1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1987In the game you lead an international organisation that fights against terrorists. Your opponent is the criminal organisation COBRA. From the various men under your command you can pick whichever one you like to take their turn fighting a Cobra representative. The game can be played either alone or by two, although in practice two-player is the only sensible option.

In a fight you go head to head with a Cobra villain, and both of you have some weapon or other with which the idea is then to bump the other one off.

You can follow the state of play from the energy bars at the edge of the screen. The fights basically come in two kinds: either man against man, or else, say, a helicopter or a tank against enemy troops.

The duels are actually completely identical, despite the men and weapons changing. Graphically they are fairly good, which on the other hand cannot be said of the troop battles. Those are also usually harder than the duels.

The game loads from disk one match and one man at a time, so the disk is spinning almost the whole time, and every now and then you have to flip it over too.

A game can go on for hours, but if this kind of shooting/fighting business is your thing, G.I.Joe will keep you entertained for a long time. Others, on the other hand, may be bored by the game's samey situations and slightly clumsy controls.

1988As modems become more common, game makers too have realised that the same game can be played at the same time on several different computers. A fine example of this trend is the software house MicroIllusions, whose One to One series games can be played either against the computer or against a friend. The friend can be either right there or at home in front of their own micro, as long as the machines are connected to each other by modem.

What could be nicer than pounding your soon-to-be-former best friend's spaceship with lasers - or, best of all, blowing their home sun quite literally sky-high once you've found the parts of the missile that is the goal of the game.

Unfortunately these sweet daydreams are spoiled by the fact that, apparently in all the excitement over the new technology, the implementation of the game itself has been left half-finished. The graphics, which aim for three dimensions, move stiffly, and when you meet enemy ships, the opponent only occasionally slips past on the screen.

The three-dimensional display is in fact also a mere illusion, since the ships can only move on a flat plane, which is also where both players' home suns are.

1988This can't be true: an Amiga game where the sprites hop about like in some Commodore 64 BASIC program! Aaargh!! In fact this game wouldn't even deserve a mention, but surely the readers have to be warned at least, so that they have the sense not to touch this game with anything shorter than a ten-foot pole.

Its plot, too, is boundlessly original. The ship moves at a constant speed over a vertically scrolling landscape, shooting at waves of enemies that fly the same path from one game to the next...

1990 KevätWe will no doubt still remember that Christmas flop, Afterburner. When you move Afterburner into space and add a few more gameplay elements, the result is Galaxy Force. Spices have been added to the old recipe and the cooking time extended, with the result that Galaxy Force is a pretty good effort.

The space fighter first flies in space/above ground and destroys the oncoming hardware with its laser cannons/missiles, Afterburner-style. The terrain usually looks sparse, but at least the sprites don't resemble Lego creations. The real novelty is the winding corridors the craft moves into next. That section suffers from the stiffness of the craft's controls. The mission ends with the destruction of the fortress on the level in question.

The graphics move reasonably smoothly, accompanied by a typical ST background tune. Garbled samples give directions in the maze section.

By way of a tip, let it be said that in this game it pays to fly with the throttle wide open the whole time. As a second tip, let it be said that Galaxy Force is only worth buying if you truly love the coin-op version and life without it feels pointless.

1989 SyksyFTL's Dungeonmaster launched a whole new type of role-playing game, which is still selling like hot cakes and will continue its triumphal march when the Amiga version turns up one of these days. Galdregon's Domain is the first attempt to bleed the same vein, and there's certainly no law against cloning decent games.

GD's plot holds no surprises, as it's standard fantasy game stuff: the evil wizard is Azazael and the wizard's downfall is the five stones of Zator (or the tractor of Zetor). The hero is "the mightily powerful barbarian of the north", to the heartfelt delight of all Conan fans. Pseudo-Conan tromps through the kingdom of Mezron both above ground and below it in this Z-packed DM clone.

As in Dungeonmaster, the landscape is seen through the player's eyes, and mouse-driven menus are the basis of the action. The graphics are claimed to use 64 colours, which may well be the case. The barbarian on the status screen is certainly drawn with outstanding skill.

Unfortunately Galdregon's Domain loses to Dungeonmaster on every count. Motionless little sprites popping up out of nowhere create no illusion of reality, and neither do the utterly monotonous underground landscapes. When bumbling about above ground, at least the scenery changes. Without mapping there isn't the slightest chance of not getting lost. Nor was I much cheered by the fact that objects don't show up on screen; instead, in a certain menu, provided it happens to be selected, a cross flashes up next to OBJECT. I finally had my fill of object manipulation when I couldn't get the axe from a slain guard into my own hands.

What spoils the combat is the total lack of animation. Only from the sampled sounds can you tell that a fight is going on, while the little sprites stand rooted to the spot as if sunk in a coma. You're not meant to kill everything that moves, however much you might feel like it at times; you can talk to them too. Conversation is mostly limited to other characters' "Hello, strong barbarian" comments, so the excitement isn't exactly overwhelming.

The general monotony and uneventfulness of Galdregon's Domain strongly reminded me of the Bard's Tales, so anyone who likes those may well get excited about GD. For educational purposes, let it be told that at around the same time as Galdregon I got hold of NetHack. How did a character-graphics adventure on the ST's black-and-white monitor fare against 64 colours and sampled effects? There was no contest, Azazael can keep Mezron for all I care. Wait for Dungeonmaster and save your money for a memory expansion.

1987Gary Kitchen's Gamemaker is a toolkit for making games on the C-64. Each different part of a game is designed and built with a tool made specifically for that particular task. A finished game component is given a name and saved into a library. After that it can be used in several different games, or, say, for more than one purpose in the same game.

Scenemaker is used to create the backgrounds for games, Spritemaker the sprites and animation, Soundmaker the sound effects, Musicmaker the music and the editor the program itself. Every separate tool offers excellent facilities for testing and modifying the picture, sprite or sound being worked on. While the program is being written, too, you can try out what you have created whenever you like.

Gamemaker can be used entirely with the joystick; you never need to touch the keyboard. This feature, which has lately become common in Activision's programs, finds perhaps its most natural application in Gamemaker of all. All the commands can be found in alphabetical order in a command list. On top of the sheer bliss of programming while lounging in an armchair, writing programs actually gets faster too.

Let us suppose that we have created a flying BITTI journalist made up of two sprites. One sprite shows the journalist from the waist down, and the journalist's ugly mug fits into the other. By swapping these two sprites on screen for other two-sprite groups, in which the journalist's panic-stricken flailing arms and kicking legs are in different positions, you get the impression of animation.

We name the set formed by the four sprites showing the journalist's upper half "torso", and likewise the lower half "legs". When writing the actual program in the editor, we choose the command SPRITE 1 IS; the program looks up the contents of the sprite library on disk and lets the programmer pick from it, say, the sprite called legs. For sprite two we choose torso. Next we set starting positions on screen for the torso and the legs at such points that together they make up a whole journalist. After that all you need to do is set the journalist's direction and speed of movement, plus the animation speed, i.e. how rapidly the journalist's legs and arms flail about. You can then watch the journalist's attempted take-off against, say, a jungle backdrop by defining SCENE 1 IS JUNGLE. The jungle is one of the many ready-made backgrounds to be found on the Gamemaker disk. The disk also has a large collection of sprites, sound effects and music.

Finished games can also be used without Gamemaker by making use of the Make disk option.

1988Once upon a time there was a cartoonist who was trying to come up with a new comic strip character. After a long spell of development, the result was a plump, cynical, orange-furred feline which answered to - hmm... recognised - the name Garfield. The artist drew a few strips of Garfield, and suddenly the whole world loved the cat and adopted it as its own pet. Let's give the world what the world wants, mused the wise product developers. The market was flooded with Garfield books, Garfield posters, Garfield pens, Garfield notepads, Garfield lamps, Garfield towels, Garfield cushions, Garfield Garfields and Garfield goldfish bowls, and at last along came from Edge the thing that Garfield fans who own a micro had been waiting for: the Garfield computer game.

The plot of the Garfield game is simple. The dogcatcher nabbed Garfield's girlfriend and locked her in a cage. The task of our lazy furball is to get the girl kitty out of the cage. Easy? It isn't, especially when it happens to be Monday. But with the help of his friends Jon, Odie and Nermal, Sherlock Garfield ought to pull through. By making use of various objects and seeing to it that he gets enough rest and nourishment ('Lasagna! I love lasagna!') the mystery gets solved.

The way it plays, carrying objects around and using them, is reminiscent of Pyjamarama. As the game goes on, it happens worryingly often that when his hunger grows unbearable Garfield wolfs down even important objects, and finishing the game on that go becomes impossible. Then there's nothing for it but to start over from the beginning, which, so far at least, hasn't felt the least bit disagreeable, considering how much fun playing Garfield is.

Brilliant details such as the well-done animation, the clear graphics, which, considering what the Commodore 64 is capable of, are near-perfect Garfield graphics, kicking Odie, eating, visits to the butcher's, the little puzzles along the way, the Garfield comments at the bottom of the screen etc., all add up to a game that is worthy of Garfield. A must-buy for all Garfield fans, but the rest of you should consider it too. I, at least, like comics, I like computer games, I like Garfield, I hate Mondays and I like the Garfield game. Period.

1988How many letters are there in the word Garrison? Right, eight of them. And what about in Gauntlet? Eight as well! So does Garrison have anything else in common with Gauntlet, which has already earned the status of a classic?

Gauntlet must be the most imitated game of 1987. Now it's the Amiga's turn to get one of its own. So Garrison's plot is the same as Gauntlet's: together with your four friends you force your way into the depths of the earth, watching out for wicked nasty witches, traps, poisons and so on.

Against Gauntlet's four player characters, Garrison offers one player more. However, only two players can be on the screen at the same time.

Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, meaning that when you play with a friend you'll end up with a better result.

Garrison's title screen is terrific. The graphics are neat and a mighty heavy metal solo pours furiously out of the speakers. Surely even Gary Moore's jaw would drop at the sound of it.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for the sounds in the game itself, as they're mediocre beeps and pops. The graphics artist must have lost patience after drawing the title screen, and it shows when you play. The levels show a slight lack of polish, though admittedly it doesn't get in the way of the action.

Like Gauntlet, Garrison can be recommended to those who are sure they don't go in for gaming into the small hours, because you can develop a craving for playing Garrison that pays no attention to what time it is.

1989 SyksyLet's state right off the bat that although GLHS tries to beat MicroSoccer on its own turf, MicroSoccer, born of a collaboration between Sensible Software and MicroProse, is still the valiant bearer of the crown for the best football game on the 64.

You shouldn't, however, settle for the idea that GLHS is some utterly wretched lash-up. The graphics pass muster, even if they are smudgier than in MicroSoccer and messier too, Ben Daglish's music is a nice breezy ditty, though no chart-topper, and the playability is just what you'd expect: easy and simple.

As in MicroSoccer, the playing of King Football is viewed from directly overhead. In other respects too, it shines clearly through which game is being imitated here. MicroSoccer's level is not reached, though.

The instruction booklet explains everything necessary in easily digestible terms, namely how the kick-power meter works, sliding tackles and the other standard moves. The programmers evidently thought it a jolly good joke to name the teams after English computer magazines, but they can be renamed.

All in all, GLHS is a perfectly nice and playable football game, and there's no call either to crow about it much or to run it into the ground. One thing, at least, has been done better here than in MicroSoccer: the ball seems to spin more realistically!

1990 SyksyThe Lynx is such a stylish, sleek and charming device that any game at all sucks you into hours of button-bashing. But on top of that, Gates of Zendocon is a really good shoot-'em-up, whatever criteria you measure it by.

GOZ is a perfectly normal laser-reeking destruction game in which a teeny spaceship creeps through peculiar landscapes, carving up everything that crosses its path. The weapon really is a laser, firing off an energy charge the full width of the screen, and not some toy gun spitting out clumps of pixels. By holding the fire button down and moving up and down at the same time, it's easy to sweep the route clean. The armament also includes photon torpedoes that glide ballistically down at an angle, and to launch them you have to lift your finger off the button every now and then.

The designers' imagination has stretched to more than the usual basic 'let's just put something on screen to fly around' approach. The slime and robot creatures served up as meals for the laser come in every conceivable shape, from bouncing eyeballs to giant jellyfish and boulders that get chopped up Asteroids-style.

You move on to the next level through teleports, of which there is usually more than one. So you can progress through the game by countless different routes, skipping the levels you particularly loathe. And when passwords have been thrown in on top of that, the result is a truly player-friendly product that it's hard to get bored with.

1987In this adventure game you go adventuring in the world of Apshai. Temple of Apshai is the foundation for this action game.

Gateway to Apshai tests the player's skill and wits. Steering with the joystick, you have to collect all the items from a single labyrinth in six and a half minutes, find your way onward through the labyrinth and avoid the dangerous traps.

Once you have successfully made it through a labyrinth, you get the bonuses. Then you have to descend into the next labyrinth, and the journey gets more dangerous. Along the way you may find weapons and spells; they can help.

Gateway to Apshai is mainly a strategy game with action added through joystick control. The game idea is simple but reasonably good. Its sheer size adds interest. The game has eight levels, each containing 16 labyrinths, and every labyrinth contains roughly 60 rooms. So the game's 128 different labyrinths hold a total of about 7680 different rooms.

Gateway's graphics are good too, and the other functions have been handily placed on the lowest function keys. The game's user-friendliness is further improved by the really good design of the cartridge. If all cartridges were like this, there would be no trouble at all plugging them in.

1991 SyksyHardly had word come that the series begun by Pool of Radiance would end with Pool of Darknes when a new Forgotten Realms series got under way with Gateway to the Savage Frontier.

Expect a hefty dose of Deja Vu, since GTTSF is very Pool-like. There's a gratifying abundance of little quests, with the main plot advancing on the side. Characters start at level 2 on average, so for the first time in ages the battles consist of whacking bottom-of-the-barrel monsters with an appalling miss rate. A nice change, actually, when you're used to a single mage sweeping away an entire horde of monsters with one fireball. Now you at least break a sweat.

Character development is cut short again: barely a fifth of the game was behind me when the Cleric had already hit the end of its development. Priests and mages stall at level 6, rangers at level 7, and the rest make it to level 8. Naturally there are no new spells, though at least there are a few new monsters.

The system hasn't been overhauled much, though at least you can now get straight into a character's inventory. Sound and graphics have been improved somewhat.

A few things are overdue for a fix: the graphics depicting the player's characters haven't progressed an inch, and the player characters look primitive compared with everybody else. The Modify option could be dropped: neither I nor any of the other dishonest types transfer our characters from the tabletop game - we just configure our characters to maximum stats.

Same goes for the level option: why bash tough monsters when on novice level the game goes more lightly and the XP losses aren't anything much either? In my own defence, the random encounters would otherwise drag on until Judgement Day.

Frankly, it would have been logical to give this line of AD&D games a proper overhaul in honour of the new series. Then again, these are massive hits: why change a formula that sells?

1987Hear the tale of Gauntlet: four adventurers, in groups of two, push ever deeper into gloomy dungeons. They are threatened by more monsters than a whole bunch of Green Berets could kill. Food and drink top up their dwindling energy, magic potions help in casting mega-death, and gold only gets you points.

Deeper and deeper they press on, greed their only motive. Deeper they must go, even if the price is throwing a companion to the wolves...

For the last few months the number one talking point in the computer games world has been the same: Gauntlet. Gauntlet hit the arcade world like a ton of bricks dropped into a glassworks' showroom. U.S. Gold bought the licence and the advance hype was enormous. There was supposed to be speech, all the features of arcade Gauntlet, good graphics, hefty sound and so on. Now Gauntlet has arrived, and what is left in the glove?

The heroes are tiny little pancakes, there is no talk of any speech, the sound is amateur-level and the two-player game is marred by bugs that crop up now and then. The Christmas market has apparently forced U.S. Gold to shove Gauntlet out the door half-baked. But (and it is a big but: two metres tall and five wide) you soon stop noticing any of this at all. Gauntlet is a brilliant game. A second player can join the game at any time, and otherwise too, all the features of the arcade version are there. There are huge numbers of good-looking monsters, and the game itself is full of all sorts of clever tricks. After level 8 the dungeons come up at random, which effectively keeps boredom at bay. And once you know the levels by heart, no worries: U.S. Gold is going to release extra levels.

As a one-player game Gauntlet is merely extraordinarily good, but as a two-player game it has no equal so far. Despite its shortcomings Gauntlet is one of last year's best games, and my conscience raises no objection to recommending it to everyone. Without a doubt Gauntlet will become the most imitated game of the year of our Lord '87.

1988In the beginning there was Gauntlet, and it felt lonely. The Lords of Programming created a companion for it, a product called Gauntlet - The Deeper Dungeons. Life together has gone smoothly, for in less than a year there was a happy event in the family and Gauntlet II squalled out its first sound effect.

Gauntlet II raised quite some expectations in advance. After all, it's built on one of the best and most successful games of recent years, and the rumours told of quite a number of additions and improvements. There should have been plenty of time, too, to turn out a decent product.

And Gauntlet II does keep its promises, though nowhere near all of them. The graphics are almost as miserable as in the first one (ST excepted), and all the new stuff is evidently to blame for the pace slowing down noticeably.

Admittedly, though, the new innovations save the situation. Besides the good old familiar stuff you'll find wandering exits and fake exits, and new monsters such as the shot-proof slime blob, the super sorcerers and It, whose touch makes the other player every monster's number one object of interest. Well, one player's death is another player's points. A dragon has also been squeezed in, to everyone's delight.

The walls and even the floors have had a makeover too. There are moving walls, walls that turn into treasure or monsters when shot, floors that paralyse you and a ray that nicely chops a chunk off your energy.

The amount of magic has increased. Amulets give handy extra abilities, such as shots that kill everything in their way right up to the nearest wall. The weapon that ricochets off walls is also extremely useful on certain occasions. As before, two players can play at the same time, and even as the same character if they like.

Gauntlet II is a very good game despite its faults, and it is sure to hit home with every old Gauntleteer like an axe into a monster. 512 different levels ought to be challenge enough.

1988Rallying in the sky? When you get fed up with ordinary car rallying, you can swap the car for an aeroplane and zoom off into the sky.

Gee Bee Air Rally was made by Steve Cartwright, an old acquaintance from the C-64. The game starts with a nice animated intro in which planes flit about the sky to the beat of fittingly atmospheric music. A tap on the fire button and before you know it you're in the cockpit, ready for take-off. You have three difficulty levels to choose from.

The idea is to fly a set course to the finish as fast as possible. When you get there you get bonuses for the time you have left.

Playing is handled with the joystick in a way that's easy on your hand. You see, you don't have to push the stick forward white-knuckled to get up speed; instead, the speed is controlled with the fire button.

There are other planes in the race too, which you have to watch out for. A proper collision sends your plane down and leaves you dangling from your parachute. Among other places, you might drop into a pigsty, where the pigs congratulate you with cheerful grunting.

After you clear a level there's a trophy presentation to musical accompaniment. Once you've cleared several levels you find yourself besieged by photographers.

The scenery during play isn't much to write home about, the sprites are colourful and stand out from the backgrounds, and the sound effects are good and realistic-sounding. Nice little animations make the game feel polished. The pictures and bobs used in the animations are high-quality and colourful. Solid stuff, as you'd expect from Activision.

1991 SyksyA block game again? And from that sub-sub-subspecies at that, where you play with coloured gems in the style of Columns and the like. For a change, though, Gem'X doesn't test the speed of your reflexes but your powers of perception and logic.

Two stacks of stones glitter on the screen, and the left-hand one has to be reshaped to match the model. The mechanism is that the stone you click and the four stones around it change colour. When you click a red stone with the pointer, it turns blue, the red stone below it turns green, the blue stone to its left turns violet, the violet stone above it turns yellow and the yellow stone to its right disappears, at which point the stones above that one drop down a notch. Sound complicated? You bet.

Your brain boils even worse on the harder levels, where you have to take the order of your moves into account because the stacks collapse. Rewinding is possible, but undos count as moves, and those are in limited supply anyway. A clock also ticks away in the background to pile on the pressure.

Learning has been slowed down by varying the order of the puzzles, and the effect is boosted further by the fact that each level only has you solve a random sample from a larger stock of puzzles.

The look is genuine Japanese design. These days, you see, they have a bewildering obsession with adding near-pubescent little moppets to their games, wearing a teddy bear at most. The sound department follows the same line: amid the sugary tinkling you hear girlish squeals, sniffles and cries of I love you by way of encouragement. The paedophilic streak in Japanese culture I shall leave for the psychoanalysts to ponder.

For those afraid of thinking, the game offers deep horror, as mouldy brain folds throb with pain and grey tufts of hair drift down to the floor among the bitten-off fingernails. An Einstein-class turbocharger installed between the ears is a compulsory extra.

1990 KevätIf the inventor of the vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up had been able to patent the idea, they would be fabulously rich. For the strip-mining of that idea has reached such inflationary proportions that it has become a sort of newsstand pulp fiction of computer games. Of course the odd pearl may stray into the pile now and then, Xenon 2 for example, so best to adopt a slightly more open-minded attitude.

Gemini Wing is, surprise surprise, originally a coin-op, converted for the home micro owner's delight by Imagitec Design. The game's backstory is simple: when the galactic tabloid SoonDay Spirit ran the front-page headline "Die Mutant Alien Scum", the politicians leading the other life forms had no choice but to declare war on the inhabitants of Earth if they wanted to get elected at the next election. Game designers seem to have a private competition going over who can come up with the dumbest plot.

Pay attention now, because the following five words sum up the content of the game: shoot things, collect extra weapons. Well, that is of course the same as saying that Mars is a planet inhabited by aliens (everybody knows that). A closer look does reveal a few original features, though, such as the scrolling not juddering (golly!). Another pleasant feature is the option to continue the game after game over.

Whether games like this have any right to live is decided by three things. The first of them is the graphics. They really ought to be mind-blowing, but sadly Gemini Wing's visual stimulation is the equivalent of watching a mate throw up after eating half a kilo of fruit pastilles. It is of course fun to see what kind of monsters have been dreamed up for the ends of the levels this time.

The second thing is playability, and that does pass inspection, except that now and then the program loses all restraint with the number of enemy bullets. What can you do when there is simply no room left for the player in the middle of it all?

The third deciding factor is the quantity and quality of the extra weapons, which is sort of middling. The idea is to stockpile a heap of single-use super weapons. A few of them are pretty effective, such as the Flying Shark-style rotating fireballs and the wall of fire that sweeps across the screen.

Gemini Wing is a "pretty nice" game cobbled together with professional routine - or rather, it would have been five years ago.

1991 SyksyFrance's own son Infogrames has done well as a game developer/publisher, but now the old line is starting to crumble. A strategy game about Tsingiskaani is a fine idea, but the Japanese as game developers are something new for Infogrames.

After a bit of head-scratching, whole new dimensions of the game opened up. Unlike the manual: Vous ne pouvez pas en même temps attaquer etc... French is beautiful, sure, but it's no longer the world's language of diplomacy - nobody seems to have told Infogrames that. Then again, it's easier to understand than Japanese.

The 96-page French-language manual hints that there's more to the game than your average shoot'em'up, but digesting it all is more of a struggle. It can be done - I learned it too, Q.E.D. - but it takes time.

Fortunately all the menus are neatly lined up along the top of the screen, mouse-driven, and are mostly self-explanatory.

The game is by no means pure Mongolism. Of the two scenarios you can choose either uniting the Mongols or conquering the world. In the Mongol scenario you are automatically Tsingis's father (I think - my French won't get me invited to any diplomatic dinners), who strives to unite the Mongols. In world conquest you can choose from several characters, such as Tsingskis himself, Alexis III of Byzantium, Minamoto Yoritomo of Japan or Richard I of England.

The great chieftain's problems are many. While your state is confined to a single region, the biggest headache is where to find enough troops to conquer your neighbour while still leaving a big enough garrison at home. Later on the difficulties begin. Diseases and floods can easily wipe out a large part of the population and of the army stationed in the province. Good, reliable lieutenants are hard to come by. Defending the border provinces is laborious. Maintaining/recruiting an army costs a lot; luckily you can get money through trade, and new weapons too. In the midst of everything else you also have to look after your love life, since the realm mustn't be left without an heir, now must it... And worst of all, as the years pile up, the ruler's memory and wits start to fail.

The use of lieutenants is an option rarely seen in games. Their most important job is to govern a province the player assigns them, either as they see fit or following the player's orders. But that has its dangers too. A poor lieutenant is safe, but a capable one may start a rebellion. Hardly ever in any game does the player's ageing cause as many problems as in Genghis Khan. Learning and maintaining various skills is vital for the realm - but as the player ages, memory fades and what has been learned no longer stays in the head. Without war or leadership skills no wars get waged, and without persuasion no negotiations get held. A senile ruler is no longer good for anything, and you're forced to use lieutenants for military campaigns etc. Suicide, then, is the best solution.

For the most part Genghis Khan runs on one and the same screen; only when battle comes do you switch to an alternative map. A map of the province in question appears on screen, with its typical terrain and the enemy's/your own capital & home fortress. Bloody battles are fought on the map, in which even the winner usually suffers losses of over 50 %. Food supplies are an important part of the battle: when they run out, the attacker (they usually carry less food with them) has to retreat. A human player can in fact cheat the computer on defence by trotting around all over the place and waiting for the attacker's food to run out.

There's a bit of superfluous stuff in the game too. Pretty little animations that slow the game down. Oriental music you'd rather not listen to. There isn't much negative to find in the game. Genghis Khan has been made with skill and good taste into a varied and interesting strategy game. If you can find a version that includes an English manual, it's worth checking out.

1987Definitely one of the very best strategy games of all. Although the original prophecy of a massive clash in Europe in 1985 did not, luckily for all of us, come true, this game, with its battlefields set on German soil, is really interesting.

In the game each side has at its disposal two or three divisions' worth of modern, mostly mechanised troops. The units' equipment ranges from attack helicopters all the way to Stalin's organs. Plenty of different information is available on every detachment, from which you can work out during play what the unit in question is still capable of, or whether it ought to be stood down to rest altogether.

There can be two players, and a solo player can choose either side. At the start of the game you can set many factors that affect how the game unfolds, so the program suits beginners and lieutenant generals alike. Control is by keyboard only.

You can give the detachments a really wide variety of orders. The range of actions is probably the best to be found on the market. On the other hand, the characteristics of the different units vary greatly, but every unit type is nevertheless good at something.

The accompanying instructions contain everything you need, but they are far too densely packed. When every sentence contains something important, someone with poor language skills in particular will struggle to take it all in. In this game especially, knowing the rules thoroughly is important, since a really wide range of different actions is available for the different units. On top of that, different types of unit perform with different effectiveness against different types of opponent.

1987The roar of the crowd rings in my ears. I crouch down, ready, and hear the signal caller bellowing the offensive codes, trying to make himself heard over the din of the spectators. "...hike!", and the ball is in play. I charge forward, remembering the tactics we agreed in the locker room. Once I get into open space, the quarterback whips the pigskin into my fingers, right to the inch. A quick glance around, the route is clear. Almost. An opposing defender suddenly appears in front of me. I pull a body feint and the guy bites the turf. A couple of last strides and touchdown!

Gamestar's Football is downright brilliant! In short, the best American football simulation I have ever played. The graphics are not the best possible, but they do their job better than well. There is no music, but the sound effects are massive. The thud of footsteps, the noise of the crowd and digitised speech - what more could you need for the perfect football game? The instructions are easy to understand and teach you everything you need in no time. There are minuses too, of course, but they mainly have to do with the cassette version's agonising loading system. Even if you know nothing about American football, it is still worth getting acquainted with. For anyone who already knows the game this is a compulsory purchase, and the two-player option opens up whole new dimensions in having fun with the C-64.

1987The Ghostbusters game is based on the film of the same name. It's made by the American company Activision.

The idea of the game is the same as in the film: catch ghosts or the world gets destroyed! Even so, although the game follows the film in its basic idea, it turns out a great deal different.

The game begins with the bank giving the player a 10,000-dollar loan, with which you have to set up your own Ghostbusters business. The business's equipment has to be chosen carefully, as the money won't stretch to everything. The game's instructions give plenty of good tips.

The game is divided into three main parts: road-driving, ghost-catching and planning your route on the city map. Road-driving means watching the car on the screen as it drives along an empty road, which is probably the most boring part of the whole game (luckily the music plays the whole time!). If you bought a ghost vacuum when setting up the business, you can suck up any ghost that comes at you on the road.

Ghost-catching is surely one of the most dangerous moments in the game. The aim then is to catch the ghost in a ghost trap. You have to catch the ghost quickly, though, because it can get away, and the city's 'PK' rating goes up. Then again, if you rush it too much, the trap can go off without hitting the ghost, and the ghost slimes one of your men out of action. The game's main points come from exactly this stage.

Route planning covers quite a lot of things. First of all you have to pick the shortest route to the next haunted block, which you can recognise on the map by its red colour, provided you bought a ghost meter at the start of the game. You also have to remember to try and catch as many ghosts on the city's roads as possible.

The Marshmallow Man

The Marshmallow Man destroys whole city blocks in an instant. But luckily there are countermeasures.

If at the start of the game you also picked a Marshmallow Man alarm as part of your equipment, life is easy. When some block turns completely white, meaning that block is the Marshmallow Man's next victim, you must drop Marshmallow Man bait the very next time the city map comes up. It lures the Marshmallow Man, who is formed out of four ghosts, over to you, so he doesn't have time to destroy the block. A narrow rescue like that earns you 2,000 dollars. You do have to be careful, though, because every destroyed block costs 4,000 dollars, which is deducted from the player's account!

A thrilling finale

When the city's 'PK' rating reaches 10,000, the game is over. The computer then compares the player's wealth with what they started the game with. If you haven't managed to earn more, the game ends.

Those who make it through, however, get to have a go at a 5,000-dollar bonus and at saving the world. If you manage to steer two men past the dangerous Marshmallow Man to the door of ZUUL's temple, they climb up onto the temple roof, where they destroy the door to ZUUL's world and save the world at the same time. That also earns you the bonus. There are only ever three men.

A normal game lasts about half an hour. About 40% of the time goes on driving, another 40 on catching ghosts and the remaining 20 on looking at the map.

The overall impression left behind was good music, although the game itself was a slight disappointment. It is best suited to youngsters from the age of seven upwards.

And finally, a game tip: try not to let the ghosts roaming the roads get into ZUUL's temple.

1990 Kevät"Who you gonna call?" "HE-MAN!" Ghostbusters, the megahit of yesteryear, is back, both as a film and as a game. The film was a disappointment, the biggest reasons being that nothing much happens and the ending is anaemic. Vigo, who comes across like an ageing heavy rocker, is an anticlimax next to the first film's house-sized Marzipan Man, and needless rah-rah Americanism and Bill Murray, a C-grade Belushi, take care of the rest. But what about the game?

In stage one, a sprite that looks like Dan Aykroyd descends on a cable into the sewer to collect a slime sample. In the film he just bobbed peacefully downwards; in the game the poor sod also has to collect the three parts of the sampler. Hands emerging from the walls, floating and spitting ghosts, and the cable-cutting hands Mark II do their best to send him plunging to his death.

Contact with a ghost fills Ray with fear, and once it rises high enough it sends him plunging to his death. More courage can be had from bottles found along the way, which will of course annoy the temperance crowd. For offensive manoeuvring there are, besides the proton popgun, PSI grenades and shields, which can also be collected along the way. In the second stage you steer the Statue of Liberty through New York. The animated statue runs on slime. The "human masses", controlled with the space bar, collect extra slime from the ghosts the statue roasts with its torch. This section too is considerably more gripping than the film. Finally the Ghostbusters crew battles Janos and Vigo Virvi in the art museum with proton popguns and slime throwers, once again improving on the film.

The graphics in both the ST and the Amiga versions are, surprise surprise, not only identical but good across the board. The musical warblings are digitised on both, but on the Amiga the sampling carries over into the effects as well. The subgames are difficult, but not too difficult, so the end result is favourable. The C-64 looks much the same right up to the start of the game proper, at which point the whole package also drops into the lower middle class for playability. And the cassette version is best left on the shelf, unless you love a loading time of over ten minutes, which you get to sit through again every time you die. At least the box gets you a badge and a balloon.

Ghostbusters II is surprising at least in the sense that the game is considerably better than the film.

1987Corpses rise from their graves, demons flutter down from the skies, and Ghosts'n Goblins is chock-full of other outstandingly gruesome creatures besides - a coin-op that is very popular out in the big wide world, and which Elite, the company behind the Commodore, has wrangled into a version for home computers. And a fine job has been made of it, too. The game looks good, sounds good, is very playable and is fun into the bargain.

The aim of the game is to rescue a beautiful maiden from the clutches of an evil wizard. A jaunty-looking knight in his suit of armour, with a never-ending supply of lances, sets off to take care of business. He can jump, crouch and climb, and nail the soloists of the bogeyman opera, first with his lance and later with other weapons he finds. If the knight touches any of the lads on the other side, his armour disappears and the man carries on his way in red underpants. The next touch strips the flesh off his bones and it's time to change knights. As a game, G&G is actually a variation on the jump, shoot and climb games, but what sets it apart from the crowd is the excellent graphics, the fun touches (when the knight dies, he turns into a skeleton that rattles down onto the grass in a pile of bones) and the brilliant music. The backgrounds look extremely good, as do the characters, which on top of everything are beautifully animated.

The music captures the game's atmosphere well. It has different tunes for different situations. And most importantly, Ghosts'n Goblins has That Certain Something, the so-called "Well, just one more go" factor, which guarantees that your interest in the game won't fizzle out within the first few hours. All in all, an outstandingly recommendable game.

1990 KevätFor the knight the hours never crawl, since the princess is nowhere to be seen at all. Into metal the hero squeezes tight: "The forces of evil must be crushed outright!" With his lance he fattens his kill account, and using extra weapons swells the amount. But the touch of a creature most dire strips from the knight his steel attire. The second touch is the last, and so only a skeleton is left to show. Without any meat, you won't make it out to the street.

Every man in the trade will surely remember the excellent Ghosts 'n Goblins, a 16-bit version of which is also on its way from Elite. But U.S. Gold went and slipped the sequel into Santa's sack first. And indeed, Ghouls 'n Ghosts resembles its predecessor pretty closely.

Haunting the background graphics are crucified corpses and guillotines that do their work all by themselves. Genuine grim reapers rise from the ground, and so on along those familiar lines. New are the various treasure chests, which when shot give you all sorts of things, usually a transformation into a goose.

The C-64 version is an alright sort of game. The original wins on the sound side, but the end result is still playable. The worst minus comes from the knight's tendency to get stuck on the background graphics every now and then.

The Amiga version naturally has better graphics, but above all a rare phenomenon: a soundtrack that suits the game and creates the right atmosphere. The ST version refused to load, so be on your guard.

The only thing to grumble about is the game's readiness to fling the poor knight back yards at a time whenever the scythe of death grazes him; otherwise Ghouls 'n Ghosts is a really good hop & bounce variation.

1989 SyksyGilbert, who appears on British television, represents a rather different vision of the cute creature from outer space than Alf, who entertains the Americans: it's a green, thick-lipped brat that looks like a punk who has been dunked in an acid bath.

The events of the game begin when the inhabitants of planet Drill turned violet with envy on hearing of Gilbert's contract with the TV company. They decided to sabotage Gilbert's Millenium-class rubbish bin by removing a few vital parts from it, such as the toilet seat. Gilbert gets tips on where the parts are hidden on condition that he beats the high score in five popular video games.

Sadly, planet Drill seems to be suffering from a severe shortage of good programmers. The video games include a Space Invaders clone in which a green blob of slime shoots at humans, an unplayable Operation Wolf clone, a simple memory test and a couple of other primitive whatever-it-is clones. The games are usually over in no time, and you can't play the same game twice in a row, so much of the time goes on wandering around the mazes of the buildings.

The shady creepy-crawlies bustling about are best gobbed to death, which gets you a can of beans or a piece of cake. Eating beans lets you take off into the air, which is based on the fact that they speed up the production of certain natural gases. The effect can be cancelled by partaking of the latter foodstuff. Besides the town, the play area includes a sewer network (where the beans come in handy) and underwater caves, but there's nothing to do in them until you've succeeded in one of the video games.

There's no point in telling the Amiga and C-64 versions apart, since they are every bit as bad as each other, except that the Amiga Gilbert is perhaps a smidgen more playable. With licensed games, that is by no means a given.

The packaging and instructions easily give you the impression that the game is a madcap romp seasoned with riotous British humour, but in fact it's a perfectly ordinary Lazy Jones-style metagame, that is, a game about playing games. The idea has been used countless times, and usually with greater success, so Gilbert's fate is to end up in an Excelsior-class wastepaper basket.

1987The snow covers the ground, but on the computers the athletics season just keeps on going. What could possibly kill off a weed like that? Not this game, anyway, because Go For Gold is surely every bit-athlete's dreams come true. A sports blowout on a par with Summer and Winter Games for a few tenners!

Go For Gold originally came out around the time of Summer Games, under the name Hesgames. Now, years later, it is exactly as good as it was back then. There are six events: the 100 m sprint, the 110 m hurdles, long jump, diving, weightlifting and archery. Everything is done with brilliant graphics and authentic-sounding sound effects. Nice features such as replays and saving your best performances (on disk!) add to the game's appeal. Only the doping tests are missing.

I rarely have the energy to play sports games, but for some reason I ended up hammering away at GFG. The weightlifting and archery in particular took my fancy.

If you drool down your front at the sound of the word "sport", then for you Go For Gold means Go To Shop. The best budget game alongside Thrust!

1991 SyksyOh God! Yet another platform game! Oh, Good: this one turns out to be the Bitmap Brothers' take on it! This may sound like subjective hero worship, but the Bit Brothers really do know how to turn tired old cliches into tasty, fresh versions.

The game has four worlds, each made up of three levels. Getting from one level to the next requires a key, and at the end of each world lurks a big nasty end boss. In Gods you jump, shoot, pick up extra weapons and whatnot, and trade the money you find for goods in the shop. Monsters pop up out of thin air, but despite all this Gods is a truly excellent game.

Everything, you see, is spot on. The demand on your brain cells has been increased with little puzzles. Some come down to pulling levers, some to finding secret buttons, working out the best way to slaughter a monster and other problems that don't call for any terrible genius but do make the game better. On top of that the game apparently has a generous number of secret bonuses, which you even manage to find all by yourself. A brilliant idea is the game's alleged ability to adapt to the player: a butterfingers like me gets off more lightly, albeit with a lower score, than the joystick masters.

It's probably been said before that the Bitmap Brothers certainly know their way around spectacular graphics and splendid sound effects. Best of all, there's no jolly background music playing during the game to spoil the atmosphere, but those who enjoy high-quality computer music get to savour a track by Nation 12 (whatever that is) on the title screen. Most importantly, the playability belongs in the maximum category.

The whinge-and-whine department has something to moan about too: jumping only works along one ballistic arc, and you fall off ladders too easily. There would seem to be a bug in picking up items: the backpack has room for four items, but when you pick something up it lands in there automatically, after which you have to move the cursor to an empty slot or the item drops. So despite the four slots, you can only collect three items.

The Xenons are classics, so are the Speedballs and Cadaver - so how could Gods be anything else?

1990 SyksyIf a games company's name is a three-letter abbreviation, it's pretty much bound to specialise in strategy games: SSI, PSS and SSG. The new release from Australia's Strategic Studies Group tries, for a change, to woo buyers from outside the small but loyal circle of strategists.

GOA tells the tale of the conquest of the American continent that began in the Middle Ages. The forces of France, England, Spain and Portugal compete for mastery of a gigantic territory stretching from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to Canada. The scale is broad in time as well, since every move covers ten years' worth of events.

The idea is to grab as many colonies as possible in three centuries, cruelly destroying the Indian cultures of the new continent along the way. First you send out explorers to patch up the white blotches on the map. Then you can hire adventurous folk to build new realms in the virgin territories.

To build up your gold reserves you have to acquire a large merchant fleet and exploit the new colonies, whether by plundering them, developing them or bribing officials. Motivation is certainly not helped by the king's piggish greed. The tax rate seems to average a cool 120 per cent. The king's displeasure, in turn, means that the amount of free troops and equipment dwindles each time round. The only way to avoid the poverty trap is to squirrel pennies away into a secret fund.

The threshold for getting started is certainly not too high, since everything works by mouse control and there are plenty of illustrative pictures livening up the status reports. But you don't get particularly excited about the game, and what little enthusiasm there is fades after a few attempts. Operating over a continent-sized area is very crude, and the options are too limited and too rough-and-ready. Far too large a share of what happens in the game is stuff you can't influence in any way. For example, you can't count on anything when it comes to enemy and ally relations, since the whole set-up can be turned on its head as soon as the very next move.

GOA is a super-easy, quickly played strategic snack suitable for beginners. It's just that it looks a bit too much like a mediocre board game that has been robbed of the thrill of rolling the dice.

1991 KevätJudging by the manual, the game's makers have been struck down by a malignant case of statistics mania. The first couple of pages are devoted to technical background, such as that the programming took seven Macintoshes, seven STs and six Amigas, that the game has 18 megs of graphics, 7000 frames of animation, 18,000 graphics tiles, that development required more than three man-years, etc etc.

After a barrage like that you start expecting a mind-blowing experience, but all the effort doesn't particularly filter through to the end result. What we have is a thoroughly ordinary bash-'em-and-blast-'em game, in which a long-haired-junkie edition of Indiana Jones chases after the Aztecs' treasure.

A small clarification to the above: the game does blow your mind after all. With the result that the men in white coats have to drag the player away from the computer in a straitjacket, screaming for revenge on the sadistic programmers. Let the accusing finger be pointed at whoever invented the game's control system.

You see, the first day passes pleasantly in learning how to use the gun. With the fire button the hero either whips the gun out of its holster or puts it back, but of course when you need the gun, the guy sets off walking instead, and when he ought to leap out of harm's way pronto he starts jabbing about with his pistol.

The second day is then spent learning to steer the strangely lurching fellow. Heedless of the dangerous surroundings he takes relaxed, hectare-sized strides, turning takes forever, and the all-important somersault jumps he does when he remembers to, or if he happens to be in the mood.

You do learn the system, of course, especially if you spend the third day practising the keyboard controls, but enjoying the game takes a back seat when every single move has to be thought out separately.

And what do 18-megs-18,000-tiles-etc. graphics look like? Among the inhabitants of the jungle and the temple vaults there are some terribly big species, and non-scrolling backgrounds have been penned by the kilometre, but the dull, doughy cartoon style lags far behind the likes of Shadow of the Beast. The hero's movements are supposed to have 1500 frames, but the animation is still jerky.

TGOTA has challenge enough left over even for the grandchildren, who will have a cybernetic serial port to the Amiga in the back of their skulls. But if it's a more relaxed style of play you're after, take yourself off to other products.

Niko's turn to grouse: "Short and sweet. The Gold of The Aztecs closely resembles Psygnosis's Barbarian, and if the control system were mouse-and-icon driven as well, the result would surely be a spectacular and playable game. As it stands, TGOTA can only be played by a master of anticipation blessed with a fortune-teller's gifts. 70."

1989 SyksySierra's action adventures in the style of the King's Quests, Space Quests, Leisuresuit Larrys and the rest are already familiar to everyone, so nothing more about them than that Gold Rush! carries on the tradition steadily but honourably. Gold Rush! is perhaps even a little too traditional, since the graphics are not one bit more detailed than ever before, and the game doesn't seem to run briskly enough on anything but a properly clocked AT or a 386. The Amiga version in particular starts to get sticky as soon as there are three or four moving figures on screen, never mind big horse-drawn wagons.

As far as the plot goes, on the other hand, Gold Rush! has come on a good deal, since there are many alternative routes to a rich claim in the California goldfields. Time also plays an important part, for the prices of travel and equipment rose, while house prices fell, the more people rushed west. The best digging spots were also, naturally, there for the taking by whoever got there first.

The main character of the story is Brooklyn newspaperman Jerrod Wilson, who finds himself in his home town as the first rumours of gold finds in California reach the East Coast. Also tied up in the story is Jerrod's long-lost brother, who gets in touch for the first time in 11 years. And of course there's a gold nugget stuck behind the stamp... By the way, it's worth reading the postmark too before opening the envelope.

But just the journey to California is long and arduous, whether you make it by wagon or by ship. The player can in fact travel by three different routes, one of which leads to a place as grim as the jungles of Panama, and another to Cape Horn and the icy breakers of the Drake Passage. Everything nonetheless squares with the historical facts, and along the way there are even info-bites on the history of the gold-rush era slipped in.

If this is the future of computer-aided education, then bring it on. At the very least the (gentle(?))men and women of the Ministry of Education ought to be made to play this game through from start to finish a couple of times over. Sort of as a model of how things must not be handled - if the idea is to keep them in as much of a shambles as they have been so far.

Beyond that, the game can be recommended to fans of Sierra's action adventures just as much as to all western fans. Then again, if Sierra's games haven't fired you up before, there's no point hoping Gold Rush! will be the one to change your attitude.

1987Golden Path is a cross between an action adventure and a graphic adventure, set in ancient China. The main character is a young monk who makes it his life's mission to avenge his father's wretched fate and to drive out the conquerors who brought him to ruin. Along the way, a little spell has slipped him into the shape of a white-bearded old man.

The instructions that come with the program are fairly simple, but still pretty good. The plot is laid out in a novella, as has become the custom these days, and it is unfortunately in English. Although the idea of the game is quite nice in itself, as is the background to the story, the actual events of the game are pretty unimaginative.

If you like, you can pick up the written descriptions of the game's various locations from a book shown in the lower corner of the screen, and the items you are carrying appear in "pockets" along the bottom edge of the display. All of this is quite nice, but the helpless clumsiness of getting from one place to another and the lack of alternative actions take all the oomph out of the whole game.

1988The games that have been available for the Amiga have generally appealed more to brains and strategy than to a twitchy trigger finger. Goldrunner at last does justice to the graphics of the 32-bit machines.

The game has a familiar background: mankind has wrecked the Earth with its pollution. Next up is an escape to go and poison the planets of other solar systems. Before the departure can succeed, however, the space pirates' enormous ringworlds have to be destroyed, so that the pirates can't go plundering the colony ships.

The best pilot in the Solar System is picked for the job: Goldrunner, a smuggler who has been making a mockery of Earth's police and armed forces for years. Only nobody told Goldrunner that on the Amiga the joystick can't actually be used when it counts.

The program is a shoot-'em-up that is more ordinary than ordinary, with vertical scrolling, ground and air targets, and bonus levels. The graphics are dazzling, as is the Amiga's way, but small improvements here and there, mainly to add variety to what you can do in the game, would have done it a lot of good.

1990 SyksyConsole games built around hopping and shooting are usually eminently playable mass-market goods, but this Goonies number two seems to split opinion down the middle. Some like it, I don't.

The hero, Mickey, is an unusually characterless stock sprite who scours a horizontally scrolling maze looking for the other members of the gang, and on the side hands Ma Fratelli's scummy gang a thrashing. The elements are familiar: ledges and ladders, moving platforms and extra weapons, among which let us mention the yo-yo, a true stock Nintendo cliche.

As a pure action game TGII would be a smoothly flowing and otherwise passable standard product, but the adventure part has been ruined by poor design. Splitting the play area into two layers, one on top of the other, is a workable invention, but the rooms shown in 3D, which form the core of the adventure, are by contrast a dull idea. They need an ungodly number of keys, which you can only carry two at a time, and you lose even those at once if your tiny foot slips. The play area isn't all that big - in fact you can scour it from end to end in no time - but you're still left feeling that the game hasn't moved on one bit.

It's pretty tragicomic that the moment Nintendo tries to replace its formulaic ideas with new ones, it goes completely off the rails. They'd have done better to stick to the safe Mario-Castlevania lines, seeing as they can't do anything else. TGII is an effort only just better than passable, whose polished graphics and varied background music tempt you to play, but you may get fed up with it on the very first day. Better try it yourself.

1987The Goonies is a game made by imitating the film of the same name produced by Steven Spielberg.

The game follows the film's plot closely; even the little on-screen men have been made to resemble the film's real characters. Having seen the film is an advantage when it comes to solving the game, because how else would you know that the player has to tip a bowl of water onto the fire in the fireplace to get to the next screen?

The aim of the game is to find One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship, which is full of treasure. The game differs from other maze-type games in that the player has to control two characters in turn to solve it. The cassette contains eight different screens, which all have to be loaded separately. In the first screen the crooks' witch-like mother is guarding the fireplace that leads down into the cave. The unusual way of playing requires one character to forge money so that the money-grubbing crook runs off to fetch it, while the other one runs to the fireplace at the same time and climbs down it. The other little man, the one forging the money, then has to run "for his life", that is, get to the fireplace with the right timing.

Every screen has to be played the same way: one of them has to turn some crank so that the other can get past an obstacle. That's why it's hard for the remaining little man to get through if the first one is no longer there to help. It's impossible to get through a screen without using both characters creatively. In the second screen you have to raise a lift, in the third blow up a wall, and so on.

All the screens are interesting and different. The player has to dodge scalding steam, deadly bats, poisonous mud, flying skulls and finally a giant octopus, so the player doesn't get bored of repeated game ideas. The look of the two Goonies in each screen changes, and if you look closely you can make out the figure of every Goonie: Mikey, Brand, Mouth, Data, Stef, Andy and Chunk.

The graphics are good, the film's scenery has been convincingly recreated and the characters move without jerking. Besides the sound effects, the game has background music, which isn't taken from the film. The game idea is also somewhat educational, since it puts greed for money (especially counterfeit money!) in a bad light and demands cooperation between the characters.

The game isn't easy, and thanks to its unusual controls it holds your interest more than other games of the same kind. Unfortunately they haven't managed to fit the whole game into memory at once, and every screen has to be loaded separately, which is time-consuming and tries your patience. Some software houses name their games after a well-known film, and when you play them you hardly see anything in common with the film, but this game, on the contrary, has truly earned the name "The Goonies".

1988Gothik takes its player into the mystical world of Viking legend. Long ago the land of Belorn was invaded by a great army whose leader cast a spell over the land. Belorn's wizard and leader Hasrinaxx tried to resist the invasion but failed miserably. The army's leader cut the wizard's body into six pieces and hid the pieces deep in the bowels of his castle. He set demons to guard each piece. Hasrinaxx's magic cloak he took into his own safekeeping.

For a long time the land lived in the grip of fear, until one day a brave young Viking warrior passed by the castle and heard Hasrinaxx's call. The warrior could not resist that call, and so he set off into the castle to fight the dictator.

In the game the player is that brave warrior. The task is to find Hasrinaxx's body parts and cloak so that the people can live in peace again. The castle is a real labyrinth of a place, with its four towers and its dungeons. Ranged against the warrior are assorted works of the Creator: snowmen, dragons, gorillas, ants and monkeys. To beat his opponents the warrior must either cast a spell or shoot them to smithereens. The shooting implement is, of course, a bow.

On the magic side there are light bolts and fireballs to hand. The task is also made easier by various extra spells that can be found in the castle's corridors. There are 32 different extra spells in all. The warrior can, for example, disguise himself as some object and stroll calmly past the bogeymen.

Pressing space brings up a status screen showing how many spells and arrows you have, where you are in the castle and which body parts you have collected.

The implementation is strongly reminiscent of Gauntlet. The view is straight down from above. Along the bottom of the screen is the warrior's energy, which can be topped up by eating. On the title screen you can choose whether to play the hero Olaf or the heroine Olga. The bloke is the better fighter and the old girl can conjure up stronger spells.

The graphics are pretty simple. The most irritating thing about the programming is the graphical imprecision: you can't get through some narrow passages even though there'd be room on both sides for the Trojan horse.

The sound effects are the usual pops. The title music, on the other hand, sets your foot tapping at a brisk pace. One can't help asking, though: does a hi-tech sampled disco number like this really put the player in the mood for medieval magic?!? It's a fine composition all the same.

All in all, Gothik beats the C-64 version of Gauntlet hands down. Playing it is sheer joy and delight. The many kinds of spells and actions and the large map are sure to keep the player entertained for a long time!

1989 SyksyThe efforts of German software houses have come on in leaps and bounds lately. The Germanic beach landing has been ably spearheaded by Rainbow Arts, although its games have largely consisted of blatant plagiarisms. Grand Monster Slam, however, is something completely new.

The basic idea is a "sports" contest between monsters and humans. The player is pitted against one of many different opponents, the choice ranging from humanoids to the embodiments of your worst nightmares. The aim is to boot all the Beloms, which serve as the balls, from your own side over to the opponent's side. The Beloms are small, endearing furballs who really don't like being kicked, but the small and helpless can't afford to complain.

Holding down the fire button sets the strength of the kick, and wrenching the joystick in the direction of your choice lets you influence which way the poor Belom flies. Kick a Belom into your opponent's legs, body or head and you get a moment's peace to kick the furballs over to the other side.

The opponent, of course, is also aiming at the player's legs and other body parts the whole time, if you know what I mean. If you make the mistake of kicking a Belom into the stands, a duck descends on a rope from the royal box and decides the penalty, i.e. how many Beloms are moved from the other side onto the offender's half of the field.

The game also has two other sections, played during the breaks between rounds. In the Revenge of the Beloms, the player is placed in the middle of a ring made of Beloms. The player's weapon is a stick flattened at one end, with which the Beloms have to be shoved further away. A single mistake and the creatures bury the luckless warrior beneath them. In Feeding the Faulton, the Beloms get paid back in kind. Within the time limit the player has to kick as many of the critters as possible into the maws of the Faultons, waiting with their mouths gaping wide.

And now it's time for the summing-up: I think GMS is excellent. Even someone with no English can get into the game easily; the manual can go straight in the bin. The music is done with digitised instruments and, in its brilliance and clarity, has few equals. The crowd noise heard during play is digitised, but the most common failing of that trick, namely monotony, has been avoided by using enough different samples. Of the graphics one can only say that you could hardly get a better result drawing them by hand.

Grand Monster Slam is an exemplarily executed game, one minus aside. That crucial final star is knocked off by the game's difficulty. It is of course good that the game isn't so easy that you play it through in a single afternoon, but when frustration starts creeping onto the player's brow in the form of sweat, things have surely gone too far. Practice makes perfect, sure, but whether anyone can be bothered to play that long is another question. Difficulty aside, a brilliant game.

1990 SyksyTsei Tsei Jippon accelerates dashingly into the first corner and squeezes between the two leaders with a spot of Ben Hur-style wheel-banging. But what's this, a plunge into the hairpin in fifth gear, and plantain bushes are flying all the way up here to the commentary box.

Well then, dear listeners, we've got our test driver here for an interview. How would you comment on today's performance?

'Finding the motivation was hard, because this Atari Formula One game, Grand Prix, represents a very old-fashioned approach in both its concept and its execution. Creating three-dimensionality with sprite-based graphics isn't fashionable - just think of the realism of Indianapolis 500, taken to the limit.'

Quite. Pole position slipped through your fingers in qualifying. What went wrong?

'All five gears were working, and the handling had a touch of understeer, but otherwise it felt good. The biggest problem was the slowness of the graphics. Even at top speed the scenery seems to drift towards you at walking pace, so the team ought to polish up the graphics routines a bit more.'

And how would you compare GP with your previous experience of the Formula One circus?

'You won't find anything much of significance here, even compared with the classic Pitstop II. At least there are rear-view mirrors at the top of the screen, so you can see the cars coming up behind you, but that's not a new idea either. There are eight authentic circuits, such as Brands Hatch and Monaco, pit stops are included, and so is qualifying to settle the starting grid. You can race against a friend by cabling two machines together, but the lack of an ordinary two-player mode is actually a pretty poor feature.

There's nothing much to say about the middling graphics and sound; the only refreshing detail is the manly digitised speech at the start. Somehow I was left with the feeling that the top games on the market are a few laps ahead, and GP is a strong candidate to end up among the retirements.'

So today didn't go to plan, but perhaps there'll be better luck in the next trials. Signing off from here in Pasila.

1989 SyksyLadies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we are witnessing the last representatives of a vanishing species. Good driving games for the 64 haven't exactly been raining down on us lately, so luckily Grand Prix Circuit, for a change, is one worthy of praise. I was worried for a moment, as the box says in big letters that GPC was cobbled together by the gang who made the notorious Test Drive. So the first impression didn't bode well, but thank the Lord it didn't know what it was talking about.

What followed didn't seem at all promising either, since the innards of the package yielded, besides a thinnish manual, (oh dear!) a cassette. Thanks to bad experiences, the undersigned dreads 64 cassettes more than the plague. Well, that's life in a big city, so there's nothing for it but cassette into the recorder, get comfy and settle in to wait. In GPC's case the waiting added up, in the end, to as much as ten games' worth. Running one race from start to finish, pit stops included, took about 25 minutes of loading in all. Driving the 15 laps took some twenty minutes.

So the glow of a very good Formula game was dimmed a little by an awkward multiload. Forgetting that, Grand Prix Circuit is a very good game indeed. The graphics are praiseworthy and the screen update is unbelievably fast while you drive, beating even the PC for speed. The PC GPC, in fact, is pretty unplayable because of its jumpy track. The music and sound effects have been carefully polished too; at the start a rhythmic disco track plays in the background, with digitised instruments mixed in. While driving, the sound is limited to the howl of the engine, which is also among the best of its kind. You can get into the game easily without needing the manual, which is of course useful too, but not essential.

Alongside Revs +, Grand Prix Circuit is the best driving game on the 64 and the closest thing to Ferrari Formula One you can get on the C-64. That's no small thing.

1988Grand Prix Simulator consists of 12 tracks. The non-scrolling playfield holds two cars at a time (one-player game) or three (two-player game). One car is always controlled by the computer - the Drone. You have to beat the Drone car to get to carry on the fight on the next track. Steering is done either with the keys or with joysticks.

Prix's graphics are pretty monotonous. The cars are rectangles, the track is matt black and a few measly trees dangle about at the edges. Luckily the tracks do at least have bridges and tunnels.

Prix's author has created his very own laws of nature. Just try doing two hundred yourself and grazing the barrier beside you: in Prix the car stops dead, as if it had hit a brick wall. The barriers must have either glue or a magnet in them. The cars steer exactly as if you were driving on an ice track with 95% of the car's weight in the nose. So the word Simulator is completely misleading. Even so, playing it is really good fun, as long as you remember that the universe surely has other kinds of natural laws too.

Prix's sound effects are astonishing: can modern technology really produce a hiss this dreadful? The title music could have been left out as well. When the game starts, a digitised atrocity speaks: three-two-one-go. In place of the digitised data I'd have put in better graphics.

Prix leaves you itching to see one new track after another. The two-player game is uproarious niggling and brawling - which is why Prix holds your interest for a long time.

1990 KevätAmerican football with zombies, monsters and mythical creatures. That's the basic idea of Grave Yardage. The rules differ from real Am. football in that this game doesn't really have any rules to speak of. Getting the flying eyeball that serves as the ball into your own team's possession is allowed by any means whatsoever. So the players lug around aids suited to the game, such as spell ingredients, cudgels, clubs and swords.

The human fumbling about on the better side of the computer screen acts as both player and coach. There's not much variety to be found in the playing; it consists mainly of moving your character to the right place at the right time. If that part goes without a hitch, all that's left is to beat the opponent with a club or some other suitable implement.

The coach's job, on the other hand, is considerably more interesting. There are several different offensive and defensive tactics to choose from, whose names describe the aim of each tactic splendidly. E.g. Kill'Em All explains to even the dimmest coach what it's all about. The coach can also design their own tactics.

You can pick the team yourself too, but the handiest thing is to let Fate do the necessary work. The coach can tell Fate whether they want the toughest, fastest, strongest or most balanced team on the field. The menu also has a command called Auto Prayer, whereupon Fate sends out a team that will force its way through those last crucial inches towards the opponent's goal.

After all this build-up it's natural to expect an excellent game. Unfortunately a poor game has been built on top of a good idea. Although the graphics aren't completely awful (but not brilliant either), the playability is far too poor for there to be any talk of gaming pleasure. The sound is the usual PC beeping; nobody could even be bothered to cram in a few little samples. GY isn't a total failure, but with an idea this good, I would have hoped for better finishing.

1989 SyksyDo you like games where you steer a small craft, tossed about by gravity, through narrow canyons? Do the names Gravitar, Thrust and Oids make the sausage-like appendages waggling at the ends of your wrists itch? If you answered yes to both questions, Gravity Force is pure manna for you.

Germany's Kingsoft makes a living publishing hobbyist programmers' games for several computers, and apparently even gets rich doing it. Looking at the quality of the games released so far, you could easily conclude that a firm like Kingsoft should have died ages ago. Gravity Force may well be the company's first game that can be praised almost without reservation.

So the basic idea is to steer a smallish craft through tunnels of varying size. Hitting a wall is, naturally, fatal. As if navigating narrow tunnels weren't hard enough already, gravity adds its own piquant extra to the play. Inertia, for its part, makes sure that once the craft has been accelerated in some direction, that is the direction you then go. Learning to control the craft takes those unused to this style of game tens of minutes.

GF is divided into four games that are, on the face of it, different. In the first game the task is to collect crates from the mazes while avoiding crashing into the walls. The tunnels also hold gun turrets, magnetic fields and shooting blobs, all of which do their bit to make the job harder. A race against the clock is the ruling idea in the second game. There are nine different courses to choose from, and they have to be flown from start to finish as fast as possible. The two remaining games are like the earlier ones, but for two players, so that two craft are on screen at once.

The graphics are, frankly, pretty anaemic, and the Amiga's graphics capabilities are not used in the best possible way. Then again, in games of this style graphics aren't the most important thing, and neither is music. The sound side indeed consists only of the hissing of the rocket engine and the occasional sound effect, all extremely nondescript. The playability, however, has been honed just right. On top of that the game saves high scores to disk, a feature missing from far too many games. A must-buy for fans of the genre.

And what does Nirvi, a big fan of this kind of game, have to say? "Gravity Force isn't worth comparing to Oids even in jest. The combat game section, with its smallish levels, isn't varied enough to be star class, but when a bunch of people get together for races, Gravity Force makes the time fly. A game well worth buying."

1987Great Escape would go nicely in a twin pack with Dambusters, since it tells what happens after the mission failed and the plane was shot down. Prisoner-of-war camp is what follows, of course. As countless television series have proved, a British airman doesn't enjoy himself in a prison camp; he wants to go home. And that is exactly what Great Escape is all about.

The prison camp is shown in three dimensions, viewed diagonally from above. There are barracks, watchtowers, storehouses and even escape tunnels, if you look carefully. Guards and fellow prisoners wander about the yard, and even the camp commandant flits past now and then.

The camp has a set daily routine, which the prisoner takes part in automatically as long as the player can resist grabbing the joystick. Of course you can, and indeed should, slip off on your own business the moment the guards aren't looking, and see whether any useful items stick to your fingers. These not only help you escape but also raise the prisoner's morale. Getting caught earns you time in the cooler, and morale drops. When morale hits zero, the prisoner resigns himself to his lot and gives up trying to escape. The game doesn't necessarily end there. When a new Red Cross parcel arrives, morale rises a little again and escaping starts to appeal once more. Which is nice, if you'd got reasonably far before that.

Great Escape is exemplarily well made. All actions are joystick-controlled. Thanks to the player-friendly design you can concentrate on the main business itself and needn't bother about side issues. The graphics are clear (and black and white), the sound is the usual Spectrum standard, and the game is a proper adventure game and not some artificially toughened pixel torture, as so-called arcade adventures often are. Denton Designs themselves have commented that Great Escape is the best game they have made, and that's easy to put your name to.

1988Dreams seem to be popular stuff in Europe at the moment - witness what is already the second game set in a dream world. The game's plot is nothing more than a simple statement: press the fire button to start dreaming. In the dream world you simply try to make your way across it unharmed, but to get back to the real world you need a magic diamond.

In practice Giana Sisters is an out-and-out Mario Brothers clone, but a very good one. In the game you steer Maria, Giana or both (in two-player mode) along a landscape scrolling from right to left, dodging monsters and jumping from one platform to another.

The Amiga and C-64 versions are almost identical, though the Amiga's technical head start guarantees that its version wins by a nose at the finish line. The graphics are meticulously detailed and beautifully shaded, and since the sound side has been handled in exemplary fashion as well, TGGS is a gripping jumping game for all age groups.

1987Green Beret is a computer version of a Konami coin-op, the same way Yie Ar Kung-Fu is. In the game you are an American Green Beret, and your mission is to rescue a group of prisoners from enemy hands, in the style of Rambo and Commando. There's no doubt at all about who the enemy is: red flags swarm across the screen in abundance.

In the game you have to fight your way through three different stages to rescue the prisoners. At the start your weapon is a knife, but as extra armament you can get a flamethrower, a bazooka or grenades by bumping off the white soldier who turns up every now and then. There are all sorts of opponents: unarmed ones, riflemen, karate experts, bazooka and paratroop squads, etc. If you hang about in one place too long collecting points, the enemy sends a bomber after you. You can clamber about on different tiers, on top of steel girders, missile trucks, warehouses and so on. You can also jump, or throw yourself to the ground when the enemy shoots at you. The special weapon is fired with Space, which somewhat weakens your firm grip on the joystick; not even suction cups last long when the going gets rough. . .

The graphics in the game are stylish and scroll well, although after the game has been running for a long time, little glitches start cropping up for some reason, but not to the point of being a nuisance. A slightly monotonous drumbeat plays in the background the whole time, and the sound effects aren't anything special either, but the opening and closing fanfares and the music that plays when you change level are well made. Compared with Rambo, for example, the game is realistic, because, for instance, there's only a limited amount of bazooka ammo, and the hero can't take several hits. The game is fairly demanding - you won't play it through in a single evening like certain other games on the same theme - so I warmly recommend Green Beret to everyone who likes action.

1988The red turns to green and my lightning-fast formula car hurtles away. I'm lurking right on the heels of the leading pack. The acceleration feels brutal and the first bend jolts me into action for real. A light touch on the brakes and accelerate again. The straight opens up and I whip the very last ounce of power out of my car with the 'boost' function, just like Knight Rider himself...

Anco's Grid Start gets the petrol in speed freaks' veins racing again. A game offering wild speed and nice graphics has pretty much always been near the top of the sales charts.

As an implementation, Grid Start is not the best of its breed. Overtaking calls for nerve-racking aiming, since even the slightest bump into the car you're passing or into the hay bales along the edges is fatal. It doesn't feel all that realistic for a car to explode into tiny fragments in the blink of an eye when it hits a hay bale.

The scenery and the cars are fairly pretty, although the cars move too jerkily. The Amiga's mighty musical resources don't get to come into their own in Grid Start, since there's music only on the title screen, and even there just a short digitised snippet. The sound effects are passable, but imagine how it would feel to drive with digitised sound effects roaring out of the speakers.

Grid Start is no masterpiece, but it's not from the very bottom of the barrel either. A good alternative to the glut of shoot-'em-ups, since those are already bursting out of every corner.

1989 KevätBeyond the open sea, somewhere far away, lies a land where a dreadful tyrant holds sway. He torments the poor people and bosses them around, and bustles about only where evil is found. But one day through the people the word flies fast: "Two heroes have arrived to save us at last!" Soon the oppressors lie piled in a crooked stack, but hooray! Haste's reward is that you don't come back. The heroes charge in splendidly, just so, and soon, face bloodied, down goes the foe. When each of them picks up a bazooka to wield, Death shouts bingo all over the field. With the people's support you can go ahead and fill the tyrant up with beans of lead.

Guerrilla Wars picks up where Ikari Warriors left off. Finding extra weapons is a nice bonus, of course, as is the men's ability to turn and fire to the sides as well. Guerrilla War has quite enough of its own that it doesn't feel like just a warmed-over Ikari. A couple of things do rankle a little, though.

First, the graphics are unbelievably bad. You could make more detailed graphics out of Lego bricks. The bullets fly slowly and jerkily, and the scrolling hasn't the nerve not to do the same. There's as much playability as there are atheists in the Vatican, but at least the music isn't half bad.

Imagine's reputation is badly blackened by this Guerrilla Wars-64, a contender for the award for the worst conversion of the year. Even if the managing director's grandson does know the basics of machine code, the result shouldn't be offered at full price. That's a cheap trick.

1990 KevätGumshoe belongs to the small band of light gun games that depart from the basic formula. In it, for a change, the pistol is used to steer the player character.

Through a landscape that scrolls forward of its own accord toddles a gangster-looking little bloke, whom you can make jump around the screen to your heart's content by shooting him in the backside. Flitting about in this fashion, it's a cosy way to deliver the ransom money to the kidnappers and pick up red balloons on the side, which are supposed to pass for ammunition. The shooting implement also has plenty to do eliminating incoming whisky bottles and other lethal objects.

The four longish levels have been crammed with bouncing about on rooftops, splashing about in the sea and everything in between. There's certainly no shortage of difficulty, since you often have to keep the hero bouncing over thin air while picking off incoming objects at the same time.

Fortunately the game can be matched to a normal human's brain capacity by means of a continuously variable difficulty setting, i.e. by holding the barrel an inch from the screen. The game itself has a rather peculiar concession: if the player botches it at a certain key point, half the level gets left out. The third and most decisive concession is the option to continue the game, thanks to which you get to make the acquaintance of the bogeyman waiting at the end fairly painlessly.

Strangely enough, the game keeps sucking you in even after the final scuffle, so the idiosyncratic control method has an exceptional amount of charm.

1987Have you ever considered becoming a policeman? If you have, then Gunfright is exactly the game for you. In it you have to know how to steer clear of decent folk and bump off wanted villains, who fetch special rewards depending on how dangerous the job is. If you happen to shoot an innocent person, you have to cough up whatever fine is in force at the time. You mustn't bump into anything except the walls of the houses and your horse, which loyally always waits in exactly the right spot. - Yes, you even have to pay for using the horse, as well as for the bullets for your six-shooter.

If you catch up with a wanted villain, you end up in a duel with him. Then it's best to act fast, because once he has drawn, the villain shoots you as full of holes as a sieve. While you're hunting villains, the good townsfolk are a help: the men point, trembling with fear, in the villain's direction. If you happen to run out of money, the residents "forget" moneybags in your path. The women, meanwhile, just keep trying to walk right into the sheriff, which can make the game immeasurably harder.

As far as the graphics go, Gunfright is done in a way that was new to me. As the sheriff walks along the street, walls that would otherwise be in the way "open up", revealing what is inside the house. So the graphics are quite stylish, as is the jingle of the spurs as the sheriff strides the streets. On the other hand, the game has some funny, downright parodic touches, such as the sheriff's hobby horse, and if the sheriff shoots innocent people, all that's left of him is his hat, etc. The black-and-white graphics tell us that life, after all, isn't as black and white as it is in the game. The almost adventure-style Gunfright is a good game, although a joystick is a handy extra.

1991 SyksyAs the things left to simulate slowly start running out, MicroProse has taken to remaking its old hit games. F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service and F-117 have already been dealt with. Now it's the turn of Gunship and that flying arsenal, the Apache AH-64.

Anyone who has played Gunship will surely feel right at home in this new variation. The idea of the thing is simply to enlist as a helicopter pilot, show what you can do on the training ground and move on to flying combat missions around the world. Carrying missions through successfully brings promotions, which in turn heap more responsibility onto the player's shoulders. The first missions are flown solo, but later on the player is made commander of an entire helicopter flight, which gives the game a whole new tactical depth. The five-chopper squadron can even be split in two, and you can authorise a computer-controlled pilot to lead the smaller squadron.

In GS 2000 you can fly several different helicopters. There are three different Gunships: the Apache AH-64, the Longbow Apache and the Apache's lighter version, the Super Cobra. For crew rescue missions there's the Blackhawk, and for reconnaissance missions the Kiova and the Defender. You only get to fly the Longbow Apache once you make captain, and the same goes for the experimental Comanche. The Comanche has already appeared in Electronic Arts' helicopter simulation under the name LHX (Light Helicopter eXperimental). The Comanche comes in two different variants too: one is light and extremely fast (for reconnaissance missions), and the other is a Gunship version fitted with heavy armament.

MicroProse's 3-D world flows along nicely even on a 286-class PC, especially if you switch off the hazy horizon, the trees, the cows and the other little things the simulation can do without. On a fast PC the graphical detail creates the most complete artificial universe yet built inside a computer. Sadists can amuse themselves by blasting a cow into a thousand pieces with the cannon. I myself got great enjoyment out of ambushing a truck convoy in an extremely narrow pass, where there wasn't the slightest room for a wrong move. A lot of time has gone into the terrain, and it shows. The ground rolls realistically, and beginners will squander their first hour of play smashing millions of dollars' worth of helicopters into hillocks and trees.

A real Apache has two people inside. The pilot keeps the chopper in the air, while the one sitting in the back handles the weapons systems and countermeasures (chaff/flare etc.). In GS 2000 the player can hand the back-seater's duties over to the computer, or alternatively take care of everything themselves. I wouldn't recommend the latter option, though, until your flying hours start running into double figures.

There are two flight models: in the easy model, flying the chopper is almost child's play, since the computer does its bit to make sure the chopper stays at the set height above the ground at all times. The realistic model is of course the one you ought to fly from the very start, but I have to admit that I, at least, will never make a real helicopter pilot; that's how many smoking chopper wrecks I left scattered across the landscape flying the realistic model.

The screens between missions contain a surprising amount of truly high-quality animation. Joystick and keyboard control work splendidly, but you can't do anything at all with the mouse, which left me slightly disappointed. In true MicroProse style the manual is once again a terrific information pack, and there are a staggering number of key commands. The test version had an annoying bug: after assigning the next destination on the map screen, I handed the controls to the autopilot and switched on accelerated time. Flying in normal time, the autopilot clears the mountains in its path with style, but lo and behold, in accelerated time the autopilot draped the chopper over the first mountainside like an ornament. MicroProse is aware of the bug and has probably already fixed it in the versions on sale. (My test copy's version number is 469.02.)

All in all, Gunship 2000 is easily the best of the helicopter simulations currently on sale. Missions that keep getting harder, growing responsibility and the different helicopters offer heaps of play, and your interest won't run dry halfway through. A must-buy.

1989 KevätMartech, which has been lying low for a long time, remembers us with a new game. Judging by the cover, the newcomer appears to be set, in reality, in a more or less Wild West. The instructions on the inside cover don't seem to take the game all that seriously; among other things they contain the remark "you have three lives, realistic isn't it?" and other remotely amusing stuff.

The person who has loaded the game is given the task of cleaning the town of dirty villains, but to prove their skill they must first knock tin cans off the noses of cacti, within the confines of a time limit. So what makes the people handing out the job believe that a guy who, with firepower close to that of a submachine gun, manages to put a hole in a few cans, is capable of snuffing out hard-bitten robbers? But then again, what does it matter.

First off, the graphics are passable. The heap of pixels bobbing about in the foreground is the so-called good guy of the story, i.e. the one that I, Petri Teittinen, steer around. To Martech's credit it has to be said that the fellow is well animated and reacts in amusing ways if you leave him to ponder things on his own for a longer spell.

Closer to the middle of the screen whirls a circular sight, which the player uses to aim the weapon. The sight is rather hard to use, since its inability to stay put, added to the delay between pressing the button and the guns going off, makes hitting the target more a matter of luck than of skill. Knocking over the cans still goes all right, with the six-shooters firing 10 shots in five seconds, but when the dude comes up against the story's so-called bad guys, the fate of the "hero" is to emulate an easy target.

Because of all this or regardless of it, whichever you like, Gunshoot is harmless, if difficult, fun for the slightly younger members of the family.

1988Something has settled into orbit around the Earth. This something is the size of a small moon and is in fact a creature weighing ten million tonnes. And a hungry one at that. We all know what that means.

Naturally a brave hero tried to make contact, and he succeeded, too - in much the same way as a hamburger makes contact with a hungry teenager. The only way out of the monster's belly is to fight your way through its entire intestinal tract and destroy its vital organs. Which exit, I wonder, does our man finally pop out of?

Not a bad framing story at all, so it's a pity the game doesn't manage to make a scrap of use of it. The game consists of running around a maze and collecting various objects. The objects are needed for, among other things, eliminating each level's guardian organ. Thank the Lord, one of the collectable objects is a map. Without it you'd have had your fill of Gutz very quickly. On top of running around the maze you are, of course, constantly shooting at the parasites lurking in the creature's innards.

Special FX, who debuted with Firefly, have done a neat enough job in itself, since both the graphics and their animation come off well, even if the backgrounds don't necessarily bring intestines to mind. The sound side is perfectly bearable too.

Gutz could have been a game where the entrails really fly, but as it stands the end result is a middling shoot-'em-up.

1987The idea of the game is the same as in the coin-op Marble Madness. You steer a spinning top (a gyroscope) along various levels and routes, trying to get it all the way to the end of each course.

Once you've collected your bonus points you get to carry on to the next level, which is nearly always a little harder than the one you just finished. There are several dozen different levels, so there's certainly enough to keep you trying for a good while.

The gyroscope is best steered with a joystick (keyboard control is possible too), and after a little practice it's reasonably easy. The top's wobbling motion does make steering a matter of precision, though, and in quite a few places the track is so narrow that there's no room for big swings. Extra trouble comes from critters barging into your path, magnets and slippery patches, which send the top into a handsome somersault and over it goes!

The three-dimensional graphics are clear and well made. On some levels the top's colour could stand out better from the background. A stylish snippet of music plays in the background.

Gyroscope is a quality choice in its class, and offers just the right amount of challenge for a long time.