1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1989 SyksyDo you want to be Tom Cruise, even though your acting is bound to be a couple of notches better than his? You can play at being Tomppa in Top Gun, but if you too think that game is sheer junk, Activision has a worthy alternative. The American Dynamix (Skyfox, Arcticfox) has left Electronic Arts' employ for Activision's payroll, but the standard and style of its games have stayed more or less the same.

Dynamix's F-14 Tomcat tests whether its wings will carry it as a flight simulator, but in my opinion it doesn't really succeed. After all, few serious-minded flight sims come with a computer-controlled landing system that lets even the most helpless Hot Gun fumble their F-14 safely onto the carrier deck with their eyes shut and their hands tied behind their back (this has been tested).

So F-14 Tomcat follows a flyboy's career from a drooling, lisping cadet to a macho-bullshit pilot hero oozing courage and chest hair. Somewhat in spite of itself, it gives the impression of either a vastly simplified flight sim or else a Skyfox clone into which someone has tried to inject a bit of depth. Well, whichever it is, the F-14 is left waggling its wings at the level of mediocrity on the scale. There's nothing in the graphics to produce any "Gasp! Choke!" effects, but they do work reasonably well, although Dynamix has taken a shortcut by using sprites. Because of this, enemy planes in the distance are misshapen blobs, and in the end they bounce madly around the screen, stuck in almost the same pose the whole time.

The sound score is explained by the excellent engine sound, the best hum I've heard out of the C-64 so far. There isn't enough music to become a nuisance, and apart from the engine noise the sound effects don't exactly shine either.

The instruction booklet turns out to be pretty useless. The only necessary parts are the diagram in the object recognition section at the start and the key chart. You can skip the explanations of combat tactics, because the combat manoeuvres are practically impossible to pull off. If you've never played a game like this before, you should of course read the manual through. The manual runs to 28 pages and the game itself, oddly enough, comes on two double-sided floppies.

F-14 Tomcat is just the thing for a pilot starting out with flight simulators, but it's boring for the pros in the field.

1990 KevätThe ancient classic F-15 Strike Eagle is the kind of game that deserves a sequel, if any game does. MicroProse's F-15 SE II makes use of MP's latest technology and is currently one of the best flight simulators around.

F-15 Strike Eagle II looks confusingly like F-19 Stealth Fighter. The programmers have used largely the same routines in both games. F-15 SE II's screen update routines have been improved, and it has to be admitted that when playing with EGA's 16 colours on an AT with a 20 MHz clock speed, F-15 SE II is at times even too fast. You can of course get rid of the excess speed by choosing VGA and its 256 colours as the display mode.

F-15 SE II is the first flight simulator to use VGA's 256 colours for anything other than the cockpit instruments. When you chose the VGA display mode in F-19 Stealth Fighter, the only differences from the EGA version were a slower game and a few shades of grey on the instrument panel.

F-15, on the other hand, uses the extra colours to create a more convincing perspective and landscape. The further you look towards the horizon, the paler the blue of the sky becomes, and the paler the green of the ground flashing past below. This produces an extremely realistic hazy horizon. Unfortunately even a 386 with a 25 MHz clock isn't really enough when using VGA. The plane jumps and jerks from side to side. Flying pleasure is out of the question, even though the graphics are truly gorgeous. I'd rather settle for 16 colours, since you get speed as a bonus.

The complex views familiar from F-19 SF are also found in F-15 SE II. The option of looking at your own plane from almost any angle turns up in nearly every flight sim these days, but the special views developed by MicroProse are really fine. You can view your own plane so that your target is visible in the same picture at the same time. The same view can also be used in reverse, with the camera following the target in the foreground while your own plane is in the background.

F-15 SE II has an unusual and rather handy Director option, in which the game itself picks suitable camera angles automatically. If you choose Director's most complex setting, the game changes the camera angle almost constantly, showing enemy planes' take-offs and landings, evasive manoeuvres, surface-to-air missile launches and everything else of the sort. The end result is the same as watching a film about an air battle. Unfortunately, effective fighting is then next to impossible.

Behind the gorgeous graphics, fast screen updates and complex camera tricks, however, lurks the same F-15 Strike Eagle that all of us simulator fans admired years ago. The same atmosphere and wild action are to be found here too. The MicroProse folks know this as well, and the manual tells all F-15 SE veterans: don't let the outer shell fool you, the foundation of the game is the same. Get out there and show 'em!

1991 SyksyThe Amiga owners glowering at PC users, red with rage, simply have to accept that Microprose knocks together the versions for other machines at a leisurely pace. The sim that made everyone jump with its VGA graphics has finally been rigged up as a competent facsimile, whose only significant difference is that the hazy horizon is used in the external views only.

Gnawing doubts about the smoothness of the 3D graphics vanish as the Eagle whooshes off into the blue. Even at its worst the jerkiness stays within tolerable limits, although the air traffic is busy and the landscape is definitely not a lawn decorated with a couple of lines and a pyramid. The sound effects, on the other hand, deflate the first impression, since they're not one bit better than the crackles of the PC's Ad-Lib.

The backbone of the game is lone operations in six theatres of war, splattering Mavericks into ground targets and swatting a comprehensive selection of enemy aircraft with Sidewinders and long-range AMRAAM missiles. You can even fly the Eagle over Finland when operating in the Murmansk area. Unfortunately no scenarios referring to Desert Storm have been added to the Persian Gulf. After all, the F-15 Eagles had almost the starring role there. The introduction in the manual makes excuses that Iraq's role hasn't been updated because the events are "too close". (Ed.'s note: in fact Microprose has released an "Operation Desert Storm" add-on disk, so so much for being too close.)

The uncompromising luxury of the options on offer provides the external views standard for Prose, adjustment of sim speed and detail, and so on. A nice bonus is the autopilot, which for once can handle landing. Almost, anyway, since sometimes the plane gets plonked down in a field a couple of kilometres short of the runway. Of the four difficulty levels, everyone will find one to their liking, although on ace level you hardly have time for anything but dodging an insane cluster of missiles while puffing chaff and flares into the air.

F-15 is spectacular and versatile, in the long run perhaps monotonous, but definitely among the cream of Amiga sims.

1989 SyksyStealth Fighter - a plane with the aerodynamics of a clothes iron, but almost invisible to radar. F-19 SF is a completely redone version of Project:Stealth Fighter, familiar from the C-64.

Before take-off, the computer gives the player a primary and a secondary target. Missions range from photographing a new missile battery to destroying a plane carrying important military personnel. For your armament you can pick almost anything to be found in NATO's stores. When choosing your weapons, you mustn't forget that just to get to the target and back again you usually have to destroy at least a couple of anti-aircraft missile battery fire-control radars and a bunch of enemy fighters along the way. All of this depends on how well you can fool the enemy's radars and fighter pilots, and that brings a hefty dose of strategy-game flavour into play, since every mission has to be planned and carried out first in your head and only then in practice.

F-19 Stealth Fighter is an outrageously versatile game, since the player gets to pick whatever they fancy from four different regions (Finnish Lapland included), three states of war, four enemy skill levels, three mission types and three landing difficulty levels. The options (432 of them) ought to be enough, you'd think.

The technical execution is excellent. The level of detail in the graphics is best illustrated by the turning sails of a windmill I found in Denmark. A plane that's been hit leaves a trail of smoke behind it, while a fire breaks out where a destroyed oil refinery stood. A plane plunging into the sea sends water splashing into the air, and a plane that flies into the explosion cloud of a destroyed target can be damaged by debris.

The accompanying material is in a class of its own too. The manual runs to 192 pages and is well organised for the first-timer and for someone brushing up alike. There are also separate large colour maps of the target areas, which make flight planning easier.

The programmers have done their homework thoroughly, since every weapon system you're likely to run into is included: 23 types of anti-aircraft missile, 13 US-built military aircraft and 14 Soviet-made aircraft.

F-19 Stealth Fighter belongs to the absolute elite of military aircraft simulators.

1991 KevätF-19 Stealth Fighter is one of those programs whose sales are dead certain to have grown thanks to the Persian Gulf, what with the aircraft type getting its baptism of fire in the night skies over Iraq and walking off with the points, too.

In case you didn't keep up with the news, let it be said that the Stealth fighter is an aircraft designed to be as invisible to radar as possible at the expense of its flight characteristics. Its surface shapes reflect as few radar waves as possible and are furthermore coated with a material that absorbs radar beams. The engine exhaust is cooled to reduce heat radiation, and even the air intakes are shielded. Inside the shell you'll find the proudest products of hi-tech. To balance things out, the Stealth fighter then flies like a cow.

F-19 SF debuted on the C-64, was improved for the PC, and the Amiga/ST version adds the nowadays standard options of viewing the plane from outside, with views through the eyes of the missile and the target as a bonus. On top of that there's also the option of flying, instead of the never-built F-19, the real hush-hush fighter that has already had its baptism of fire too, the F-117A 'Wobbly Goblin'. The sim only changes the plane's looks, not its other characteristics, so the F-117 is fitted with four weapon bays rather than, realistically, two.

There are four theatres of war: Libya, the Persian Gulf (where Iraq still counts as a friend, heh heh), the Northern Hemisphere and Europe. Missions are flown in skies of cold, limited and full-scale mayhem. There are dozens of different weapons to meet every technofreak's needs, including of course the precision weapons used in Iraq.

MicroProse's English programming team is no bunch of slouches, since the polygon graphics are truly exceptionally nippy, and those famous windmill sails turn in this version too. The terrain looks realistic with its little houses, and objects don't suddenly pop up before your eyes. The sound on the less melodious ST is surprisingly good; the Amiga's sound resources haven't been exploited terribly well.

F-19 Stealth Fighter edges a little above the second-generation sim, since there are other friendly planes in the air too, and they have even been known to destroy enemies flying too close (I've seen it with my own eyes). Still, it might have been worth the trouble to upgrade the game into a genuine third-generation product where, besides yourself, there would be teamwork with other aircraft. 'Alone against the whole world' sims are becoming the snows of yesteryear.

Whereas the weapons in Ocean's F-29 left something to be desired in effectiveness, F-19 on the other hand uses weapons that are too effective. Missile accuracy is close to a hundred per cent, and with the guns you can easily down an enemy from as far as 10 miles away. The flight debriefing is a bit annoying too, as the small action pictures cover up the flight path.

In any case F-19 is one of the five best 16-bit flight simulators, and it can be played not only as a full-blooded simulator but also as a jolly shoot-'em-up. The thick manual is worth wading through. Hopefully MicroProse will soon deliver a Persian Gulf data disk.

1990 SyksyOcean's first flight simulator is quite promising: it's not often you get to fly a plane that doesn't exist and use weapons that don't exist either. The game, at least, does exist.

Both the F-22 and the F-29 are new-generation stealth fighters capable of supersonic speeds without afterburner. Interesting enough in itself, but the layman is probably more interested in the armament. Apart from the cannon, you see, not a single one of the missiles is likely to be in service today. Of the five air-to-air missiles the most interesting is the Backwinder, a short-range AAM which, as you might guess from the name, zips off backwards. The ranges quoted in the manual, or its other boasts, are not worth paying attention to, though; in the game the missiles feel like something else entirely.

Among the air-to-ground missiles, besides a souped-up version of the familiar Maverick, there are cruise missiles, which set off a merry sea of flame when they hit the target, and missiles that spit out warheads just the thing for wiping out vehicles. Considering that these are supposed to be High-Hi-Tech weapons, they perform rather feebly. According to the manual the cruise missiles' range is over 150 miles, i.e. more than the whole play area, so in practice you make do with just a few miles. Pah!

In terms of execution F-29 is a presentable effort. The fast - if choking as the detail piles up - but well-defined 3D graphics offer every possible show-off and cockpit view, right down to a missile's-eye view. The minus points come pouring in, though, for the short draw distance: even an island-sized lump only gets drawn on screen from a few kilometres away. The sound side is quite OK too, if run-of-the-mill. Four theatres of operations and a mission count hovering somewhere around a hundred give more than enough value for money.

Retaliator's biggest problem was bugs. Three Amiga versions obtained from different sources were full of these cheeky little rascals, which pretty well killed any desire to play. The ST version was already bug-free enough, and I hear a new, identical Amiga version has come out too. The easiest way to recognise the bug-free version is that you are not forced to update the pilot log, or else by the lock-on markers that appear on ground targets. Another bonus is the freedom to use the second disk.

The manual deserves a mention, mainly because it is bloody awful and was evidently written before the game was finished, since the box contains a correction supplement and the game itself one more supplement on top.

Of existing sims, F-29 Retaliator mostly brings Bomber to mind, mainly because it too is aimed at fans of fairly easy sims. The serious flyer will get some fun out of it as well, but the sloppiness in the details gets on your nerves. Then again, Retaliator also has plenty of solid effort in it, so it does come out on the plus side.

1988The Interceptor demo was what convinced me that I needed an Amiga. The long wait has finally been rewarded, and Bob Dimmerman's partially successful masterpiece is in my hands.

Interceptor's execution is dazzling. The graphics move quite nicely and a great deal of attention has been paid to detail. Interceptor may well be the first sim in which the landing gear actually folds away instead of just vanishing. The superb missile launches give a massive sense of power and might. And for once someone has known how to make use of the Amiga's sound potential. Apart from the feeble sound of the cannon, Interceptor's effects department is truly massive, especially when heard through a stereo. Owners of extra memory get a few more effects on top.

For armament the F-18 has a couple of Sidewinders, four AMRAAMs and a standard 30mm cannon. Unlike in Jet, the defences work. There are both flares and chaff, and as a bonus an ECM system too. You can forget any dreams of bombing runs, as the weapons loadout is fixed.

There are six different missions: identifying an aircraft, covering the emergency landing of a damaged Air Force One, forcing two stolen F-16 fighters to land, dropping a rescue package to a downed fighter pilot, destroying a cruise missile heading for San Francisco, and sinking a foreign submarine-aircraft-carrier-combination (now there's a fine word).

Every scenario is pretty much the same, though. They follow the "shoot something down, plus a couple of MiGs on top" formula, and since they're fairly easy you'll have played them all through within a week. Dinnerman would have done well to analyse Microprose's products to work out how to create a simulator with staying power. Another big minus is the lack of a modem play option.

Despite its flaws, Interceptor is nevertheless the state-of-the-art sim of the 16-bit machines, the one its successors will be measured against. A pity about the thin content; I expected a lot more.

1989 SyksyFun! Yet another F-16 simulator for venting pointless aggression. This time Digital Integration is behind it. The spirit of the game is simple: fly, kill and get killed. The player starts the game as an ordinary pilot who has just been handed a brand-new F-16C Falcon fighter. In that crate you then bumble around a wide combat area, peppering every piece of hardware moving in the air or on the ground that can be identified as hostile. Of course all the targets shoot back. The most spectacular parts of the whole game are the flights over the enemy's heavily defended headquarters, because that's when the enemy celebrates the F-16's visit in style with anti-aircraft shells popping in the air. Sometimes the odd anti-aircraft missile also wanders onto your tail, but you usually shake those off without any great trouble.

Then, when you get tired of the ordinary pilot's missions, all you need to do is complete five set missions and you get promoted to commander of the whole squadron. After that you and your squadron have to clear the game map of the tanks, factories, bridges, SAM batteries and other fun stuff that show up on it in a nasty shade of red.

Of course countless enemy planes (and missiles) try to stop this, but a squadron armed to the teeth has more firepower than the Luftwaffe had in total during the whole war, and a proper F-16 pilot knows how to fly loops around anti-aircraft missiles. Nor do you need to fear death, because even if the commander flies their plane into an enemy missile battery at, say, the speed of sound, all you lose is the aircraft - life goes on as if nothing had happened.

Combat Pilot can't be compared directly with Spectrum Holobyte's world-famous Falcon. Whereas Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon concentrates on simulating reality, Combat Pilot is more of an action simulator. The blasting is fun and the sound effects amusing. What also caused great bewilderment was that the enemy's guns don't do much damage to the F-16. Once I even managed to land at an airfield, even though a certain ill-tempered MiG-23 Flogger was pumping burst after burst into my bird. Admittedly, the HUD, the radar, the weapon systems and other nice things got busted in all the fun, but for some reason the MiG's guns simply didn't destroy my plane. A pilot buddy of mine remarked sourly on this that the makers of the game have evidently never seen the mess a Soviet bullet-hose makes.

Combat Pilot is addictive, though: a quick quarter-hour game stretched into six hours, and there's still no end in sight.

1987In Fairlight you control a knight whose task is to find the 'Book of Light' in a large castle. The castle is full of twists and full of rooms, and the task is really not easy at all.

The game controls much like the familiar Alien 8 or Nightshade. That is, sort of diagonally 'three-dimensional'.

The game has several action keys for picking up and dropping objects, opening and closing things and so on. There's a separate button for fighting.

The knight can carry five objects with him, unless one of them is especially heavy. In that case the number of items he can carry goes down. Doors usually only open with keys, of which there are eight in all. So you can't carry every key with you the whole time.

The energy meter along the bottom of the screen shows the man's condition; you get more strength by eating and drinking.

The graphics look fine and neat. Movement is slow, especially if there are several characters in the room. Moving from one screen to the next also causes trouble now and then.

The game is hard and demands a certain amount of cleverness. Not too much, though, so your interest should hold up for a long time.

1989 KevätFalcon - the world's most famous combat flight simulator. Both MS-DOS versions of this masterpiece have already been reviewed, of course, but when the new ST-Amiga version is simply so incomprehensibly good, an old friend of simulators cannot stay silent, but is compelled to let the joy ring out across the world.

Falcon has everything: an ungodly number of buttons, a total sense of realism, linking machines together with an RS cable, fast and truly authentic graphics, excellent sound, intelligent enemies and so on and so forth. Those who have been flitting about in Interceptor may, however, be in for a nasty surprise: the flying no longer goes with ego-boosting ease, and the MIGs are no longer easy missile fodder.

Even though Falcon can't quite match Interceptor in every last detail, the old master in question stands no chance whatsoever against Falcon. So what if the landing gear doesn't fold down into view but just suddenly appears, when in Falcon you can admire your plane from the outside as the cannons toss the trucks of a road convoy head over heels and the shells rip craters in the highway. What a feeling of power and might!

For the "my machine is better" guys, let it be said that the ST Falcon is considerably faster, but the Amiga Falcon's sound is in a class of its own. Since I happen to have both, and the RS cable too, the question of which version is better just can't hold my interest.

The review the new Falcon deserves would take a couple of pages, so better to stop here and just state that anyone interested in simulators simply cannot afford to leave Falcon on the shop shelf. Falcon is the undisputed king of combat flight simulators. (At least until I get round to taking a proper look at F-19 Stealth Fighter.) If you don't have Falcon, buy it. If you don't have an ST or an Amiga, buy those too. It's worth it.

1991 KevätWhen it came out, Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon was at the very forefront of flight simulators. Time hasn't otherwise taken a bite out of Falcon, except for the original overall concept, i.e. missions unconnected to one another. Mission Disk 1 patched this shortcoming by turning Falcon into a game with a goal. And now Mission Disk 2 carries on propping the sim up towards today's standards.

The F-16A familiar from the previous Falcons is now an F-16C, which in practice means a more powerful radar and engine plus a built-in ECM system. You'll still search in vain for a proper INS navigation system.

The new enemies are Mig-27 ground-attack aircraft, Mi-24 Hind helicopters and a surprising choice of fighter, the Mig-21, that ancient old rattletrap. The goal in MD 2 is to secure superiority for your own forces, and to achieve it you have to not only attack the enemy but also defend your own troops (at the same time, of course). The enemies no longer come after your plane, since they have better things to do, so you have to go looking for them.

The weapon selection has also been fiddled with. Ye olde AIM-9J Sidewinder has been replaced with radar-guided AMRAAM-120A missiles with a range of 18 miles, which makes it possible to shoot enemies down before visual contact. The AIM-9Ls have also been replaced with the better AIM-9M model, whose accuracy is finally starting to reach a satisfactory level. In place of the ECM unit come AGM-88 HARM missiles, which home in on the nearest source of radar emissions, such as SAM batteries.

As a whole Mission Disk 2 is excellent, if rather demanding, but then that suits Falcon aces. Also on the plus side are the improved sound and extra graphics enjoyed by full-meg Amigas. The sooner people are forced to buy extra memory, the more games there will be made for the one-meg Amiga.

Among Falcon MD 2's shortcomings are the smallish flying area and the lack of more friendly aircraft. Thank the Lord the game doesn't have F-29's worst blunder, i.e. enemy planes vanishing when you cross the edge of the play area. In that respect Falcon's greatest advantage, namely its still unsurpassed realism, rises to the surface.

Just to be on the safe side, let it be said in capital letters: MISSION DISK 2 REQUIRES THE ORIGINAL FALCON!

1987Falcon Patrol II is a simple but still fairly good game. You fly a plane capable of vertical take-off and landing, and your task is to destroy enemy helicopters.

The scrolling is horizontal and the area you patrol is fairly small. Even so, there's plenty going on.

Your fighter can shoot both horizontally and diagonally downwards, and you'll certainly need both directions if you mean to get anywhere in the game. The helicopters attack in waves, a few at a time. Some of them are gunships that shoot at your plane. Others are transport choppers, which, when they land, often leave an anti-aircraft gun behind!

Naturally you have to destroy these guns if you intend to last long... And they're worth more points than the choppers, too.

The game gets harder little by little as your score goes up. The enemies shoot more, there are more of them, and they even bring along a radar jammer, which completely scrambles the radar at the bottom of the screen.

Besides the radar, you can see your fuel, your ammo and the number of planes you have left, as well as how many enemies are still left on the current level.

The plane is flown with the joystick alone and is easy to handle. Unfortunately the jet doesn't turn as quickly as the enemy helicopters, so things sometimes get a bit hectic.

Thanks to its simplicity the game is easy to play and works splendidly. The scenery is neatly done and movement on the screen is smooth.

1987This game is exceptional in that the battles it is modelled on are still fresh in everyone's memory. In the spring of 1982 the course of the conflict between Argentina and England was followed in almost every news broadcast.

The program puts the English forces under the player's command. The task is to capture the settlements in the northern part of the island of East Falkland within about a month. All the units that took part in the fighting are included. The navy provides fire support, and Harriers operating from the aircraft carriers fly ground-attack sorties when needed and fend off Argentine air raids.

This game is a contradictory package in that, although in many respects it has very successfully aimed for the greatest possible historical and military accuracy, the English transport helicopters, for example, have been deliberately left out of the program. They gave the British a considerable edge in many situations by allowing troops to be moved quickly to wherever the main effort was.

Falklands 82 offers the player a range of difficulty levels, starting from very easy and going all the way up to the masochist's special. As the difficulty goes up, Argentine morale improves, the units become stronger and they dig in on better-sheltered ground.

The program still seems a bit half-baked. The way units must be given their orders in a fixed, unchangeable sequence causes troops to jam up, when the unit you command first may well be stuck behind the one you command last. Then again, the colours have been badly chosen, and on a poor television you can't be sure what the situation is, because the letters blur into the background.

The worst blunder, though, is in how victory is determined. You see, the program counts it as a defeat if the player has destroyed all the enemy units and only liberates the last settlement on the final turn. And even if individual units do surrender easily, the Argentine high command doesn't seem to grasp the difference between fighting and suicide either, when only a couple of crippled units are left to hold out against an entire army.

1989 KevätA hard dunk and CRASH! Shards of perspex rain down on the players' heads, to the crowd's great delight.

Fast Break is Accolade's proposal for computerised basketball, and it isn't bad at all. Not terribly good either, though, even though there's a top-class man behind the game: Steve Cartwright. Fast Break has all of Cartwright's hallmarks: careful finishing touches, versatile menus, a skilful mix of action and strategy, and an altogether too perfect computer opponent.

Fast Break is a brilliant game, but only when played with another human being (so the godlike editors of C=lehti or MikroBITTI won't do). For some reason the computer opponent is far too good. You can't even get the ball out of your own half before the computer already has it and, in the same blink of an eye, it's in the basket. I guarantee you'll get frustrated with the game really fast when the net of your own basket keeps swishing nonstop. One star off the overall score because of this, which is a bit childish of course, but a leopard can't change its spots.

So Fast Break is enormous fun when two people play, that much we know. But what about the game's all-important outer shell? The visual side is perfectly OK, although the players' biggest corners could have been rounded off. The animation is commendable, but the sound side lets it down badly. The music is extremely monotonous, and you'll be quick to start the game if only to get away from the title music. The game's audio is limited to a thin murmur from the crowd and the squeak of sneakers whenever someone turns.

But as is usually the case with Accolade's games, the playability has been got just right. Passing from man to man and dribbling the ball are easy and happen both logically and naturally, and on top of that, choosing defensive and offensive strategies is child's play. A pretty good game, then, and especially if you can find someone to play with, give Fast Break a break.

1987Fast Tracks is a versatile racing game. Alongside ordinary racing, the player can also design their own courses.

A race always has just one player and three computer-driven cars. Racing in Fast Tracks is out of the ordinary: the car stays on the road by itself as long as you don't touch the joystick. Left to itself, though, the car trundles along extremely slowly. You get speed by driving yourself, but go too fast and the car flies off the road on the sharp bends. A race is either one, five or ten laps long.

The best thing about the racing is that the game doesn't end if you go off the road. It automatically carries on from the start of the lap. In practice, then, going off the road only costs you part of a lap, and it doesn't mean the end of the race. Shoving the opposing cars into the ditch earns you a two-second bonus, so ramming them actually pays off.

When designing your own courses you have a fairly large area to work with, on which you can lay out a race track of whatever shape you like. There are 22 different track pieces. Placing the track pieces does come with some smallish problems, though. Namely, if you want to put a new piece in place of an earlier one, you first have to destroy the old one (which is extremely laborious).

The game has (passable) music in only a few places, and the sound effects are not the best possible. In practice the audio side has been handled rather poorly. Only the graphics can be called a success, although even they have the "usual" bugs (the car not showing up on screen, strange dots on the screen).

Fast Tracks is pleasant to drive, but the long pauses during disk operations get tedious. In my opinion Fast Tracks is something you'll happily keep playing for a good while.

1987Fax, published by Epyx, represents the rather thin ranks of quiz games for the Commodore 64. The idea of Fax is to answer as many questions as possible as quickly as possible.

In Fax you can also get ahead by tapping one button over and over, in which case no time is lost and every now and then the right answer happens to come up.

Fax contains dozens of subjects such as film, television, rock'n'roll, art, literature, the space age, the great wars, world history, ancient history, humour, world records, science, geography, football, baseball, basketball, tennis and the Olympics. The subjects are divided into sections for history, sport, entertainment and general knowledge. Fax contains over 3,700 questions, which come up in random order.

The makers of Fax haven't put much effort into the graphics, so the game's appeal rests on the questions. These also include the question "What is the White House's phone number?"

All in all Fax is interesting, and the interest is boosted by the option for two players to play at the same time. What may dampen Finns' interest is the language the game uses, which is, typically, English.

1989 SyksyFOFT - the final game. This is the story of a game whose mission was to seek out the outermost frontiers of the gaming world, to offer an experience beyond compare and to go where Elite could not take you.

The player starts out with a grotty Hartley Mk.II ship and earns money by trading, in the familiar way. There are considerably more goods than in Elite, and prices change with supply and demand too, so little stock-market sharks can make a profit without budging from the space station. Profits can be invested in a wide stock of assorted weapons, shields and engines. The Hartley is equipped with a computer that offers not only its own programming language and 16 KB of room for your own fancy programs but also the chance to connect to the Galnet. On the net you can trade, receive and send messages with other pilots an' stuff.

The player starts at the rank of cadet and works up towards admiral and the leadership of the federation. You rise in rank by completing missions the federation hands out. The missions include, among other things, Search and Destroy missions, escort gigs and courier jobs. The ship can dock at space stations or land on a planet's surface in a Virus-style section. So all in all, the whole game sounds like a gamer's dream.

Unfortunately the ST version was quite a dud, but Paul Blythe fixed the bugs and the biggest flaws for the Amiga version. A new ST version should already be out as well.

Paul Blythe has developed an excellent game that is a truly realistic space flight simulator. The stars don't move, which is indeed realistic, but a game doesn't have to be built quite that seriously. The upshot, you see, is that the ship seems to stay put. The ungodly speed of the enemies, which was a nuisance in the original FOFT, has been fixed in the new version, so you can actually hit an enemy now.

The only way to find the enemies is the Hartley's radar. It's an Elite copy with 8 different zoom levels, but considerably harder to read and worse at its job. It's backed up by a helper radar that shows the enemy's general direction. It's no help, though; a HUD would have been just the ticket.

The ship has a jump drive that shortens the trip to the space station. In the first FOFT the trip could take hours, since the jump doesn't work near hostile ships, and space seemed to be as densely populated as a rubbish tip on a hot summer's day. Thank God the new version no longer suffers from this. Finding the space station has been made considerably easier as well.

The famous onboard computer was a chapter in itself. The programming features are still no use for anything, but otherwise it has been decisively improved. Talking to other ships is done with a press of Return, but the benefit seems slight, as they don't seem to understand anything but the familiar four-letter abbreviation.

The new Federation of Free Traders still suffers from undervalued ergonomics, but it's good enough to be mentioned in the same sentence as Elite. The biggest blunder is the supply-and-demand buying system combined with prices being much the same everywhere. You see, I left the space station for the first time after two hours, kitted out with the best engines and lasers, and with another half hour's work the ship would have been fitted out to the brim.

In any case, FOFT is a good alternative to Elite, even though 'that certain something' still seems to be missing.

1990 SyksyRacing games are going through their own period of change towards a more complex form of expression. Ferrari Formula One was one of the pioneers of the new direction, and now there is a 64 version of it.

FF1 is not just a racing game; it tries to give a more all-round introduction to the world of F1 racing. The game's designer and the accompanying material alone point to a serious treatment of the subject, and on top of that EOA claims the game contains 'all the excitement of the world of Formula racing'.

FF1 is made to be played either as an advanced racing game or as a sort of Grand Prix simulation, which is where the game's strengths come to the fore. In that mode you can modify the Ferrari to your heart's content by adjusting, say, the front wings, the fuel injection or the gear ratios. Changes can be tested before the race either in the wind tunnel or during practice laps, but you may have to redo the settings just before the race if the weather changes.

The driving part itself, however, is not entirely successful, as the slowness of the graphics hurts the playability. Racing game sound is a whole other story, of course, and its weakness usually doesn't bother anyone. The slowness is offset by the option to adjust the car's handling, which improves the playability. Many of the menus are clearly laid out, and the pictures of the pits and the cars look polished for a change.

As usual with Electronic Arts games, polish and variety are Ferrari Formula One's strongest points too, and even someone after a pure racing game surely won't be disappointed. Test Drive I and II have now got a commendable successor, without the progress being overshadowed by cashing in. Those looking for fast-paced racing games had better beware, though, as FF1 may not grab you the very first time.

1988There are far too few Formula simulators, and more than half of those are total rubbish. Go looking for the cream of the crop and all that comes to hand is Revs. Luckily, Electronic Arts comes zooming to the rescue with tyres screaming and slaps Ferrari Formula One down on the counter, saving the day - or actually the whole rest of the year.

The player is given the chance to jump onto the F1 merry-go-round as a member of the world-famous Ferrari team. At the start you can choose the 'difficulty level'. You have four options to choose from: in three of them you get to drive, and in one you are the manager, who is along at the track only as a passenger, so to speak. The differences between the other three levels show up only in the use of the gears and in setting up the car.

Playing on the easiest level, the gears are automatic and setting up the car is easy - you just ask the chief mechanic for help. On the hardest level you have to make all the decisions yourself and fiddle with the gears yourself, which is no easy business, at least at first. The best thing is to start on the easiest level and play on it for the first couple of weeks.

The graphics, although a bit jerky, are finely detailed and create a sense of speed really well. The sounds are digitised - what else would they be. All in all, FF1 is one of the best simulations of all time and makes it into the Amiga's top three games. If you're interested in Formula racing or in simulations, buy FF1 right away.

1990 KevätFiendish Freddy draws its subject matter from the world of clowns and glittering leotards. The way it handles the subject is familiar from sports games, but a plot has also been grafted on as a backdrop. The game begins with an animation in which a bank manager, arriving in an ultra-long limousine, demands the return of the money lent to the circus. So the show has to be a success, or the result is bankruptcy. The evening doesn't get off to a promising start, since out of a pocket-sized VW Beetle pops Freddy, dressed as a clown, with every intention of sabotaging the show.

The game has six breathtaking, daring etc. acts, in which up to five players can take part at a time. First up is high diving, where you strike as many funny poses as possible on the way down and try to hit the tub of water. In the second act a clown balancing on a unicycle juggles balls and clubs. On top of that there's also the trapeze, dagger throwing, tightrope walking and the human cannonball.

If you succeed in your act, you can try the same one at a harder level. For example, the number of objects being juggled goes up to four, and in come anvils, chainsaws, babies and other fun things.

The performances are judged by a panel made up of clowns, whose expressions say it all. In the worst case they nod off and the till doesn't ring, but a giggling panel guarantees financial success.

Small, nasty Freddy's task is to disrupt the performers every way possible. In the high dive, for example, Freddy tries to push the player aside with a fan, and in the cannon act the barrel gets plugged with a cork if you dawdle too long.

The game's most memorable feature is its riotous slapstick humour, which shows clear influences from Warner Brothers' cartoons. The high diver getting stuck fast in the ground brings Kelju Kojootti to mind, and even the cannon uses Acme gunpowder. Usually the only thing to laugh at in games is their lousy execution, so you'd think there would be a gap in the market for a refreshing exception like Freddy. At the very least it stands out favourably from the grey mass of uptight games.

Games put together from many events are usually dragged down by the fact that there are a couple of interesting events in the bunch and the rest are more or less unplayable. The same applies to Freddy too. The club juggling, which demands skill and concentration, is among the best of the lot, but in the cannon act there's nothing to do except set the distance to the target and fire the cannon at the right moment. Playing alone soon starts to feel wooden, but the bigger and noisier the gang of mates you can gather round the monitor, the more fun it gets.

1990 KevätFighting Soccer is a home computer conversion of a coin-op that has enjoyed some sort of popularity abroad. The idea is simply playing football. The game is presented in the same style as, e.g., MicroProse Soccer, that is, straight from above. The similarities by no means end there.

The player has the option of snatching the ball off an opponent with a sliding tackle, or simply by getting neatly between the other player and the ball. The longer you hold the fire button down, the harder and higher the wallop goes. Crammed onto the narrow pitch are 10 extremely big players who, going by their size and looks, would be better suited to the Mr. Universum bodybuilding contest.

On the Amiga the graphics are quite tolerable; the players are big (too big, if anything) and moderately well animated. The C-64 FS performs a skilful and deceptive Sinclair Spectrum emulation. The sprites do look quite good, but the graphics look as if they've been wired straight over from the Spectrum, which in my opinion is certainly no plus, quite the opposite.

The sound side is extremely average in both versions; there's nothing revolutionary to be found in either. The Amiga whizzes out a few nice samples and some irritating title music, whereas the C-64's music sounds the same as a thousand other C-64 title tunes. In playability the Amiga FS is a toe or two ahead, but both still end up on the unplayable side. Since controlling the players jerking about the pitch is what it is, you can't expect a very interesting game. And so you'll happily lower FS into its grave after a few games.

It must also be mentioned that the Amiga FS is, incidentally, at least as good as, if not better than, the Amiga MicroProse Soccer, though it doesn't beat Kick Off, mind you.

1989 SyksyLittle by little every sport is getting stored in binary form, especially now that Epyx's latest offering covers mountain climbing.

The familiar names Matterhorn, Jungfrau and Mont Blanc are among the lofty rocks the Final Assault player gets to make closer acquaintance with. There are six peaks to conquer in all, and the routes range in difficulty from one to ten. Route names like Hat Trick, Brink of Fear and Goner reflect the ordeals waiting ahead. The routes differ from one another in length and in the terrain to be crossed. The latter comes in three basic types: ice plains, vertical rock and icy mountain face.

To survive the trials of the climbing contest, the player has to make sure of being properly equipped for the special conditions. Any deep knowledge of mountaineering gear was wiped from the consciousness of the Finnish peoples along with the Ice Age. So at first there may be a little uncertainty about what goes in the sack, but you're never too old to learn. A complete beginner can fall back at first on the basic kit offered by the computer and so avoid the tough choices.

Climbing on icy rock is relatively easy once you get the knack of the thing. Balancing on a bare rock wall calls for more deliberation and a hunt for a grip that holds. Help comes from a figure on screen that tells you when your feet and hands are slipping.

Spending the night on a vertical wall is no picnic either. Fatigue and cold take their toll, and many a climber who set off with too little practice backs up to square one in a hurry. Fatigue, cold and hunger are announced by an old geezer's head that pops up at the edge of the screen from time to time, conveying his needs of the moment through his general demeanour. Once they have been satisfied, the little fellow disappears from view. If you'd like to combine, say, a healthy fast with brisk outdoor exercise and leave the old boy begging for roast chicken, a sudden bout of faintness may prove the climber's undoing later on.

After several attempts the lucky player reaches the goal and is king of the mountain for a while. If you remembered to pack the bubbly, now is the right moment to pop the cork in true jet-set style.

1991 KevätThe legend of the sword continues, as the ad for The Final Battle is keen to tell everyone who remembers any such legend. So what we have is an adventure game built on the mouse and graphics, in which you are also given text information about situations. All the commands, however, are given with the mouse.

Technically The Final Battle is quite neatly done, the interface works smoothly, the graphics are perfectly decent, ... but then comes the big BUT: the game has to be played through at a really tight pace, otherwise the player gets stuck or the companions have time to kick the bucket. In my opinion this takes away all the joy adventure games usually have to offer: searching and trying everything possible and then some. The whole idea of an adventure, after all, is to create your own story, not to follow a path someone else has signposted in advance. The solution that came with the review copy doesn't even allow you to explore places; the player has to follow it completely blind, without glancing left or right.

I won't say anything about the plot, since in an adventure game that proceeds on this principle it doesn't much matter - any trained monkey can learn a bunch of mouse clicks by heart.

1991 SyksyIt is the 22nd century: the bloody space war against the Horgants has ended, giving way to a cold, sullen standoff. With the sciences flourishing, a research station called Junar G2 is set up on the planet Ipsos III to study long-range matter transmitters. But contact is mysteriously lost, and the same happens to a ship named Centaure, which is sent to look into the matter.

This is the setup for a cross between a sci-fi adventure and a spy story, and it is packed with mysteries. Who murdered the Centaure's crew? Why has the Horgantt ship found on Ipsos been abandoned? How is it possible that radiation has turned the station's staff into mutants who kill with the power of thought?

The detective work is done with mouse control, which you could describe as the lazy programmer's school of adventure. The game is in fact a series of pictures with icons hidden in them. The first click gives you information and the second one acts: picking up an object, going through a door or using a device, for example. The system is extremely smooth, but it doesn't make for very glamorous puzzles: the mutants kill you if you pick the wrong one of two possible routes, and the Horgant ship blows up if you shove the wrong ID card into the computer.

The game has a peculiar, oppressive atmosphere, backed up by the distinctive style of the artwork. In places the graphics look as if they were finished in a hurry, or even downright messy, but that only strengthens the impression of all-round decay in the cyberpunk spirit.

FC is a very close relative of Exxos's Kult, but the execution is a class below it. The most worrying feature is that it is far too easy. There are usually so few sensible options on offer that you get a long way in the game even if you don't understand diddly-squat about the plot. A more experienced player quickly grasps the game's internal logic, and progress is so brisk that within a couple of days the mystery is solved and the game is left on the shelf to gather dust.

1991 KevätFinal Countdown, which is of German origin, causes quite some consternation when you get the box ripped open: no game instructions at all. However much you rummage around the cardboard box, all you find in there are two booklets, the first of which contains background information and the logbook notes, while the second is the manual for the Amiga 9000 computer. At least the player's intelligence hasn't been underestimated.

The background story relates that an asteroid approaching the Earth is in all likelihood a disguised alien ship with evil on its mind. Commander Laira Tyrik - a charming golden-tressed female person - got fed up with the dithering and beamed herself onto the scene, taking along a portable Amiga 9000 computer and a jetpack. The kit also includes the energy capsules and mines strewn along the corridors.

FC strongly calls to mind Impossible Mission. Firstly, the handguns have been left in the desk drawer, and secondly, fiddling with terminals plays an essential part. Using the A9000 is something quite different from leafing through menus, since it mimics a DOS environment, featuring a dozen or so commands that are needed to rummage through the spaceship's central computer. The game is definitely not meant for the novice computer user.

Once the heroine has learned to avoid mines, robots, force fields and running out of jetpack fuel, the worst problem turns out to be the risk of being found out. All you need to do is stand in the path of the wrong kind of robot or poke at the wrong file, and the result is a general alarm and the game is over in one fell swoop before you know it. I haven't yet had time to figure out whether this is a case of the game being too difficult, or just one hacking challenge among the rest.

For an action adventure FC is unusually logical; even the low gravity has been taken into account in the slowness of movement. There's nothing to complain about in the ship's innards either, which are teeming with detail and create a suitably mysterious atmosphere. Let it also be mentioned that certain sound effects have been nabbed straight from Alien (presumably a favourite of the makers, since the creature's mouthparts form part of the Demonware logo).

Rarely do you come across a game where everything hasn't been spelled out in words of one syllable, but room has also been left for a tantalising 'what's this all about' feeling. FC offers a singular, brain-racking challenge that might even be worth getting to know.

1990 SyksyA hefty helping of fire and brimstone is in store as the thunder god Thor is put to work. The game instantly brings Hewson's Stormlord to mind, but the makers of F and B have at least bothered to study old Viking mythology. The target of Thor's fury is Hel, the evil goddess of Niflheim, but to face her the hero has to trek through a string of worlds, each more hellish than the last: Alfheim, Vanaheim, Nidavellir and Muspell.

In the fight against the forces of darkness, Thor's allies are a dose of magic and four weapons, including of course his trusty hammer, Mjollner. Besides fiercely charging enemies and treacherous traps, the journey is livened up by hidden bonus items and secret passages. In places you even have to rouse your brain cells from their afternoon nap.

The ingredients have been stacked together to a very conventional action-game formula: the journey goes from right to left, the scenery changes one screen at a time, Thor jumps, Thor shoots, Thor dies. Familiar and easy to grasp. F and B is a typical "bang your head against the wall when there's nothing better to do" game, one that makes the player feel like a blind rat in an electrified maze, if you know what I mean. In other words, the game is pretty frustrating.

Graphically F and B is in a class of its own. The backdrops of most games look like finger paintings smeared by a chimpanzee when I compare them with F and B's beautifully composed, painterly landscapes. The run-of-the-mill sounds drift in one ear and out the other without leaving a trace; the only memorable racket is the rousing heavy metal guitar work on the title screen.

If anything deserves a game consumer's safety guarantee, this does: no surprises, no experimental programming, just familiar, professionally crafted entertainment from the gaming mainstream.

1988First there was a coin-op called Outrun. U.S. Gold bought the rights to it and started hurriedly making a home computer conversion. Titus, however, got there first with its Crazy Cars. Then along comes a game in the arcade world called Roadblasters, which was practically Outrun with a bit of shooting stirred in. U.S. Gold bought the rights to that one too and started hurriedly making a home computer conversion. And once again Titus got there first with its Fire & Forget.

To keep at least some shred of restraint, the plot has not been copied outright. In Fire & Forget the player's task is to tear around in a four-wheel-drive, triple-engined combat car and destroy enemy tanks, helicopters and buildings. To help out, the driver of the car can call up the Thunder Cloud, a magnetic levitation unit. (That's what it says on the box, honestly!)

At first glance you can see that a large amount of code has been taken straight from Crazy Cars into Fire & Forget. The next thing to catch the eye is the commendable graphics. The sound side is fairly nondescript; as is typical for the Amiga, most of the sound is made up of a sample nabbed from some unnamed source. The fine-tuning has gone somewhat wrong, because F&F has been made a bit too difficult. I'd guess that the only person who will bother to play this game for very long is someone who has paid out their last pennies for it and has to play it, through gritted teeth. Despite its difficulty, F&F is a passable Roadblasters clone to play for a while as you wait for the official conversion.

1988The research vessel Firefly had been knocking about in outer space for a decade before the crew got homesick. They shouldn't have bothered, because in the meantime the Mechanoid baddies have neatly eliminated almost the whole of humanity. The solar system has been paved over with a metal lattice, and so the Firefly's task, naturally, is to drive the Mechanoids far away.

Firefly is the debut of the programming group Special FX, and a pretty successful start it is too. The game is a strategic shoot-'em-up in which a certain amount of originality can even be detected.

The point of this shoot'em-up, which scrolls in every direction, is to fly around and locate four power sources. A power source is destroyed by sucking up the four "Yoka" energy charges coming out of it and then winning a little mini-game of the Uridium in-between stage type. Still, there's plenty more to do besides.

Le version de C-64 looks graphically as if it had been ripped straight off the Spectrum. The sprites and backgrounds look good, but the best-looking thing in Firefly is the ship's bullets. They float in a ring around the ship until a press of the fire button sends them on their way.

Firefly is one of Ocean's better releases, even if it isn't a game on the level of Parallax. Hopefully the company will keep finding the energy to release quality stuff like this and Platoon in future, and won't sink into wretched licence cash-ins.

1987Firetrack is the hottest shoot-em-up of the moment. The game's backdrop is the chaotic state of planet Earth in the 23rd century. At the start of the century Pirate Industries had founded colonies in the asteroid belt surrounding our planet. Before long, those left behind on the Earth's surface realised that Pirate Industries was starting to cut itself off from the Earth completely. Cooperation talks that were already under way were broken off, and the Pirate Wars began.

The pirate companies built their colonies around four basic models: Baseworld, Dustworld, Iceworld and Mallworld. Every colony has its own nuclear reactor, which produces all the energy the community needs. Destroy the reactor and the colony loses its power source for a while. The asteroids do have automatic repair systems, though, so you always have to attack an asteroid at least twice in order to take out the repairers as well.

As if that weren't enough already, the asteroids also hold the mysterious White Light, from which an all-destroying weapon can be made. Your most important task as the pilot of the HatchFighter is, in fact, to stop the White Light being used as a weapon.

The game's reputation as an excellent kill-'em-all game is entirely justified, because there really is plenty to shoot at. You don't even have to press the fire button yourself: in their honest, peace-loving way, the guns spit out bullets nonstop. You can get straight to any of the first three asteroids by pressing the right key, and on each asteroid you can always continue the game from the level where you last died.

Graphics-wise Firetrack is in no way revolutionary, but it is still very good. The same could be said of the sound side too. A good game, but no sensation.

1989 KevätIt's a tiny bit annoying that mighty 16-bit power gets used mainly for arcade mayhem, even though mouse control and a graphical user interface provide the ideal framework for large-scale strategy games. That's why it's always a pleasant surprise when a strategy game pops into the machine.

The disk reveals a world after the year 2000. The superpowers have fallen apart and in their place are new power blocs. War follows. United Europe, the Pacific League, the African Federation and Islam fight for power with tanks fitted with anti-gravity engines. Battles no longer last hours; they're over in minutes.

Seven units are at the player's disposal. The infantry is armed with laser weapons and battle armour, nova cannons provide raw firepower, AT-ST-style Striders wade among the light gravtanks and heavy tanks, even the command centre moves on caterpillar tracks (how might that affect game sales?), and the Leviathans are huge war machines that spread terror, destruction and death.

Firezone is actually a pretty simple war game, so simple in fact that I didn't even glance at the instructions and got on fine. Unfortunately the graphics don't make use of what their host machines can do, but at least they're garishly coloured. That's often the way with these games anyway. Animation and some proper sound effects would hardly have ruined the atmosphere. The implementation of mouse control, too, feels half-finished, but you still don't need to touch the keyboard. Turns are divided into movement and firing phases, and there are no special options to be found. Firezone does at least suit the budding strategist.

On the plus side, though, Firezone has a two-player option and, above all, the chance to build your own campaigns in addition to the ready-made ones, using the tolerably user-friendly Gamegen program that comes with it. That always extends a game's lifespan, of course.

Firezone is a game quite worth getting to know, but unfortunately it somehow leaves an 8-bit aftertaste. Hopefully strategy kings like SSI will turn their gaze towards the ST and Amiga as well.

1990 SyksyWhen mankind finally manages to touch the stars in the 3000s, some alien race immediately starts making trouble. This time the trumpets of doom are sounding at the vital space communications relay station 9W/4.

The intruders are green creepy-crawlies breeding at an alarming rate, which go through a rapid metamorphosis from grub to biped and systematically destroy every one of the station's systems. The player's job is to keep the station in working order and, while at it, send the aliens packing. At least that's what I'd assume, since oddly enough the instructions say next to nothing about the aim of the game. Besides the station, the game is supposed to contain the aliens' ship as well, so I suppose that's where you're headed.

At the player's disposal is a remote-controlled, three-part maintenance droid whose head, arms and legs can scurry along the corridors together or separately. The four floors of the station, seen from above, hold kilometres of control panels from which even the smallest system can be checked and, if need be, repaired. There are at least as many wall lockers to rummage through for extra equipment. All the droid parts are armed as well, but some alien forms are not much bothered by being tickled with a laser.

At first the sheer gigantic scale of the task has a badly demoralising effect: you have barely got going before a report of mission failure is slapped up on the screen. Playing FC purely as an action game is pretty hopeless, then; you need a more strategic approach. Salvation lies in programming the droids. With a sort of program editor you can define long sequences of actions for all the body parts in advance; for example, you can move them to the other end of the floor with one single command.

The programming system itself is easy to pick up, but the editor is badly designed. If you want to change column in the menu, you first have to scroll up to the top row. The editor is handy in that it automatically works out the shortest route. Except that sometimes it goes haywire. One time I wanted the droid to move to the next square, but the program picked an insane detour for it.

To look at, a couple of the floors are quite stylish, but the overall look is monotonous and there isn't even any scrolling. The sound doesn't even bear mentioning. The instruction booklet takes an interestingly 'scientific' approach, but things could be put more clearly.

FC is a peculiar cross-breed of action and strategy with plenty to get your teeth into, as long as a few design flaws don't drive you up the wall.

1990 KevätExpectations aren't very high when you get your hands on a game that uses the three-dimensional scrolling familiar from arcade games like Afterburner and Out Run. There's no point in a home micro even trying to imitate its coin-operated big brothers, since the graphics need an insane amount of memory, or else the machine has to have special chips that can zoom the graphics seamlessly. First Strike has at least kept its ambitions down to earth, even if you do fly an F-16.

At heart the game is a reheat of the Afterburner theme, spiced up a little with tactical elements. On offer are eight missions, the first of which is meant for practice, and a varied loadout that includes missiles, bombs, ECM equipment, machine-gun ammunition and an extra fuel tank.

After loading up, the fighter starts its dive towards the horizon and empties its arsenal at helicopters, submarines and tanks. It isn't entirely aimless blasting, since to get to the next level you have to succeed in destroying the primary target. The trigger finger is also kept in check by the meagre weapons load.

The scenery alternates between sea, forest and desert, done in very stripped-down but pleasantly smooth-scrolling graphics. The effect is tolerably stylish, especially since in the game you can also move sideways and even climb above the layer of cloud rolling across the sky. But the illusions come tumbling down when enemy hardware appears on screen: the typically jerky graphical mush isn't terribly convincing, but then you can hardly have the nerve to ask more of the C-64.

Playing First Strike is exactly the kind of vague flailing about that you've come to expect from games like this built on 3D effects. The enemy forces appear in steady torrents, and once you've selected a suitable weapon by pressing the space bar, with a bit of luck you might even hit something. Because, for some reason, the plane has no gunsight.

This doesn't offer anything decisively new, but First Strike is nevertheless clearly more careful work than the conversions of coin-ops in the same style.

1987Little by little even comic-strip heroes are starting to get games named after them, as game makers grab any idea going as raw material for a game. Asterix and Judge Dredd, for example, are already familiar names to joystick maniacs.

Mastertronic is bringing out a comics game of its own, whose subject is no more and no less than Flash Gordon - the strip named the world's best comic, created by Alex Raymond, who is called the world's best comic artist - that interstellar adventurer whose exploits have (naturally) already been made into a film as well.

All comics fans know that Flash's worst enemy is the cruel tyrant Ming (racism?), who this time too is hatching his utterly wicked schemes. Ming plans to destroy the Earth with some seriously heavy-duty missiles, whose guidance units he carries around with him. All Flash has to do is destroy Ming within 24 hours and the Earth is saved (hip hip hooray!). But it doesn't come easy even for Flash, especially since our hero's spaceship has come crashing down into the jungle of Mongo.

In the first part of the game you have to find your way through the jungle to Prince Barin's cave. The jungle's little critters - fire-breathing lizards among them - and other obstacles, such as chasms, make the going hard. With a bit of acrobatics and a pair of six-shooters you'll survive the journey, as long as you first manage to map out a route through the jungle. The map shown at the bottom of the screen isn't much help, but then it doesn't really matter much anyway.

When you finally find Barin, you can get ready for the next ordeal, which is a little karate bout (aagh - karate again) with the prince himself. You see, to get help Flash has to win the prince's trust, and according to this game the best way to earn respect is apparently to beat up someone weaker than yourself. Nice folks, these Mongolians.

If you get Barin to believe that a guy this tough is best helped, you finally have to chase Ming in a jet speeder kindly handed over by the prince, and try to end the tyrant's days with the missiles that come as standard equipment on the speeder. Easier said than done.

The game has quite a bit of charm thanks to its subject - the loading and title screens, for example, stylishly breathe old Raymond-style Flash Gordon nostalgia. The game seems varied and its execution is average. The graphics, for instance, aren't too bad, if not too good either. The most irritating thing is the Flash figure, who mostly looks like a roly-poly little fellow in a snowsuit and has hardly anything to do with the athletic figure we remember from the comics.

The music is middling (by Rob Hubbard) and the sound effects are sparse. The curses of a multi-part cassette game, with all the rewinding and hunting for the right spot on the tape, may also get on your nerves. The game is a good showing from Mastertronic, whose products seem to be getting better as time goes on. Still, there is no point calling Flash Gordon the world's best computer game.

1991 KevätSo Spectrum Holobyte, the creator of Falcon and Vette, has now stepped into the world of licensed games too. Holobyte was looking for a subject for a new flight simulator when the Hollywood bigwigs worked out that former Intruder A-6 pilot Stephen Coonts's book Flight Of The Intruder would make a splendid film. What could be nicer.

FOTI is really several flight simulators under one set of covers. Besides the Intruder A-6, you can fly combat missions in the Phantom F-4, which as aircraft go is a real jack-of-all-trades. The A-6 is useless in dogfights against MiGs, so it is mainly flown on bombing runs.

The game can be played at two levels: either as a simple straight-into-the-air-and-cut-the-waffle game or as a simulation complete down to the very last detail. At the simple level you fly simple, pre-prepared missions, whereas at the simulation level you have to study the flight maps yourself and plan your route with your own two hands. This multi-level approach gives beginners an easy way to get to know the game's functions and possibilities, and as your skills grow you can then sink your teeth deeper into the game's secrets.

So the game is set in Vietnam. You take off from an aircraft carrier, after which comes the flight to the target, bombing ground targets or destroying aircraft, and finally the return to the carrier. In practice, of course, it's not that simple.

Lasting interest is guaranteed by numerous missions and about five difficulty levels. A great deal of attention has been paid to realism, and it's clear the programmers waded through more than a few books while coding the bits of the program that deal with the aircraft's behaviour and aerodynamic properties.

The game has fine features enough to hand round to others. In line with current trends, you can view your own plane from every possible direction and zoom in and out. All in all the keyboard holds (including the ones hidden behind CTRL, SHIFT and ALT) close to 100 functions, which take a good while to learn. There's none of the keyboard overlay card MicroProse often uses, so at first you end up hammering the pause key a lot while you hunt through the key map for the right button.

Some missions include other American planes as well. At the press of a single key you can switch from one plane to another, even in the middle of a dogfight. When things get tight, you can let the autopilot steer the plane into safe waters. The autopilot can be set either just to fly automatically or to take care of everything, right down to the fighting. FOTI also has a very handy video recorder that records your flight. Afterwards you can watch your antics from any angle and save your best missions to disk.

In programming terms FOTI is a real showpiece of skill. The filled vector graphics are incredibly fast despite the complex objects, and don't slow down even when there's a huge amount of action on screen. A 286 PC ticking along at 12 megahertz is quite enough to get the full enjoyment out of the game. There isn't much in the way of sound, but the game does at least support the AdLib and lets rip with digitised effects even from the PC's speaker. As for controllers, the keyboard, mouse, joystick and Superstick are supported, the last being a 'joystick' made especially for flight simulators.

Flight simulators won't get much better than FOTI. If flight simulators get your propeller whirring, get yourself down to the nearest game shop and buy FOTI.

1990 SyksyHow about a vision like this: a ghostly desert, dust clouds and sagebrush tumbling across a wide-angle-distorted view, a tracking shot skimming the ground sweeps towards a set of doors that slowly swing open to reveal millions of Nintendo consoles and Super Mario Bros clones stacked in a dim hall. Then you wake from the nightmare, wiping the cold sweat of anguish from your brow.

Basic horizontal platform games are OK in themselves, as long as they aren't churned out onto the market non-stop and they genuinely reach the level of the Marios. Flimbo's Quest is an example of half-successful hopping about, with enough playability but a basic formula that is too monotonous.

Bobbing an oversized cap on his oversized head, Flimbo leaps right and left, collects scrolls and whisks them off to the shopkeeper. From treasure chambers and the remains of critters that strayed into the line of fire you can dig up a few pennies, which are traded for firepower or other little bonuses. From then on the game only gets harder, when what it absolutely needs is more kick in the ideas department.

Flimbo's Quest has a lot in common with Hawkweye, more than just a programming team teeming with Dutch names. In both, the play area is a short stretch of scenery that you scroll back and forth. An even clearer similarity is the layers of background graphics scrolling over one another, found in both the Amiga and the C-64 versions. There isn't much difference between the eight- and sixteen-bit versions anyway: both have showy backgrounds, flawless scrolling and smoothly responsive controls. Thanks to this, the C-64 version's score haul naturally has to get some special bonuses added.

'Easy playing' makes a nice change in between leafing through hundred-page manuals, but the penalty is a short lifespan. After a couple of hours of pumping away I was so numb and dazed that the game no longer interested me one bit.

Let's not be needlessly negative, though, since there are worse games on the market by the hundred. So: an eminently playable basic game, but don't expect too much.

1990 SyksyYou are a fat green blob, but never mind. So is Quiffy. Then again, Quiffy does at least get to be the hero of an action game by Bullfrog, the makers of Populous.

Quiffy and fellow blobs live in underground caves, getting by on the rubbish of ancient civilisations. But then assorted nasty creatures decided that the age of green blobs was over and wiped out the entire blob clan, except for Quiffy. As if that weren't enough, the Taps of Wrath were turned on and now the caves are filling up with water. Quiffy decided to make a run for it.

The aim in Flood is to get through 36+6 caves by collecting all the rubbish in them and finally dashing into the teleporter. The task is made harder by the rising flood water (like Kiwi, Quiffy can dive for a while) and the monsters crawling about all over the place. Quiffy has three lives plus an energy meter and an oxygen meter.

Quiffy has ways of getting rid of the monsters. There's a boomerang, shuriken, hand grenades, dynamite bombs fitted with time fuses and a really heavy-duty flamethrower. This fun weapon does have one downside, though: when you yell "fry, you stupid creature" and press fire, instead of a pillar of flame you may find a clucking rubber chicken in your hand. Nothing helps, however, against the ghost of Quiffy's aunt, which follows Quiffy's movements ten seconds behind but slowly gains ground all the same. In other words, dawdle and you're done for.

On top of all this the caves have teleporters that zap you from place to place, power potions, balloons, space hoppers, parachutes, lakes of fire, force fields, mines, flood stoppers (and flood speeders) and so on, with the result that there's fun aplenty. As well as walking, jumping and diving, Quiffy can also walk on walls and ceilings like Spider-Man.

The wearisome trudge through the same levels again and again is eased by a password system (assuming you find it: the words are invariably hidden in secret caves whose entrances you only find by sheer luck). A player who owns a brain should manage to work out a few, mind you (my own record: 15 words in two hours).

At first glance Flood's graphics call to mind a cute classic such as New Zealand Story. Except that NZS's cuddly teddies didn't have teeth in their bellies, and the background graphics didn't feature eyeballs split with a razor blade, not to mention partly decomposed relatives of Quiffy hung up on stakes. The sound effects are truly brilliant and, best of all, there's no stupid background music of any kind to fray your nerves. The ST version has push-scrolling and thinner sound than the Amiga, but they hardly affect the playability.

Flood has a flood of creative thinking, clever details, playability, playability, and floating on top of the flood is a quirky sense of humour. Probably the year's best example of its genre, and another win for Bullfrog.

1989 SyksyBased on Taito's coin-op, Flying Shark carries on the traditional line of vertically scrolling shoot-em-ups. This time it's a biplane that gets thrown into the fire, blasting away at flying enemy formations, tanks crawling along the ground, gunboats and other suitably warlike hardware. Collectable icons give you a wider spray of bullets, plus fireballs that can be released to circle around the plane. At the end of the level there is, of course, an opponent waiting that is bigger and tougher than the rest.

Flying Shark sticks to the basic shoot-em-up formula without offering anything new. It does, at any rate, copy its model quite faithfully. The tanks, for example, move stylishly among the palm trees or emerge from inside buildings just as in the coin-op. Technically, though, the game leaves a lot to be desired. The ST version's scrolling, OK enough in itself, slows down on the Amiga into a miserable judder, and the firing stutters badly, since only three shots' worth of bullets can be on screen at a time. The plane also has an irritating tendency to vanish under the border at the bottom, which makes it all too easy to fly into enemy bullets by accident.

Despite its shortcomings the game did at least stir up a moment's interest, but then a blaster would have to be truly dreadful for you not to bother playing it at all. What Flying Shark lacks, however, is the furious atmosphere that gets the gaming lust going, something Sidewinder, Xenon, Silkworm and many others capture far more convincingly. Recommended only for fanatical collectors of shoot-em-ups.

1991 SyksySimulmondo plonks the player down in a Formula 1 driver's seat and shoves them off down the track, once again with a lousy manual.

For some reason the box cover reads "Monza G.P. Action Simulator - TV Racing Camera". Could that just be a roundabout way of saying it's a racing game seen from the driver's point of view? The dismal manual raises expectations by going on for pages about engine tuning, driver training, choosing tyres and wings and other interesting stuff. Those vain hopes wither away, however, once the game has loaded. Not one of the heavily advertised features is anywhere to be found in the game!

Formula 1 3-D resembles some coin-op conversion far more than a simulator. At the top of the screen there's a clock steadily ticking away the time remaining. You have to get the car to the finish line within the time limit to make it into the race proper. Around the halfway point of the track there's a checkpoint, and reaching it in time earns you extra time. The more time you have left when you cross the finish line, the better your starting position in the race itself. The race, once again, has a time limit.

The controls are a bit odd. You accelerate by pushing the joystick forward, and reverse is engaged by pressing the button. Reverse stays engaged until the button is pressed again. Accelerating in reverse is still done by pushing the stick forward (!), which causes hilarious confusion when the car has spun off the side of the track and you need to back up in a hurry.

The player's viewpoint is so low that you can't really see the bends coming in time. In practice this means you end up taking the bends far too fast, and eventually the Formula buries itself a metre deep in the barrier. Once you learn to anticipate the bends, the game turns out to be far too finicky about speed. You have to drop your speed really drastically if you intend to stay on the track. Hard braking, on the other hand, takes your speed right down to zero. Hey, programmers: a Formula car does not come to a dead stop from 300 km/h in one second!

After all this griping I suppose I should hand out a little praise too. The sound effects are decent and the title music is excellent. The vector graphics update commendably fast, even if you switch on the grandstands and all the other trimmings from the menu. In the end the playability isn't completely atrocious either; you can play the game a few times and quite enjoy it. Formula 1 3-D isn't a total fiasco, but since there are much better Formula games on sale, I for one wouldn't buy this one.

1987Fort Apocalypse is a mighty realm lying deep inside the Earth's granite crust. The realm's ruler is so evil that not a single word will be spoken. Only whispers have reached the world of the living.

The Kralthan soldiers, rulers of the Earth's interior, have built the fortress to be deadly. Everyone who has tried to solve the riddle of Fort Apocalypse has vanished without a trace.

The player is a helicopter pilot, and the helicopter is hovering above the refuelling pad. First you fill up the tank and set off flying in some direction. The radar shows a wall that you have to blast an opening in. Magnetic cannons fire at the helicopter the whole time.

Once you've got the helicopter through the hole shot in the wall, you have to pick up all the men you can find. There should be eight of them to find in the tunnels. When you've found enough of them, you can go down at the spot that says Land here. A lift lowers the helicopter into the next cave system. It is called Chrystaline Caves.

There you refuel again and head right, and then down through the first opening you come across. A helicopter often lurks above the spot, so watch out for it.

The wall ahead is so thick that playing is easiest with a joystick that has autofire. Otherwise you can easily end up with a sore hand.

From here it's no longer a long way to destroying the core of Fort Apocalypse. Finally you still have to make it out of the maze.

At the end of the game the screen shows the rating you've achieved.

The game's graphics are good, but the colours could have been used more generously. More attention could have been paid to developing the sounds.

The game is big, so your interest holds. The whole idea of helicopter games is certainly starting to be worn completely threadbare by now. The game is available on cassette and disk.

1989 KevätLife isn't all a bed of chickens, even for a fox. When Mrs. Fox wants food, food gets fetched, even if armed badgers lurk in the forest along with KOP-sponsored squirrelkins lobbing nut grenades, on top of other hilarious but furry killers.

Mr. Fox owns a little pistol with which to thin out the pursuers. The forest is full of heavier weaponry. When the fox's stamina starts to give out, Fox can retreat underground into the foxholes and wolf down, say, a tasty team of hares. This makes the floppy tongue that shows the fox's condition flop about a little less. The object of the game is to collect three food items and take them back to the home den for Mrs. Fox. In this way the game reinforces gender roles: the wife cooks at home the food that the husband procures, gun in hand.

Fox trips over a couple of things: first, apart from the graphics it's a thoroughly run-of-the-mill shoot-'em-up, and second, it isn't even very playable. The fox, you see, is a wild creature whose free spirit doesn't always care to take the joystick's hints on board. The graphics and animation as such are pretty good; the sound stays at the usual level.

Fox Fetches Food is a shoot'em-up in fox's clothing, and yet another mediocre addition to the huge pile of shooting games. Denton Design has not managed to develop a good game out of a good idea.

1987At the start of the game a good-looking landscape appears on the screen, and a man called Trogg is near the bottom edge of the screen. The player's task is to help Trogg collect all the keys from each area. Trogg's enemies are all sorts of monsters. The game moves along nicely as long as Trogg always keeps his yo-yo at the ready.

Trogg gets out of many a problem with the help of his yo-yo. He also has a long nose, which comes in handy when collecting keys. While you play, the time keeps running down, and once it's up, darkness falls and Trogg's yo-yo no longer works against the balloons and daggers. As the game gets harder you also come up against a clone of Trogg, who puts up more than enough of a fight. Trogg will have to slog away for quite a while if he means to get all the keys collected from all 96 houses.

The game's graphics are astonishingly advanced, and on top of that 'off screen action' has been added, meaning Trogg's yo-yo also works outside the screen even when the target can't be seen. In that case you can only tell that the yo-yo has hit an enemy from the sound.

The game's music is on the weakish side. It resembles the 'beepers' of lower-quality computers, which put out nothing but beeps of different pitches and lengths.

The game's colour choices have come off better than average.

Frak is a fairly successful copy of the original BBC game. The resolution of the graphics has of course had to be reduced.

All in all the game is a good buy and offers plenty of pleasant gaming moments for a long time to come.

1988The wonder boys of Spain, i.e. the programming team Dinamic, have already thrown three games into the ring in a short space of time. The previous ones, as you know, were the popular Army Moves and the less popular Game Over.

Freddy Hardest is an intergalactic playboy, which is to say a sort of substitute for Bitti's Assistant. The playboy's rocket goes limp (as shown at the start of the game) and Freddy is shipwrecked on an asteroid, which he needs to get off so he can carry on living it up. A worthy goal.

And where the plot ends, a pretty ordinary shoot-'em-up begins. Freddy of course has that symbol of manhood, the laser pistol, but Mr. Hardest can also deliver a mean flying kick. The first part of the game deals with Retu Kovanen's journey across the surface of the asteroid, and if he survives that, he gets a code with which you can play the second game, where you pick your way through the aliens' house. By then Freddy can already punch and even defend himself. That's what experience does for you.

This time Dinamic have done a good job. Although the game is mostly like the previous two with new sprites, the graphics are good and so are the sound effects. The sprites are well animated and Freddy does what the joystick tells him.

But in true Dinamic style the game is extremely difficult. Once again it demands split-second timing and pixel-perfect jumping. When the Grim Reaper takes Freddy, the man always has to go back to the start, which gets tedious after a while. Some people like that sort of thing; I don't.

For those to whom the joystick is not just a game controller but a natural extension of the hand, Freddy Hardest is a challenge worth its weight in gold. Everyone else can buy it to get revenge on the show-off gamer next door.

1988'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, take me up to heaven with you, and preferably to the ward where I get to laugh at my mates Downstairs.'

We've all been held prisoner by a dream at some point, unable to wake up. There are dreams that are quite interesting to get stuck in, but nightmares aren't necessarily among them. That's why the idea in Frightmare is to wake up by surviving from midnight until 8:15. The clock moves six minutes forward every time the sleeper moves on to a new dream (i.e. a level, in everyday language). A growing score changes the type of dream from bad dream to hair-raising nightmare.

The dreams are crawling with the usual paranormal monster brigade, namely werewolves, zombies, vampires and so on, reinforced with monsters from antiquity. To my great disappointment, there wasn't so much as Freddy Krueger's hat to be seen. The dreams are also crawling with the traditional anti-monster armoury, i.e. silver bullets, guns, crosses, holy water and the like, plus some special items that make staying alive easier.

Frightmare is a perfectly ordinary jump, collect and shoot game whose plus points are an atmospheric soundtrack and high-class graphics. The fun, on the other hand, is effectively spoiled by the zillion sprites whizzing across every screen.

In this nightmarish type of game, Frightmare is one of the better sort of nightmares.

1990 KevätInfogrames is a rare kind of games house in that what matters most to it is freshness of ideas. This time these likeable Gauls have taken on a strategic board game set in the future.

The idea of Full Metal Planet is to land on a planet bursting with metals and grab as much wealth as you can in a couple of dozen moves. The planet's surface is simulated by a playing field made up of hexagonal tiles, half of it covered in water. In the hold of the clover-shaped mothership you'll find two types of vehicle: robots and barges haul chunks of metal, while tanks and gunboats take care of military operations. The most interesting vehicle is the Weather Hen, a kind of robot factory that can turn chunks of metal into new hardware.

Movement is made trickier by the randomly changing tide, which can leave land vehicles surrounded by water or boats stranded high and dry. So it's worth securing the most used land routes with pontoon bridges.

FMP is an unusual strategy game in that two to four players can take part, and all computer-versus-human combinations are allowed. At first it's actually quite illuminating to watch four computer players romping about. Puttering away alone in a corner may be the easiest way to win, but an upstanding gamer goes off to play at war. You can tip the balance of power by indulging in manly gunboat diplomacy, i.e. by capturing the enemy's mothership, but if there are more than two players, allying with the enemy is also possible.

Getting the rules to sink in takes its time, but once you get the hang of the game you start to appreciate its watertight internal logic and its subtleties, thought through to the last detail. For example, destroying or capturing an enemy vehicle always takes two units, which makes the outcome of military action surprisingly hard to predict. The thinking time can be set to 1-9 minutes, and it applies to both the computer and the players.

The sombre graphics and metallic sounds aren't brilliant, but they create the right atmosphere. The game's only more serious shortcoming is that there's only one map, but then again, a chessboard only has squares in two colours too. In short, FMP contains the basic ingredients of a classic: a simple basic idea, but unlimited possibilities. FMP is a good choice for those gaming persons who shy away from the complexity of "proper" strategy games but enjoy a pastime that gives the brain some work.

1989 KevätSo few proper Amiga games come out for the Amiga that expectations always stay high. Now EOA adds a new name to this short list.

Fusion combines brains and blasting. The aim is to save the world by assembling a bomb from parts found on the various levels of an alien world. Access to them is blocked by gates, which can be opened with pattern- and colour-coded switches found here and there. Here and there are also icons which, when passed over, give standard bonuses such as firepower or field energy.

The player's craft consists of two pieces. The slow ground-grubber is the one used to activate the levers. The somewhat faster mothership lets you zoom along above the ground. There's just enough firepower that the craft can, in principle, be called capable of defending themselves.

The graphics at least look good, especially the backgrounds. The game runs in halfbrite mode, which means there should be 64 colours on screen. Maybe that's why the scrolling then judders rather badly. The sound effects are miserable, and the background music isn't all that marvellous either.

Fusion has one serious problem. It's exactly the kind of game that has you wondering, while you play, whether you left the car lights on and whether the wife got anything to eat. In other words, simply uninteresting. There are too many more-or-less identical games already as it is. The most original thing in the game is showing the score in alien letters. What a triumph of innovation...

Amiga programmers would do well to take a peek at the kind of games that have started appearing for the ST, and forget their 8-bit mindset. All right, I believe it already: you can make good-looking shoot-'em-ups on the Amiga. Isn't it about time to come up with something else as well?

1991 KevätWhen it comes to futuristic sport, you can be pretty sure the game has borrowed a few ideas from Speedball. So too with Future Basketball, where the goals have been replaced with baskets, but otherwise the ingredients of the matches are the familiar shoving of players and collecting of icons off the court surface. The aids include some decidedly unsporting kit, such as circular saw blades that home in on the opponent.

Oddly enough FB lacks a two-player mode, but that is at least partly made up for by an interesting league system with three divisions and a super league. The idea is that the money you rake in from wins can be invested in better players. Renewing the squad is certainly necessary, since at the start of the league you have to put up with slow-moving butterfingers who haven't mastered even the basics of shooting baskets and passing. Assembling a top squad doesn't happen in a flash, so the option to save your position to disk is a much-needed feature.

The game system as such is clear and smooth, but a couple of blunders spoil the enjoyment. For example, when one of your players is shoved over, he stays lying on the ground for a while. That is part of the nature of the game, but the downside is that if the eliminated player is the one nearest the ball, you can't do a thing for a while.

The defensive play limps along even worse. The man you control is always the one nearest the ball, but the automatic switching doesn't work the way it should. If two defenders are at roughly the same distance, control flips from one player to the other at a rapid tempo. It's really infuriating when control switches to the wrong man just as you're lining up a tackle. By the time control returns to the original one, the opponent has of course had time to turn his back on the attacker. And so you've handily managed to clear your own half of the court, and the opponent scores a basket.

FB manages to entertain surprisingly well, even though the game system's muddles do cause mild frustration. But in the futuristic games class Projectyle is better in my opinion, and Speedball 2 probably squeezes ahead of it on the shopping list too.

1990 KevätFrance's Delphine Software throws itself energetically into the battle for the crown of graphic adventure games. This, of course, has been Sierra's and Lucasfilm's very own turf, but Future Wars shows that they know how to do it in Europe too.

Today's adventure games no longer settle for old-fashioned "find ten treasures"-style set-ups; instead, the most important element is the plot. I can well imagine FW's designers rubbing their hands with glee and muttering "we'll wipe the floor with 'em".

The game's hero is a perfectly ordinary window washer who dangles at the risk of life and limb on the sides of skyscrapers. But you wouldn't believe everything that can happen when you get too curious. Revealing the plot would spoil the enjoyment of the game, but let it be said that in the distant future mankind is at war with the cruel Crughons. The wars of the future are fought in the past, for what could be a more crooked way of pulling a prank on your opponent than tampering with history. It is into this mess, which breaks the boundaries of time and space, that the player gets swept.

Paul Cuisset's three-year project has spawned an easy-to-use and logically working graphical system, in which the character moves convincingly within the pictures and the mouse control works with pixel precision. Lucasfilm-style, there's a set of pared-down commands whose meaning depends on the context. The game's problems are clever and suitably connected to the course of the plot, but the worst flaw is the lack of things to do. I myself got so utterly stuck in a certain sewer that either there's something wrong with the game or between my ears, or else I've been sent an unfinished review copy.

The game's high-quality graphics, and the sound effects and music mixed to accompany the action, make the game's Cinematique trademark live up to its name. The storytelling has a humorous touch and the plot twists are so high-flying that the game sucks you in whether you like it or not. If you like Zak McKraken or Sierra's games, Future Wars is worth getting to know.