MicroProse than the muddled game-monster of some insignificant two-bit outfit.

E.S.S., or European Space Simulator, purports to depict Europe's shuttle programme sometime early in the next millennium. The aim is mainly to rake in money by ferrying satellites into orbit, taking part in scientific projects and carrying out assorted maintenance jobs. The fascinating basic idea has been more or less completely ruined by emphasising precisely the wrong things and by making the game extremely muddled and tediously drawn-out.

At first glance the game positively bursts with content: screens each more amazing than the last, brimming with gauges and icons. Closer inspection, however, reveals that most of it is pointless bric-a-brac. The absolute crowning glory is moving the shuttle from one orbit to another by pressing the mouse button until two bars on the instrument panel are the same length. An error of a split second is enough to fail. Surely no idiot seriously imagines that manoeuvres like that are handled by hand? The share of dull transfers and steering is disproportionately large anyway, and the implementation can best be described as stupid.

Evidently the designers didn't genuinely believe in the subject, since they have tried to cram 'exciting action' into a game that it doesn't suit one bit. The game ought to be either a 3D simulation with the emphasis on realism or a versatile strategy game, even better if it were both at the same time, but a half-baked compromise is the worst possible waste of material.

1988The Americans' favourite sports, baseball and football, have driven sports-mad programmers to churn out a staggering pile of computer games simulating them. Some succeed, while others fail, and fail hard. Earl Weaver Baseball ranks among the successful ones. The right term might be over-successful, since in places EWB even goes too far. Every last teeny-tiny detail has been included, and a player wading through the manual ends up well and truly befuddled.

Judging by the manual, it feels as if to play this game properly you would have to be able to recite the rules of American baseball forwards and backwards, standing on your head if need be. Luckily Electronic Arts has realised that there may be people in the world who know absolutely nothing whatsoever about American baseball. The manual does its best to educate the ignorant player, albeit in English.

Luckily for the player, EWB lets you choose between an easier and a harder way. The easier way puts the bat straight into the player's hands while the computer takes care of everything else, and in the harder mode the player has to handle everything personally, from coaching to playing. Among the details worth mentioning are, say, the radar gun that lets you measure the speed of the pitcher's throws, or the option to design and build a ballpark bearing the player's own name.

All in all, EWB is one of the best baseball games ever made for computers. The graphics are neat and well animated, the sounds are digitised apart from the title music, and once you've got a passable grip on the manual you can enjoy the game to the full. I recommend it unreservedly to all baseball fanatics, but not to anyone else.

1988The year 3000: the wars have ended, space has been conquered, and everything else is just peachy too. Boring boring boring. Luckily there's a game called Ebonstar.

Ebonstar is played in an isolated zone in which an artificial black hole has been created. The game has no purpose other than shoving your opponents into the hole, until only the new Ebonstar champion is left in the arena. An interesting idea, which unfortunately hasn't carried over properly into the game itself. Little Asteroids-style ships buzz around the arena, taking potshots at each other with energy charges. These don't destroy; they give the opponent a shove. For some odd reason, though, the ships can fly right through each other. On later levels all sorts of exciting stuff turns up to liven the game up.

Getting to the next level is so hard, however, that few players will have the stamina to keep bashing away at Ebonstar that long. You see, the level changes when you shoot the robot that keeps the hole going at exactly the right angle, and that is really difficult. And when you finally pull it off, the new level is only a tiny bit different from the last one.

The graphics and sound aren't up to much either. The saving grace, however, is the option for four players to play simultaneously, at which point the Amiga's keyboard gets rather crowded with hands.

MicroIllusions has released a couple of good games too (Faerytale and Firepower), but Ebonstar isn't one of them. Still, it is better than the dreadful Galactic Invasion. Gosh, how comforting.

1989 SyksyEchelon is the code name for a top-secret military base located on Isis, the tenth planet of our solar system. Echelon is run by the International Space Federation, whose mission in life is to put a stop to space piracy. As luck would have it, the Federation knows that the pirates' main base is on Isis, so there's nothing for it but to fire up the C-104 Tomahawk's engines and go pirate hunting.

The ultimate aim, of course, is to find the space crooks' hidden base. You find it by flitting about over the surface of Isis, searching for objects and clues from which the coordinates of the pirates' vile hideout gradually become clear.

The C-104 Tomahawk is a technophile's dream come true. The ship is equipped with a computer, a remote-controlled droid, a teleporter and four different weapon systems to boot. You can zoom the landscape freely and the views open up in every direction. Naturally the keyboard gets heavy use, so clearly you won't get much Echelon played without a symbiosis of manual and language skills.

The graphics are fairly simple vector graphics and, this being the C-64, excruciatingly slow. Otherwise the ship's controls are pleasantly logical. Echelon's weapons work with the Lipstick, which in practice means either plugging in a second joystick for the shooting or pressing the F key over and over. Unfortunately our office Lipstick is on the lam somewhere, so we couldn't test how it works.

Echelon combines a futuristic flight simulator with an adventure game, and with good results, save for one thing. That thing, of course, is the C-64. The laborious disk loading (the cassette version...hrrrrf!) and the slow vector graphics killed my initial enthusiasm, in my case at least, but on the PC Echelon ought to be hot stuff, judging by this sample. Due to poor sales, however, Echelon won't be seen on the ST or the Amiga.

1988You are a god. Or rather a spider (or a fly, if you're lucky) that wants to evolve towards humanity. Either way, you get to fiddle with your own genes and decide the direction of your evolution.

Based on a truly brilliant idea, Eco is Ocean's first game made for 16-bit machines only, and it is the handiwork of Denton Design. The advance news about Eco piqued my interest, and I waited impatiently for the chance to play God. Until at last the 3.5-inch floppy hovered over the disk drive and said: "Let there be a game." And there was a game. And what a game! As a visual experience Eco is without equal. The animals have been animated in vector graphics really beautifully and naturally. The mouse-and-icons control works excellently. The execution is top class.

It's the game itself that lets you down. Hardly anything happens apart from looking for food and a mate. Many people may not want anything more out of life, but I was expecting a lot more variety. The results of the genetic manipulation vary wildly, too. Sometimes you can slog away for generations with nothing to show for it but longer wings, while at other times evolution advances in giant leaps. Once I managed to evolve from a fly into a human in three generations, which doesn't match my views on the theory of evolution. As a bonus, I then carried on evolving into a snail.

Since the 16-bit machines aren't plagued by the curse called the cassette drive, Denton could have put the effort into a much bigger game. I do confess that I play Eco more than willingly, though I don't know why myself.

Long ago, creating man took 7 days. I did the same in half an hour. That's how computers speed up even the simplest of things.

1987The games made under the Lucasfilm licence have concentrated on showing off impressive three-dimensional landscapes. The Eidolon is no exception. A spectacular cave landscape opens up on the screen, and it is the program's most impressive feature.

The program's plot, unfortunately, is not quite so impressive. Some eccentric nutcase of a scientist once built a vehicle out of wood and bronze that takes you into the world behind the mirror. This world consists of cave complexes on different levels. The player finds this contraption and, after leafing through the prof's diary entries, sets off at once to explore the mirror world. Here you're up against all sorts of crawlies (quite neat ones, even in the way they move) as well as energy balls of various colours, which you can collect and also fire at the critters in the hope that something might happen. The way from one level to the next is always guarded by a dragon of its own particular kind, and getting past it takes skill, energy balls and the diamonds that some of the crawlies turn into when hit by an energy ball.

The program's graphics are impressive, but putting the plot to use in the actual gameplay has, to a regrettable degree, been overshadowed by the graphics gimmickry. So once the first excitement wears off, playing may soon start to feel as dull as wood and bronze.

1990 SyksyElectrocop is the second of the Lynx's first-born games to make use of the scaling blitter that is one of the machine's custom chips. Put more plainly, this means that the game moves through smooth three-dimensional landscapes. In Blue Lightning you glided across the blue sky; in Electro-Copper, by contrast, you scour a futuristic maze.

At first glance Electrocop would seem to be a perfectly ordinary side-on destruction game starring the typical cybernetic man-machine, but you can also move into the depth of the area. When you come across a doorway in a corridor, you can slip through it, and the scenery zooms smoothly towards the player. What makes the effect especially fine is that the walls, which look like the innards of a microcomputer, are packed with detail. Showing the doors that lie between the hero and the player's eyes has been solved by drawing them as simplified outlines.

In between squashing robot guards to mush, you can pick up heavier firepower from along the walls. To get to the next area you have to find the locked door and crack its security code with the help of the terminal next to it. The easiest way is with the search program found in the menu. While you're at it, you can also relax with a couple of rounds of Asteroids or Breakout.

The execution would otherwise be excellent, but the hero figure is disproportionately large. The area visible to either side is so small that it's impossible to spot the robots lunging for your throat in time. Of course you have to let the guns smoke in time with your steps, but by the second level the playability already starts to suffer. Electrocop is an interesting experiment; perhaps in future similar ideas can be made to work better.

1987Would you like to drive at breakneck speed around the British Isles, Australia or the United States? All this is possible if you buy this nifty driving game. Besides the different tracks, you can also choose the difficulty level.

After you've made your choices, the drive starts from a tunnel. Soon you come out into daylight, and there's nothing to complain about in the scenery either, even if it's exactly the same on every track. Oh well, who cares, since there's no time to spare for admiring it anyway. The player has to keep their eyes peeled to succeed, because the hazards range from pillars to flying objects, not to mention trees and ponds. Crashing into them costs precious time.

When you finally reach the point where you see an aeroplane swoop past across the sky, you can breathe a sigh of relief. By then the first lap is almost over, and soon you're back in a tunnel, heading ever deeper into the night. Pity only that the time limit (80 s) is seldom enough to get you this far. The tunnel then gives you another minute of time.

All in all, Elektraglide is a surprisingly good high-speed game. The graphics, colours and sound have been done almost to the very last detail. There's no scoring in the game, but perhaps that would only spoil it. This way the player can play for the journey, not for the points. Once you get absorbed in playing, there's plenty of three-dimensional atmosphere.

1987Elite was originally written for the BBC Micro, which has caused a lot of heartburn among owners of other micros. It has even been said that it's worth buying a BBC purely to get to play Elite. Now the program has been converted to the Commodore 64, and as a result it has immediately climbed to the top of the sales charts.

A.D. 3200

At the start of the fourth millennium, the universe is a really tough place to live for an honest (?) trader. Space piracy seems to be the main occupation of at least every other spaceship owner, and as if that weren't enough, the Galactic Federation is also at war with the Thargoids, and every now and then Thargoid ships manage to slip through the lines to terrorise galactic trade.

The Galactic Federal Republic is made up of 2040 inhabited planets spread across eight galaxies. The main economies range from high-tech to agricultural, and so does the planets' tech level, which determines the range of equipment you can get for your ship on a given planet. The main economy, in turn, partly decides the prices set for the various goods.

Besides the main economy and the tech level, the political system prevailing on a planet matters a great deal. It determines how effectively the local authorities are able to keep space piracy in check in their own solar system.

Cobra Mk III

The player is given a Cobra Mk III ship, 100 credits in cash and a single pulse laser. The aim is to make money from trading, kit out your ship with ever more powerful weapons and equipment, and improve your rating as a fighter by destroying pirate ships and, while you're at it, perhaps a few police fighters as well.

The Cobra Mk III is excellently suited to a lone trader travelling between solar systems. It can carry a relatively large amount of cargo, and it's good for defending yourself against space pirates with their eyes on that rich cargo.

Galactic trade is centred on Coriolis space stations, which orbit every inhabited planet. A trading ship docks with the station through an opening at its base that rotates along with the station (which, by the way, takes really precise piloting). After that the trader can either sell the goods they've brought at the local price or buy local goods. The player can also equip their ship. The level of equipment on sale depends on the planet's tech level.

Comments

All the elements of the program's plot are relevant, and they neither leave gaps nor clash with one another. There's a wide variety of ship types, weapon systems and trade goods. The planets have all kinds of social systems, and the combat ratings run all the way from completely Harmless to Elite. Rare random events, such as personal messages from the military or from traders, Thargoid attacks in hyperspace, or encouraging asides from the combat computer, add further to the sense of realism.

The worst problem is that nobody seems to bother getting out of the player's way. Landing shuttles coming out of the Coriolis station don't even try to dodge, and instead explode on hitting the Cobra's powerful shields. As a result, though, the player's legal status drops to roughly that of public enemy number one.

The graphics are done really magnificently. The ships are drawn in perspective with vector graphics in really stylish fashion, and the hidden lines of objects are even left undrawn, although objects behind other objects do show through.

The Blue Danube

At first the program seems rather silent, but even that has its purpose. You have to listen carefully to the sound of laser fire hitting you to know how serious the hit is. Likewise, the sound of your own shots changes when you hit an enemy ship. There are also different sound effects for different situations, such as docking and using the ECM missile defence system.

The program only turns musical, however, once you've bought a docking computer. Switching on the docking computer, you see, activates a sandman function that keeps the pilot asleep for the duration of the docking. This has been done by having the computer play The Blue Danube, straight out of the deep-sleep scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the whole docking procedure.

Excellent instructions - in English

The program has joined the trend of fighting piracy by making programs dependent on their manuals. The controls are indeed very versatile, and the program comes with a strip that sits on top of the keyboard, listing the functions assigned to the number-row keys and the function keys. These are by no means the only control keys, however, and it is vital to get to know all the functions with the help of the space trader's flight training manual. This booklet is written very nicely to support the program, in that it really does teach you to fly a spaceship whose control panel, for some reason, happens to resemble a Commodore 64.

Unfortunately all of this is in English, which, with the whole game depending on the instructions and on understanding them completely, makes things rather tricky for a young space-trader-in-the-making whose language skills aren't quite there yet.

1991 SyksyThat very last of the untrodden wildernesses has been scoured with Elite in so many versions already that it was about time the game came out with VGA and sound card support. The original PC version, after all, was a CGA contraption that looked terribly dated.

What's in the Plus is an old familiar story. The Cobra pilot's job is to build up a fortune, either by trading, by robbing honest merchants or by taking up bounty hunting. Things to invest in include civilian as well as military hardware, and there's more than enough use for the latter when hopping from one solar system to another.

The differences start turning up once you get a grip on the joystick. The most positive thing is the speed of the 3D graphics, which has the faint of heart fumbling for the 386's turbo button. Less convincing is the enemies' artificial intelligence. They were no geniuses in the original either, but in the Plus the predictability is getting annoying. The real idiots are the pirates, who dive at you, do a full about-turn and pull away without batting a fin, even if the player were pumping a full broadside into their tail nozzles.

There's no shortage of other oddities either. For some reason docking with a station feels even harder than before. For a one-off fee of a hundred credits you can at least hire the station's automatic system, if you can't afford one of your own. Another peculiarity is how generously the ranks are handed out. On my first day of play I went through the ratings harmless, mostly harmless, poor, average, above average, competent and dangerous, ending up with the title deadly, and elite came along a couple of days later. The strangest feature is yet to be mentioned: where the heck are the Thargoids hiding? According to some sources they haven't been forgotten, but they're mighty few and far between.

There are supposed to be a few more missions than in the other 16-bit versions. At the start, at least, the original formula is faithfully followed. The routine is broken for the first time when a smooth-tongued trader tries to lighten the player's wallet by 5000 credits. The name of the creature on sale, by the way, has been changed from Trumble to Tribble to please the Trekkies.

Would it have been better after all to leave Elite on its pedestal in the museum of great games? The Plus didn't feel at all like the same game I played on the Commodore 64 every day for three months in 1985. The insane pull is still there, though. Even now, somewhere at the back of my skull, the thought is smouldering that since I've got this far, I'll carry on to the very end.

1991 KevätThe Mistress of the Dark and queen of B-grade horror films would have liked to turn her castle into a crowd-pulling tourist attraction, but her plans got complicated. You see, Elvira's great-great-grandmother Emelda is preparing a comeback, and meanwhile the castle is flooded with customers who aren't alive, let alone paying their bills. The local exorcist is naturally bursting with zeal for the job on landing an employer in the shape of a horroress with the most ample, er, hair in Hollywood history.

Elvira is a rare graphic adventure in that it can be classed as genuine horror. No effects have been spared in the juicy close-ups. The poor hero's eyes are gouged out of their sockets, a head hacked off with a meat cleaver ends up as a soup bone, and in the shed a corpse awaits, with plump worms wriggling in its ripped-open throat. The warning on the box about blood-curdling graphics delivers on its promise surprisingly well.

You get some idea of the outward colossalness of Elvira (the game, that is) by cross-breeding Dungeon Master and Magnetic Scrolls' adventure games in your mind. There's no skimping on graphical detail, even though in every one of the castle's 800 rooms you can look in at least two directions. Add the flashy animations on top of that and it's no wonder that on the Amiga the game needs five disks and a meg of memory.

On the PC, too, memory consumption comes really close to the magic 640K limit, and the game sucks up 4.5 megs of precious hard disk space. Without a hard disk, the downside is constant loading and, on the Amiga in particular, hunting for the numbers hidden on the disks with the help of a candle and a magnifying glass.

In between the wandering you come into close contact with Emelda's worshippers, whose swipes from the right or left must first be parried before you get your turn to strike. Nastily unergonomic business, because on the Amiga the reaction time, short enough as it is, is shrunk further by the program's stupid slow-wittedness; on the 386 the sluggishness plays no significant part. And of course the blighters have to reappear when you pop off somewhere else. At least the flailing about with blades can be cut down with spells and the crossbow.

The most uninhibited splatter entertainment is provided by monsters that kill with a single slash, though fortunately they stick to fixed locations. As countermeasures you can stock up some twenty spells, and to mix them you gather everything imaginable from Belladonna to spiders and take the ingredients to Elvira in the kitchen, once you've first evicted the previous cook back to the underworld. Then it's off to read the recipe book through a blood-red plastic doodad.

The fascinating idea is spoiled by how clumsy the spells are to use. You aren't always even told what the finished scrolls are, and in the heat of the moment you still have to hit the use command. Considering the amount of fighting required and the considerable drop in stuff-lugging capacity caused by taking a beating, the program ought to let you gather hitpoints back by resting.

Offsetting the interface blunders are the inspiration that shines through and the sheer size of the game. For those who can stand malignant devilry, Elvira dishes up weeks of torment along with juicy slices of graphics and music. Recommended with reservations.

1987Empire follows the line familiar from Elite: a skilful mix of strategy and destruction.

You start the game with a standard Cub scout ship. Your aim is to build a mighty empire spanning several solar systems. To achieve this you have to trade with space stations, destroy the invading aliens who have conquered many planets, venture on dozens of missions all around the Milky Way and become the best pilot of all time. And finally, on top of all that, you have to build a force field to protect your realm until the end of the world. . .

That's quite a challenge, to say the least. Doing all this will surely take several weeks, since, following Elite's example, Empire has an insane number of planets and solar systems.

As in Elite, there's a wide selection of control keys here too, and to the delight of younger players the Finnish-language instructions are (if possible) even more meticulous than the original instruction leaflet.

Empire doesn't stick to one kind of screen the whole time. When landing on a planet you have to fly inside squares, and the more accurately you fly, the closer you get to your final destination on the planet. On the planet's surface you first have to fly through a forest. Dodge the trees or things will go badly for you. The more accurately you flew through the squares, the sooner you get out of the forest. While flying over the surface you also become a target for missiles. You can dodge them or try to destroy them. At the same time you're trying to locate a cargo pod on radar, which you take with you to the space station when you leave.

These "larger than life" games have already become an established concept in the gaming world. The scale of the game and the sheer number of control keys are also, in part, the manufacturers' counterattack against piracy. Without the instructions the game is hard to play. This applies to Empire too. It really is best to read the instructions first and only then start playing. Otherwise you'll be truly lost and your first impression of the game may end up a poor one.

Since Empire has a large playing area, it naturally has map screens as well. Other instruments include, for example, an energy gauge, a temperature gauge, a radiation meter, a shield status indicator, a computer display terminal and a fuel gauge. You can buy new equipment for your ship if you can afford it. Later on you can earn a Wolf-class attack ship.

The graphics are fairly ordinary vector graphics, familiar from Elite. In the background there's a drum-bashing soundtrack that's rousing at first and tiresome later. Luckily it can be switched off. Once you've read the instructions, the game feels really interesting. And so it is, and will remain for a long time. Perhaps interest in Empire will last longer than interest in Elite, since Empire is, in a way, more varied than Elite.

1989 SyksyThe long battle will soon be over. Apart from the main island, the vexteens' empire has shrunk to a mere couple of cities, and their navy is no more. Escorted by the battleships Niko Nirvi I-IV, the landing force advances steadily towards victory. And of course, just when every unit still able to stand has been sent off to finish the vexteens, the teittinens' army appears out of nowhere and, with the might of massive air squadrons, mows the army down like hay.

Star Fleet's Operation Big Brother: a strike force is dropped onto technologically advanced planets and, using the planet's natural resources, starts building an army and conquering the planet in the name of the Federation. Unfortunately the idea is so good that the Krellans and the Zaldrons start doing the same.

Empire is a strategy game in which the key word is capturing cities and harnessing them to build up your war machine. A captured city can be ordered to produce armies, aircraft or ships, which range from submarines to battleships. The units differ. Armies are the only ones that move on land and therefore also the only ones that can capture cities. Transports are meant for carrying armies across the open seas, and aircraft carriers do the same for planes.

Compared with other strategy games, Empire is really simple to learn and to play. The funny thing is that in spite of this (or because of it), Empire breeds a hunger to play like nothing ever seen before.

Empire plays comfortably with the mouse, and you hardly need the manual for anything except getting past the code-word check. As a special feature, three players can take each other on in whatever mix of humans and computers the player likes, which gives the game a considerable kick. There's even a PBM option, where the computer lets a player play for a while until the situation is saved to disk and delivered to the other players. Sadly there's no modem or cable option.

The disk comes with a bunch of ready-made battlefields, and if you get tired of those, you can always make more yourself. There are surprising differences between the machines: the PC version seems to put up the stiffest resistance, whereas the ST version is the fastest and nicest to play. Amiga Empire is sluggish in the familiar fashion, but not to a really annoying degree. It pays to save your game at regular intervals, though.

Believe it or not, Empire is an unbelievable game and a must-buy for every gaming individual with even the slightest strategic leanings.

1988Many people's wish came true when Domark released the conversions of perhaps the world's best shoot-em-up, Star Wars. Unfortunately only the ST and Amiga Jugend wept for joy, since the eight-bit machines didn't quite have the power for a smooth-running game. In any case the sales were considerable, and Domark, true to its promise, has now released the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

The game consists of four stages that follow the film. First you fight the Imperial probes and try to stop them getting four radio messages through. (Everyone knows, of course, that you can shoot radio waves with a laser).

When this sooner or later fails, a conflict begins with the ST-AT and AT-AT (where are the PC-AT and Amiga-AT?) tanks closing in on the rebel base. These walking monsters can be destroyed with accurate fire into the gun port or by tying their legs together with a harpoon line. Then it's on to the controls of the Millenium Falcon to pound the bolts out of the TIE fighters and across the universe.

The next and final section consists of slaloming through an asteroid field. During the game you collect letters for the word JEDI, not to mention bonuses. After the asteroids, of course, the same show starts all over again with nastier opponents.

As a game, The Empire Goes Back On Strike doesn't measure up to its predecessor. The TIE fighters are a pointless rerun, and the asteroid section is not only easy but also dull. Blowing up the probes is perfectly OK, but the battle against the tanks is the thematic climax of the game, and it is what gives the package its interest.

The ST version is, as expected, fast, gorgeous and completely faithful to the coin-op. A few samples from the film have been added to give the game some flavour. The Star Wars theme is good and the sound effects are high quality all round, so 16-bit owners would do well to lighten their wallets. On the C-64 the graphics are tolerably fast, as in Star Wars, but jumpy. Recommended only for those who liked Star Wars-64.

I'm waiting with interest for Return of The Jedi, whose colour graphics should make even the 16-bit machines work for every penny.

"I want that ship, not excuses!"

1987Your skimmer races along the surface of the planet. The utter tedium isn't helped by the planet's terrain, which, apart from the green grass and the blue, oh so blue sky, consists only of regularly spaced black monoliths.

Soon it's a different tune altogether. The shallow-minded monsters of deep space break the routine very effectively. Different enemies (though not necessarily different-looking ones) with different tactics come rolling off the conveyor belt. There are flying saucers that fire either single shots or splendid shotgun effects, leaving the whole field full of bullets. There are also missiles that don't shoot but aim for destructive contact. By exterminating twenty enemies you can try to get through to the next level via perilous hyperspace, where a herd of balls a zillion head strong comes at you at dizzying speed.

Encounter is based on a well-known and much-loved game called Battlezone. Encounter is not a cheap copy, however, but a game that can proudly stand on its own two feet. Encounter's father is none other than Paul Woakes, who earned his place in heaven with the game Mercenary.

Encounter is hardly going to win anyone over with its looks. Everything is made up of strictly geometric shapes with no detail at all. But then these modest graphics are moved so insanely fast! And when you add combat that demands lightning-fast reflexes, the result is one of the best combat games on the Commodore 64 of all time.

Encounter is one of those programs that will last as long as the Commodore 64 itself.

1987Hang On and Enduro Racer have been roaring away in the arcades for a long time now. Hang On came to home micros under the name Super Cycle and behold: it was a good game. Now Activision's take on Enduro Racer has appeared right behind its rear bumper, waiting for its chance. Has the clock of doom already struck twelve for Super Cycle?

Enduro Racer stands out favourably from its competitors in that it's ridden off-road. Every so often there are jumps that launch you over lurking rocks. When you thump back down to earth, the rider loses control of the vehicle for a moment.

The Spectrum Enduro Racer is indeed perhaps the best bike game on the Spectrum market and a very worthwhile purchase. On the Commodore 64 side, though, things are worse. The game feels like the first practice assignment on a Machine Code for Beginners course.

The sprites look good, but that's where it ends. The colours are awful and you can't make out the lettering. The moped moves as if it were ploughing through deep snow, and to add to the excitement someone has glued the handlebars almost in place. When you crown the whole splendour with juddering scrolling in which everything either jerks or hops from one spot to the next, Enduro Racer's place in the gaming world is clear: the dustbin.

Whoever wants to feel the thrill of speed astride a binary motorbike would do well to consider some other option for their Commodore 64. Enduro Racer spoils a beautiful machine.

1987The game has four heroes. A war is under way between the Empire and the forces of the dictator Zoff. The heroes had captured the dictator and were transporting him to the Empire's prisons when Zoff focused his psi powers on the ship's computers. The result was a forced landing on some planet. This is where the player starts.

The ship has landed, Zoff is gone, and on the planet there's a war between locals sympathetic to the Empire and Zoff's supporters. The mission is to capture Zoff, find the only usable spaceship and possibly establish good relations with the commander of the local inhabitants.

The area is divided into rooms. The heroes' movements and the room they're currently in are shown in a window in the upper part of the screen. Below it are each hero's personal strength meters and the commands given to them. The lower part of the screen is used for entering commands with the joystick. Each action has its own icon. Despite the icons, a little logic is needed, since for example the action "take object" has to be entered by first selecting the "take" function and then pointing at the object.

The graphics at the top of the screen are very colourful and extremely pleasant. The action (that is, the backdrop) stays in rooms the whole time, but some variety has been worked in too. There are ventilation shafts, computers and many devices unknown to me. All the "non-heroes" are unfortunately single-coloured, but the heroes' sprites have been given a very colourful look.

The only problem with the graphics is that they don't work. The heroes' bodies "get lost" at a certain spot on the screen. The same sometimes happens to the enemies as well, when there are many of them on screen at once.

A pleasant experience on the working side of the graphics was the command editor at the bottom of the screen. Since not all the command icons fit on the screen at once, some of them have to be "hidden" beyond the edge of the screen. They're brought into view by moving the cursor to the edge, whereupon the screen scrolls in that direction. The scrolling is extremely smooth, and I myself have never come across a similar way of entering commands before.

Each hero can be controlled separately. Commands can be given into a "stack", meaning you can enter several different commands into memory, which are carried out in the order they were given. The commands in each player's stack, along with their remaining strength, are shown in the middle part of the screen.

The real surprise was the nice music, which could be set to play in the background. As a joy for long evenings of gaming it's rather pleasant, especially since it's optional and you don't always have to listen to it.

1990 SyksyBad news from Planet X (a synthetic industrial planetoid, of course). The evil Reptilons have seized power on the planet and enslaved every member of the human race they have come across. Worse still: the Reptilons have forced the poor humans to assemble an evil robot army, whose purpose is, naturally, to destroy the Earth.

But luckily there is such a thing as an interplanetary SWAT team. The team's fearless members Jake and Duke are instantly ready to fry some lizards, in this case Reptilons. On the side it would be nice to free the enslaved humans, squash a few robots and destroy the machines the robots are built with. To help them out, Jake and Duke get a couple of laser guns and a bagful of Megabombs.

Standing in the way of the jolly SWAT team is a small army of assorted robots. Some are content just to take potshots from a distance, while others come straight at you. Naturally, as the robots go up in smoke, the lasers' charge drains at a (far too) brisk pace. Luckily for the heroes, some robots leave behind an energy charge with which you can try to perk your lasers up a bit. Humans are freed by touching them, but realistically enough, humans fry under laser fire just as well as robots do.

You get ahead by escalator, but someone has kindly been round to switch off the power to the machinery. So Jake and Duke are forever having to run after the switch. Great is the joy when someone has had the sense to replace these modern marvels with ladders, which need no electricity to work. At the end of every level you step into a Port-O-Matic, which quite literally sucks the hero up to the next level.

Every now and then you run into a Reptilon wave, where the bogeyman on show can only be taken out with bombs. You get the chance to top up your bomb supplies and then try to get rid of the Reptilon, who turns out to be a pretty nasty customer.

Planet X is made up of who knows how many sprawling isometric levels. After every third level comes a junction where you can pick one of three different routes. In plain English, you don't have to grind through exactly the same levels back and forth. Now and again you fly through mazes on a Cyber-glider. Getting through a maze quickly enough lets you choose which way to go, and there is bonus energy on offer too. As a fitting finale, you let a few more Reptilons taste laser and rescue the wisest and most beautiful man of science on Earth, or should that be woman of science, Professor Sarah Bellum.

EFTPOTRM is a good game, one you're happy to keep playing, especially with a friend. The intro screens already tell you what the game was riffed from: the more or less magnificent B-grade horror films of the fifties, which you can still catch on the sky channels (the fifties = in fashion). The execution is at least better than in the originals.

The perky music is reminiscent of fifties tunes, and the playability of the best games of the nineties. The graphics are no feast for the eyes, but they contain lots of neat little touches. Just try and see what happens when you walk to the edge of a platform or get too close to the spikes jutting out of the walls.

On the C64 the graphics are an isometric landscape viewed from diagonally above, turned monochrome in the conversion, on top of which blocky sprites hop about and shoot each other - not my idea of a proper coin-op conversion, at least as far as the graphics go. Gone are the spikes coming out of the walls and the comic scenes they cause, and the escalators have been replaced by ladders as well. The switches are missing altogether, the shuttle stage has vanished, and the Port-O-Matic's fun effect has been swapped for a much worse one.

In this stripped-down form the game is really wooden to play, and it is sure to bore you to death after a few levels, the only differences between which seem to be that one has n identical-looking robots and the next n+1, besides small changes to the play area.

There is a two-player mode as well, of course, which lets you bore two players to death at the same time. At least that way you don't waste quite so much time on rubbish like this either.

1989 KevätStanding out among the new games of early this year is Espionage, which as a board game has attracted a fair amount of attention around the world. Compared with the board game, the computer version of Espionage has some clear shortcomings. For example, the playing area doesn't fit on the screen all at once, so it has to be scrolled to the sides to keep hold of the overall picture. The symbols representing the different pieces are also needlessly small and hard to tell apart.

The computer's strengths come to the fore in the choice of difficulty level and in the various time-limited quick games. It's hard to imagine a better practice opponent than a computer, so Espionage fanatics who own a computer have a head start in honing their playing skills.

Espionage is played on a gridded playing area that looks like a crossword. Some of the squares are coloured black, and moving onto them is forbidden. The game can be played by 1-4 players, but the computer version leans heavily on battling against the machine. The computer can be set to play on behalf of one, two, three or even all of the participants. The game's difficulty increases with the computer's share.

Each player has six pieces that move diagonally, four pieces that move in every direction and two pieces that move at right angles to the squares; these are placed one at a time in strategic positions at the start of the game. This phase goes a long way towards deciding the character of the game.

The condition for capturing an opponent's pieces is that there's an empty square behind the piece being captured. Compulsory capture can also be switched on, in which case an opponent's piece can be removed if it has not used its chance to capture.

Espionage offers a new strategic dimension with its option of swapping pieces. The computer shows all the possible moves of the piece you nominate. If a path ends on one of your own pieces, the move can be replaced with a swap of the two pieces. Swapping even one key piece for another can completely change the opponent's plans for developing the position.

The object of the game is to carry four items, called microfilms, from the middle of the board to your home squares. You gain possession of a film by jumping over the square that holds it or by capturing an opposing piece that is carrying the film. The pieces are in fact secret agents moving around the world's centres of power, waging their own cold war. The story feels far-fetched, but the game is so good that it doesn't much matter.

1988Football again, this time from Silverbird. Not quite one of the very best, but playable and cheap.

The makers have taken a humorous approach and put a few funny gags into the game. Like how, when you kick the ball, it soars sky-high and you hear a peculiar noise that is supposed to depict the little ball's flight.

The pitch and the players are shown from a bird's-eye view. This new angle doesn't hurt the game; instead it adds a nice bit of fresh interest.

The playability is nice. The little guys obey right away and not a week later, but controlling the goalkeeper is a bit tricky at first.

A playable and good budget game. You wouldn't buy it otherwise, but for a cheapie 5-A-Side is hot stuff.

1987Wally and the whole gang now have a new challenge ahead of them: they have to fix up places and things across an entire town!

When the game starts, the whole crew is in the park and you can pick a character. If you don't pick anyone, you control Wally.

Each character has their own job according to their trade. Wally is a builder, Dick is a plumber, and so on. You have to find work for the gang and then get it done.

Graphically the game doesn't lose out to any Spectrum game I know of, but I'd certainly have expected more from the sound. When the game starts the sounds are perfectly listenable, but the stupid tuk-tuk-tuk noises of the game itself soon start to grate.

On the other side of the tape, though, there's some "Wally music", which you can listen to while playing the game, if you like. The game is turbo-loaded, so the loading time is reasonably short.

A little tip for those who can't make much sense of the game at all: when the game starts, pick Dick first and go and fetch The Monkey Nuts from the baker's and then The Plunger from the post office. Then go to the zoo and take The Monkey Wrench, and when you then go back to the park and stand on top of the fountain, it sprays water...

1991 SyksyHewson's (R.I.P) Zarathrusta was a splendid attempt at reheating the Gravitar theme with modernised graphics. The Executioner, too, crams itself into exactly the same slot.

The idea is so basic that bells ought to be clinking and jingling in everyone's head as images float up into consciousness of a ship battling against gravity in fiendishly cramped vaults. In Executioner the skeleton has been wrapped in a clingfilm layer of tactical surface and adventure.

The playing area is divided into twelve sectors, each with a handful of planets, a station and a shop. The goal is to find the four parts of a key so that you can pay a visit to the Gargaroths' nasty leader on execution business. To track down the keys you collect prisoners from the planets and interrogate them at the stations using Torquemada-like methods, i.e. corporal punishment, stretching and electric shocks. The most stubborn only let out a peep when motivated by bribes. The survivors are sold into slavery at the shop and the profits blown on stocking up with fuel, radars and other extra junk.

When wading through the planets the order is free, though within the limits of your fuel reserves. A skim-the-surface sightseeing tour is not an option, because there's no leaving a planet until you've found the transmitter that activates the teleport. Other things to potter about with are picking up fuel tanks, precision shooting at assorted peashooters and opening doors by aiming at lever mechanisms.

Progress is outrageously often such agonisingly pixel-precise nudging about in oppressively tight caverns that your body starts secreting nasty chemicals, hair sprouts on your face and you feel like jumping out of the window and biting passers-by. On the other hand, the controls seldom get out of hand, thanks to the lightness of the gravity. There are well over a hundred levels, but the vast majority are little planetoids you can comb through on routine.

The ice, rock and other landscapes have been polished to perfection and look superb, and the Gigeresquely nauseating frame doesn't look too bad either. Colours burst from the screen too, 32 of them, with no hiccups in the scrolling. There's also a simulator featuring authentic Gravitar graphics pared down to lines.

Execution is no match for Oids, but it's a splendid piece of work all the same, especially as the frustration has been eased by letting you save your game position.

1989 KevätEveryone surely remembers Exploding Fist, brilliant in its day, and the not-so-brilliant Exploding Fist II. Both games were published by Melbourne House, which has been through bankruptcy once and is now in other hands. Now Firebird has acquired the rights to the game's name and squeezed Fist plus out onto the market.

The familiar-sounding name is presumably a declaration of war on System 3's International Karate+, since Fist and IK have, after all, had a bit of a spat going since time immemorial. First came Exploding Fist, and straight after it System 3 puts out IK, which was better. Then System-3 made IK+, and Firebird tries to take revenge on Melbourne House's behalf with Fist+.

So how does this clash of the titans turn out, then? Simple. Fist+ clearly draws the shorter straw, and on top of it all in every single area that makes up a computer game. The graphics are clearly clunkier than the opponent's, and the city skyline in the background is frankly pitiful and contains nothing to compare with IK+'s background. The sprites depicting the blokes beating each other up have been plucked straight out of Fist I, and by today's standards they're not all that hot. The music is middling, and the chaps' yells still sound like a bad cough. There isn't much to either knock or praise in the playability. It may be mentioned that the computer-controlled third man is up to Bruce Lee's level (i.e. dead? ed. note).

This isn't quite a straight Exploding Ripoff; the game has a few new moves such as the cartwheel (as if straight from the circus) and the elbow to the stomach (handy in everyday life too). Even so: if you're looking for a nice karate game for your C-64, hunt down IK+ from somewhere, because Fist+ won't do as a substitute.

1987They don't make these old crates like they used to, muses the disgruntled astronaut as his broken-down spaceship plunges into the atmosphere of a green planet. Boom boom, and pieces of the ship scatter all over the planet. I'll have those gathered up in no time, the man declares, strapping a laser pistol to his hip and a jetpack onto his back.

But he's wrong. Explorer has 40 billion screens, or rather landscapes, which must be some kind of record. Somewhere among them are nine important pieces of the ship, from which you can build a distress beacon transmitter. You can fly with the jetpack, and it's sure to get you there faster than walking. What's more, the planet is full of teleport fields where you can type in absolutely anything as your destination. Helsinki will do just as well as a hot dog stand, not to mention Nirvisburg. And typing the same name gets you to the same place. Nifty!

If you happen to find an important piece, you can program a droid to carry it to the nearest radio beacon. You can also navigate by these beacons. The planet's creepy-crawlies, which you see now and then, can be terminated with the laser.

The graphics are good, but far too slow. On view are forests, rivers and buildings. For an old Ultima-ist, the opening, where the ship hovers above the planet's surface, causes a heartbeat deficit. That's because it looks just like the latest episode of the Ultima saga. There's no talking about the sound, since there barely is any.

Sounds exciting? 40 billion landscapes, wow and gasp! Don't go emptying your bank account, though, because as a game Explorer is about as exciting as looking for a needle in a haystack. A big haystack. A huge haystack. And a teeny-tiny needle somewhere in there.

You'd have thought Electric Dreams themselves would have realised how tedious the game is. Maybe the idea is to give mapping freaks a nice way to pass their evenings. As a technical showpiece Explorer is convincing; hopefully the technology developed for it will get used in some game too one of these days.

1987Long ago, the blood-red sun sank below the horizon as herds of bison thundered past. Women were women and men were cowboys. The place was, of course, the USA and the mythical Wild West of the last great humanist, John Wayne. This is where Express Raider is set.

In those days the big railroad companies robbed their passengers with sky-high ticket prices, but some passengers struck back...

This arcade conversion is split into two parts. In the first you hop along the carriage roofs and fight the guards. You can also clobber a couple of scrawny coyotes in the hope of extra points.

There's a time limit for dealing with each guard, and when it runs out the bomb on the coupling between the carriages goes off and the "hero" falls off and gets mashed into red porridge.

If you make it all the way to the locomotive, past the bottle-throwing amigos and the gunmen, the player gets two fat sacks of money credited to their account. But does this satisfy the scourge of the railroads? Well, no.

Next you ride along the side of the train on the back of your faithful metwurst-in-the-making. Colts blaze on both sides as the guards holed up in the carriages practise hitting a moving target. Bump off five and you move on to the next carriage, and so forth until you reach the locomotive, after which it's back up onto the roofs, and so on down the line...

So, yet another beat-'em-up. The background graphics are pretty good, with the train rolling along, but once again the sprites have been left half-finished. A bit too crude for a full-price game. The sound effects don't really back up the action either, with the punches sounding like gunshots and the hits like someone kicking a barrel.

Express Raider is a perfectly decent mid-range arcade conversion. I sorely fear, though, that after a few goes it will start to taste like sawdust.

1991 SyksyPanic grips the people of Elm Street. Thousands of insects, vermin and toys come to life have attacked and taken over their houses, their dog kennels and above all their garages. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! No - pest-pulveriser Exterminator!

Exterminator parks the insect-control wagon in front of the first house and takes the tools of the trade along on the way in. What tools? A bazooka, eco-poison and Raid? No - a pair of hands! Exterminator can fire stunning lasers from the fingers, swat and crush flying bugs, and best of all - smash flat the little nuisances toddling across the floor.

What's different about the game compared with shoot 'em ups is that all you see of the exterminator is a hand, or in two-player mode both of them. Sounds like a nifty idea, and that's just what it is. Flies and other flying things come at you, and the floor teems with eco-catastrophe of every stripe and shape, from toy tanks to spiders. On top of everything, the critters don't take the terrorist verdicts they've been handed all that seriously, but fight back hard. When you make it past the killer tomatoes into the next room, the same thing starts all over again with even tougher pests. If you manage to de-bug the whole house, the next shack is waiting for someone to sort it out.

The game has been converted straight from the coin-op of the same name, which rumour has it is even flashier than the Amiga version. There are digitised samples included, such as the squelch of a frog under your hand. Real sample or not? The animal protection society is looking into it. Here too the package spawns a few evenings of play, especially as a two-player game, but interest fizzles out pretty soon. The difficulty level feels tough at first, but fairly easy once you've got to grips with the game. Recommended as practice for next summer's wave of mosquitoes.

1991 SyksySSI's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has wormed its way into the territory of almost every possible type of game; only the straightforward shoot'em-up has been skipped. Now the AD&D tentacles have grabbed hold of perhaps the best game in the world, Dungeonmaster.

Dungeonmaster's idea is so simple that, oddly enough, only Captive among the earlier clones has made it to the same level. That's why rousing yippee-shouts echoed far into the small hours when Eye Of Beholder, from the new Legend series, turned out to be a quality-class clone.

Ankle-deep...

The sewer network of the city of Waterdeep is home to more than just rats, so the bigwigs of the fantasy world hire four heroes to find out what's going on, who's doing it and, if possible, to put an end to the rampaging of the forces of evil. But Evil has its ways: the band of heroes has barely got into the sewers when a cave-in cuts off the connection to the outside world.

And then the tramping of endless corridors begins, in a spirit of deja vu. There are pit traps, levers, buttons, twisters, teleport fields, secret walls and everything else exceedingly familiar. Kindly enough, the maps of the top three levels come with the game, and those levels are mainly for getting used to the user interface, without any very complicated problems nor dangerous monsters.

Then things really start happening and the challenge curve climbs. So does the size of the mazes, which isn't purely positive: tramping through huge cave complexes gets boring at times, and Westwood could well have taken a lesson from Dungeonmaster's compact and eventful mazes. Help, of course, is already to be found in this very Pelikirja.

The photocopier has been running

Implementation-wise, Eye Of Beholder's user interface has been cloned straight from Dungeonmaster, i.e. all handling of objects is done with the mouse. The most significant invention is that the equipment screen doesn't cover the view, which makes it considerably easier to, for example, collect daggers, rocks and arrows after a fight. The fixed compass is, owing to the size of the caves, extremely useful. The improved quiver also works well in practice.

EOB is evenly lit, meaning it lacks the darkness caused by torches burning out. Another harmless shortcut is replacing DM's abundance of food with two different kinds of rations and kenku eggs.

On the ideas side, Eye Of Beholder suffers from nothing except the grafting-in of AD&D's idiocies. The mage, you see, can do nothing but dress up in a bedsheet and wave a staff, because armour prevents spellcasting, and mages haven't taken the business college's swordsmanship course. Well, fancy that: if it's an elven mage/fighter, the armour suddenly doesn't get in the way any more.

Magic is based on spells learned at the campfire and on praying. Luckily the process has been largely automated, i.e. the chosen spells are learned whenever the party rests. While resting you can also switch the clerics to automatic healing. There's a perfectly tolerable number of spells: 23 mage and 23 cleric spells, up to level 5 spells.

The combat ergonomics could have used some fine-tuning. There's a lag, you see, in the bigger clashes. So if, say, you shoot your bow just as the monster(s) attack, the arrow won't fly until the animation ends. The right mouse button is used for fighting, Captive-style. When casting spells in a hot spot, for instance, instead of a fireball you may get the message "SPELLBOOK TAKEN".

Beholder for the eyes and ears

On the PC the 256-colour VGA graphics beat Dungeonmaster coming and going, as far as outward looks go. The monsters are animated more or less identically to the original, but the graphic presentation of combat leaves something to be desired. When a monster takes a hit it flashes white, and when it dies it simply vanishes without any further effects. Hits on your own party are also rather tame: a bloodstain with numerical details appears over the character's portrait.

In EGA the game still looks quite good. Playability doesn't suffer and the objects stand out. CGA is presumably included out of pity, and I don't recommend it, since objects, little buttons and other fun stuff have a nasty tendency to get lost in the background.

On the PC's beeper the sounds are serviceable. That's lucky, because you definitely want to keep the sound on so you know whether a door is opening somewhere, or something like that. With the AdLib the effects multiply, including among other things the padding of monsters' feet. There are no screams of pain at all, and only a few monster grunts. Pity.

Jukka Tapanimäki got stuck into the Amiga version: The graphics make do with sixteen colours, and nobody has bothered to coax any extra power out of the Amiga's chips for the sound either. So in short, the Amiga EOTB is a competent but routinely knocked-together conversion of the superb PC version. What grates most is the program stuttering during combat, a feature that has sadly survived the conversion unchanged.

Eye Of Beholder lacks the fine-tuning taken to the extreme, the testing and the piquant details that make Dungeonmaster the model for all dungeon-vault games. The ending is a miserable disappointment and in fact an outrageous swindle: a bigger reward than a text screen was called for.

In any case, no Dungeonmaster fanatic can afford to leave EOB unbought, least of all the PC men, whose Dungeonmaster still hasn't turned up. Naturally the hope of Legend games coming out at a brisker pace is exciting too. Despite its little rough edges, Eye Of Beholder gets the Nirvi Official Seal Of Quality and a great many Power gloves.

With the sequel in mind, the problems could be trickier and the monsters could go and fetch their big brothers to help: only the Beholder and the Mind Flayers - well, maybe the kenkus in a big pack - earn the grade of opponent; the rest are pitiful dregs.