1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1987Hacker is the name of Activision's new game. The idea of the game is to get out of a computer system you ended up in by accident when you dialled a wrong number.

The game starts with the text: LOGON PLEASE:

When you try to type some text in here, the system reports an error and advises the user to press H for help. Once you've pressed the H key, the system tells you the password has been changed and announces the new one (!). Then the text DISCONNECT IN: comes up on the screen and the numbers start whizzing down from five. At three the machine stops and reports that an error has occurred in its security.

Then the welcome texts come up on the screen, and at the press of a key the system puts a picture of a robot on the screen and asks you to aim the laser at the right spots. After this a map of the world appears. There you can move from place to place. After a while satellites appear on the map, circling the globe. If these satellites catch you, you get the first level of security check. If you don't answer the question correctly, a message comes up on the screen saying the connection has been cut, and GAME OVER.

The game is up to Activision's usual standard, i.e. a nice pastime for kids. Games of this sort just can't hold the interest of older players who are used to more sophisticated games.

The game has many inaccuracies compared with normal hacking: when you connect to somewhere with a modem, no fancy graphics and joystick-controlled dots come up on the screen. Of course the game has had to be livened up a bit to guarantee sales (?). If you get somewhere in a real situation, no message comes up on the screen saying: Congratulations. You have completed the game.

The game comes with no instructions at all apart from the loading instructions; after that, it's all up to the player to figure out... In any case, the game is no good for anyone who doesn't know English.

1987Your character is a little turban-hatted man. He is looking for coins so he can get out of the realm of Hades. Standing in his way and making his life a misery are, among other things, vanishing tiles, escalators, electric traps, pools of acid and locked doors.

Opening the doors takes a key, and you can only carry one of those at a time.

The game starts from a flashing starting point. There are several of these points around the playing area, and after you die the game carries on from the one you last stepped on.

Hades is a good alternative to the killing games, and you don't get bored of it easily. A decent difficulty level keeps your interest up for longer, too. The graphics are the usual solid fare; there isn't much to say about the sound.

1990 Kevät"Vroom vroom", remarks the engine of my fine car as it wakes to a new day. The road starts to flow beneath the rubber paws. But perhaps I set off too early, for the oncoming truck is gliding gracefully above the road. Taken by surprise, I forget about my car's stiff steering and move on to driving on the grass.

Domark's Hard Drivin' is a game it has been hard to avoid hearing about. Hard Drivin' poses as a "genuine" car simulator, right down to the gears and clutch. You either put your foot down along the strip or swing onto the stunt track, where among other things you jump over bridges and do a loop.

The 3D graphics flow smoothly enough, and the roadside buildings are commendably detailed. There's even a cow beside the barn, and crashing into it is rewarded with sampled mooing. Showing the crash as an Instant Replay is a good invention.

And then the mood starts to darken. Playing with the joystick sends the temper curve spontaneously soaring, and although driving with the mouse is leagues simpler, it doesn't stretch to anything like top-class playability. If driving a real car were this stiff, the verges would be full of corpses. The circuit driving and the stunt track are soon played out too, but the data disks due out in future should help with that.

The longest-lasting fun is found in so-called "bughunting", and Kova Ajelu offers a nice supply of bugs. Floating cars, surprise bonus time and even the car turning into an aeroplane of course won't save a limited game. Stunt Car Racer delivers the same action considerably better.

1991 SyksyWith a gang of terrorists having seized the airport, the lone hero must...sorry, that was some other story. What we have here is the sequel to a three-dimensional driving simulation that reaped fame as a coin-op and rather less of it as a home computer version. The predecessor's dreams of gushing reviews were crushed by various strange phenomena, not the least of them hilarious bugs and erratic steering.

Drive Harder would be better off named Hard Drivin' Extra Plus, since it takes after its predecessor right down to the looks and the technical problems. The content has at least been multiplied, by giving the good old familiar rally course a few new ones for company. On top of that there's even a track editor, with which you can twist the tarmac into as many knots as you please. The tracks follow the familiar formula: part of each is a speed stretch and the rest a stunt section embroidered with loops and jumps.

The fixing of the notorious bugs seems fairly superficial. Cars no longer show through buildings, but on the other hand they still keep vanishing in hilly terrain. A more important target for fine-tuning is the steering, which has been made more precise. The result really is a better feel, but the side effect is a steering wheel that turns more slowly and not as far. Steering is painfully clumsy using a joystick on the Amiga or the keyboard on the PC. Mouse control works best, but the limited steering lock makes getting through the loops too difficult. On the Amiga at least, you have to enter the loop with your wheels brushing the verge, and even then you rejoin the road by way of the undergrowth, even with the wheel held at full lock. On the PC an analogue stick might work best, if only you could use one.

HD2 is enough of an improvement on its predecessor to earn a B-minus. Even so, it still falls a long way short of the best driving games. The game mechanics are disturbingly sloppy. The hills are built out of three flat surfaces, and the position of the steering wheel is shown by a bar a couple of pixels high. The slapdash impression is underlined further by the lack of sound card support and by the fact that the game refuses to run from a hard disk. (You can get it working - NN)

It might be worth popping into your nearest shop for a test drive, but only if you're a "die hard fan" of driving games, as the English language so aptly puts it.

1991 KevätTake one spaceship, put in it a crew made up of different races with different skills, fight in space and on planet surfaces, smuggle this and that, save a few star systems on the side - surely this isn't starting to sound familiar??? Behind it once again is EOA, whose product lists also include both Sentinel Worlds and Star Flight plus its sequel.

So this is once again a space role-playing game, whose only real novelty is flying around planet surfaces in a craft that runs out of fuel in no time at all. Luckily a quick pop up into orbit fills the ship's tanks... Even the graphics judder in the customary manner, or else the machine underneath is too fast and the game proceeds at a lethal pace. If the game feels vaguely familiar, that's because it's the work of the Sentinel Worlds team.

Of course Hard Nova also has details worthy of praise. For example it gives you the chance to practise in a television arena against flimsy opponents, and the prize money can be used to equip your crew and ship. The ship also has a database that can tell you things that aren't in the game's accompanying material either. What's more, you can choose as your main character either a man who uses his fists or a femme fatale who makes use of her brains and her accurate gun hand, and after whom the whole game is named. At long last the womenfolk have been taken into account as something other than decorations on game covers.

So Hard Nova isn't bad, but it isn't any sort of revolutionary game either, though its mysteries are ones that fans of space role-playing games will probably have the stamina to solve with enthusiasm. Everyone else's patience may run out even before the first battle, though they'll be missing out on a lot.

If you're only now thinking of getting your first space role-playing game (booooooo...), it's still worth starting with Sentinel Worlds if at all possible. In my opinion it's still the best and most challenging game in the genre, and it even has a pinch of humour. Hard Nova is roughly in the same class as Star Flight, though far superior in its graphics.

1988Hat Trick must be the most interesting way there is to play ice hockey. Who would have believed that such an old, squeezed-dry subject could produce such a terrific game. Simple ideas are often the best.

Hat Trick's playing area consists of just a single screen, on which two players and two goalies knock the ball about (skate). The playing area doesn't even scroll, yet this still thrashes every other ice hockey game. Once you've started you can't tear yourself away for weeks. Almost every day I get visitors who come round to play 'that hockey thing', even though they don't even own a computer.

The game sucks you into its depths the way a kid brother sucks up floppy disks. Two players at the computer grunt and groan, wrenching the joysticks as if their lives depended on it. On screen two little players scurry about, feinting each other, stealing the puck and charging at the opponent's goal. A twirl in front of the goal, a dummy, and a shot. Goal!

Everything is very simple. But it works. The sparse sounds (not even the crowd roaring), the players, controlling them, everything works. An unbelievably gripping and frantic game. Almost like three-odd years ago, when I was playing Pitstop II. That was the last time my hands ached from playing.

1989 KevätThalamus is one of those few companies whose releases stay consistently high in quality. Hawkeye, from the Dutch programming group Boys Without Brains, does nothing to dim that picture.

The star is a synthetic life form (SLF), Hawkeye (there's already one Alien Life Form too many as it is). As usual, Hawkeye has to save the world, this time by collecting four jigsaw pieces from every level. Hawkeye runs, Hawkeye jumps, Hawkeye shoots, and shooting is no chore when, on top of a crummy rifle, the basic kit includes a machine gun and a laser rifle, with even a bazooka to keep them company. Just as well, since the bigger monsters can't even be bothered to be amused by the lighter armament.

Although Hawkeye is about as original as the average municipal election slogan, it is saved by the effort that has gone into making it. The talking-head intro at the start of the game alone has surely had more time frittered away on it than many a standard game gets in total.

Hawkeye is an exhibition of graphical special effects. The parallax scrolling is really superbly done, and every sprite is not only masterfully defined but also excellently animated. Hawkeye obeys the joystick's commands quickly and without hesitation, which makes the game a pleasure to play. Another plus is Hawkkis's reluctance to die the moment you brush against a minor enemy. And if the big sleep does come, the SLF neither loses the bonuses collected so far nor even gets flung back to the start of the level. That's the way it should be.

There was, however, one very nasty thing about Haukansilmä. The SLF got stuck in place quite often and refused to budge so much as another millimetre. Evidently it has something against ancient C-64s. The bug is so common in the game that the newest C-64s CAN'T have the same problem.

Hawkeye represents the very top of its genre. It brings nothing new to the computer game universe, but at least it serves as an example of fine programming.

1991 SyksyOn the front of the box stands, ramrod straight, an Indiana-style young man decked out in an aviator's leather cap. Behind him stretches the open sea with its Chinese junks. When the box says Dynamix and Heart of China on top of that, it would take a lot less to set your hands trembling.

After an exhausting installation, the Roland blasts out a majestic opening fanfare full of oriental sounds. The intro explodes across the screen, filling it with digitised pictures. The controls perform to the usual Dynamix standard without your laying a finger on the keyboard. The backgrounds change on screen quickly enough, and stylistically the game does resemble Rise of Dragon, only with pictures digitised from photographs.

This time, in 1920s China, you control a charter pilot by the name of Jake "Lucky" Masters, who is handed a daredevil assignment by the businessman Lomax. The job would be to free Lomax's daughter, who was kidnapped from a monastery. You get started by listening to the rumours going round among the men in the street. Tagging along is the master ninja Zhao Chi, who, having grown bored with Hong Kong nightlife, is hankering after some more down-to-earth brawling.

Lucky talks with various sources of information, gets from place to place by rickshaw, admires the scenery and every now and then stops for some action. The screen is saturated with spectacular 256-colour pictures, and events move on to Istanbul and finally, aboard the Orient Express, to Paris. They've managed to wring plenty of power out of the Roland, but the Ad-Lib is perfectly bearable to listen to as well. The 16-colour version, though, can stay in the shop waiting for owners of basic machines.

So why isn't HOC a classic? The display is fine, the sounds are a success, the windowing and the mousing work. The game is like a film that you can follow, stepping in to influence events whenever you see fit. And yet something really important is missing, namely a decent Plot, which Rise of Dragon still had. Missing is that richness of action which turns a classic into a Classic. There's all too much text, at times to the point of numbness. Especially as you play towards the end, the makers' interest in graphical expression has run dry.

We ask Dynamix to put this right before the CDTV version is released, at the latest.

1991 KevätThe lifeblood of the three Triphyllos of Nem, which sustain life and racial memory, has been contaminated, and Tantris is doomed. But the wise race of the Gnostics built the Foot and the Heatseeker, which can gather energy from the mist flames of Zeal. The stored heat must then be handed over to the mythical plants on Midsummer Night.

This is a fine example of the kind of plot that should never be put into games. Sure, it's original, but you can't make head or tail of that sort of delirious raving. After I had spelled my way through the instructions a dozen times and played a couple of rounds in between, the idea did finally start to take shape, and it isn't all that complicated after all. What you steer is a comically bouncing boot that dangles a ball on top of itself.

The aim is to search the plant-filled level for the flames of Zeal, near which you spit the ball out into motion and try to bounce it onto the flame, where it soaks up the heat. Once you've worked at this routine for a while, you pop off now and then to revive the Triphyllos.

The backdrop to this strange carry-on is a suitably fairytale plant kingdom, among which the boot bounces and climbs, kicking aside any animal fauna that happens into its path. The emphasis is clearly on stick-waggling skills, with violence taking a back seat. The control system isn't one of the easiest, as the footwear bounces around in a rather unruly way. Keeping the ball under control once it's been let loose is even trickier.

The garishly colourful backdrop has a surreal atmosphere, though the Spectrum-like clunkiness is a bit off-putting. For scrolling the brick-lined maze they've settled for jerking new scenery into view a screen at a time, which certainly doesn't make playing any easier.

In today's era of safe ideas, completely original action adventures seem to be on the brink of extinction, since they only appeal to a select few. Heatseeker, too, will probably trip over the fact that it's just a bit too weird.

1990 SyksyThe makers of the classic Beach Head games decided to go one better on their old format. Gone is the level-based game system and the pointless background plots. Gone is the evil dictator and the sampled roars. All that's left is a big pile of heavy military hardware, and when you add to this stew a tactical element linking the various sub-games together, plus a constant climb up the army's ranks, the result is Heavy Metal.

Heavy Metal puts no fewer than three different kinds of destruction machinery at the player's disposal. You get to shoot with the M1A1 Abrams familiar from tank sims, the not-so-familiar ADAT (Air Defence Anti-Tank System) and a nippy attack vehicle, the FAV. Each one has been made into its own little 'game', and all they have in common is plenty of shooting. Driving the Abrams even manages to include a genuine simulator feel, with fast 3-D polygon graphics. Shooting with the ADAT is done sitting behind the sights and rattling away with a machine gun, and with the FAV you get to both shoot and drive.

First you have to prove your skill on each of these machines before you get to the real thing, that is, tactical warfare, where the player is given a small army and a headquarters to defend. You can hand out simple movement orders to your troops, and if you like you can handle the battles yourself in action mode. After a longish battle the player is awarded points that affect career progress, and the general gives a verbal assessment of the player's conduct. And then it's straight off to a new battle to gain more experience.

The reasons why Heavy Metal, despite all the fast-paced shooting and strategising, slowly starts to get tiresome are probably mainly the narrow range of missions (1 mission!) and the simple fact that it's impossible to die in the game even if you lose. Reaching the rank of Five Star General is the only fixed point in the whole game, and thanks to your immortality even that is just a matter of time.

The graphics do the job just as the sound does, even though both come across as a little old-fashioned, and the multiload will almost certainly kill off any interest in the cassette versions.

What puzzles me most of all is the game's copyright date of 1988. It makes you wonder what on earth has been going on during these two years. A perfectly decent game for a while, but nothing revolutionary.

1989 KevätIt is the rule rather than the exception that when a big-league coin-op conversion is announced as coming onto the market, the clones get there first. Examples worth a mention include Druid/Gauntlet, P.O.W./Operation Wolf, Rambo/Commando and now Hellfire, which aims to leech off Afterburner and Thunderblade alike.

In Hellfire Attack you fly a helicopter towards the horizon and shoot everything that comes at you, which will hardly be a surprise to anyone. The chopper has continuously firing cannons for nearby enemies, plus 40 Hellfire missiles as a bonus. The missiles first have to be locked onto a target by moving the sight over it. That's all there is to it.

The C-64 version is ruined rather effectively by a few things. First of all, the enemy aircraft often seem to rise straight out of the forest, and they get lost effectively in the terrain. Even more of a nuisance is the near-total camouflage of the enemy missiles against the background graphics.

Nor does the ST-Amiga version do any better. The chopper moves so slowly you feel like getting out and pushing, and the graphics aren't impressive enough to save the game. A game like this demands fury, not careful tiptoeing about.

Yours truly is dropping Hellfire Attack precisely where its name suggests. And so, no doubt, will plenty of others.

1988Hercules, son of Zeus, is in a tight spot. He has to complete 12 tasks to be forgiven his little sin (he killed his children). Twelve of the most fiendishly difficult tasks, while fighting off other creatures at the same time.

There'd have been the makings of a good game in this subject, but alas: Gremlin had to go and ruin it. Instead of putting together a proper adventure in ancient Greece, the result is a miserable bash-'em-up stew.

Strictly speaking, what we have here is Samurai Trilogy, Ancient Greece Version. Lots of the same moves, just a knobbly club instead of a sword, and otherwise much the same implementation. Everything takes place on one single screen, where Hercules bashes skeletons. The twelve tasks have been ingeniously turned into icons which pop up on the screen every now and then and have to be clobbered with the club. When all twelve icons have been collected the game loads the second part and you get to fight a proper devil.

Stupid. Blah! The passable music is the second-best thing, and the best thing in the whole heap of rubbish is the backgrounds. Otherwise utter rubbish. This wouldn't hold the interest of even a snail.

1991 SyksyThe board game Heroquest has been quite a hit around the world, and apparently in Finland too, judging by the wobbly stacks of Heroquest in all sorts of shops around Christmas time. And no wonder: the cool-looking orc figures and whatnot surely set many a shopper's fingers itching.

Gremlin has done the computer version in a rather interesting way: instead of some fantasy-themed cliché game getting a Heroquest stamp slapped on its backside, Gremlin has emulated the board game directly.

One to four characters can take part in the game, played by one to four players. The characters available are standard stuff, namely a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf and a wizard. The wizard is presumably the character that's left over when one of the four players turns up late.

Playing is really simple. The players take turns moving their character(s) with the mouse/joystick as far as the dice allow, and before/after moving they can attack, search the room, look for treasure, open a door or cast a spell. Items you own, such as a weapon, armour, a magic potion or the like, can be used at any time. You can check your position on the level from the map.

In combat the player's part is limited to choosing a target. If the target rolls fewer shields than the attacker rolls skulls, either the monster dies or the player takes damage. Between adventures the player can pop into the shop and improve their odds of staying alive with weapons and armour. And with good reason, since the toughest hero, the barbarian, boasts a whole 8 hit points.

Incidentally, a hero doesn't heal automatically between adventures; instead, the "refresh option" mentioned in the instructions resets the character. You can, however, save your own heroes.

Technically Heroquest is nicely and slickly done in every respect, which means it's nice to look at, listen to and play. It's at its most fun as a multiplayer game, of course, when the scramble for the reward breeds treachery and double-dealing.

A couple of things knock off points. Heroquest was presumably designed as a really simple role-playing game, and that naturally carries over into the computer version too. The micro version's very own weakness is the modest 14 quests that make up its story (Gremlin has quest disks coming out soon), playable in any order you choose, and although getting through all of them with the same character is a challenge, otherwise you can finish them in an evening or two. The selection of monsters isn't exactly comprehensive either.

Even if the quest had stayed the same, the level could have been laid out at random, or could at least have scattered the treasure at random. What's more, the levels are small, just as in the board game. The conversion didn't have to be done quite this slavishly.

But there's more pointless stuff than this on sale. Apart from needing a slight understanding of English, your 10+ gamers at least will get fun and joy out of it even as a single-player game, and as a party game Heroquest takes on a whole new sparkle.

1988Star Wars has long been a popular topic of conversation, so it's no wonder a game was made of it. Breaking with the popular custom, High Frontiers is not some old shoot-'em-up artificially bolted onto the SDI concept, but a strategy game in which you get to splurge the appropriations yourself and fill the sky with techno-toys.

After choosing a president type, the player has to decide which SDI subsystems to start developing and how to divide up the available money and workers. Different parts of the system are better suited to some tasks than others, so for example the rail gun brings down missiles admirably but is not effective at intercepting warheads. Some money also has to be sunk into building ordinary missiles, so that things don't turn out so unpleasantly that, with the USA in flames, not a single "return the favour" package has set off for the Soviet Union.

Once the scientists have developed the weapons, you have to start moving them into orbit. Every now and then the president asks how much coverage the shield provides. Quote a suitable percentage and more money may trickle your way. Of course, time also goes on spying on the other side.

And then, inevitably, one day It happens. The spy satellites register missile launches and the destination is the U.S. of A. With good luck the sky is covered by a comprehensive defence net, with bad luck by a few measly satellites. At this point the player can admire the SDI network at work, or grab the joystick and square up to the missiles personally. It's not a terribly satisfying shoot-'em-up though, so it's worth giving a miss. After the match you are told the extent of the nuclear destruction in each country and the player's policies are assessed.

High Frontiers is an interesting game hampered by mediocre graphics. Using the icon system with a joystick in the middle of a battle is also a tad impractical, and the icons aren't always very clear. A good command of English is essential.

High Frontiers will never be a hit, but it is in any case an interesting game on an interesting subject.

1987You are the sheriff of a perfectly peaceful little town. At least everything looks peaceful as the sheriff walks out of the jail to the middle of the screen. But then comes the twist: every so often villains appear from the edges of the screen, trying to rob sacks of money from the bank or damsels from Saucy Sue's saloon. As the town sheriff, your job is to shoot the nasty villains, who are shooting at you too. Once you've shot enough villains, there's a duel with the villain boss. Once you've settled your score with the villain boss, you move on to the next screen. There are five different screens in the game. Every time you've shot a villain or a villain has shot you, the undertaker comes toddling in from the top right-hand corner of the screen and carries the body off to his office. Carefree Western music plays throughout the game.

In terms of execution the game is a little better than average. The colours and sounds suit the atmosphere well.

1990 SyksyYou can predict the latest crazes by following events on the coin-op front. A couple of top-class arcade hits can be recognised as the sources of inspiration for Highway Patrol 2: Chase H.Q. and Hard Drivin'.

The game is about a three-dimensional hunt for crooks, and it has been done in an interesting way, especially considering Microids' previous rather flimsy efforts. The idea is a stripped-down duel between two cars. The police car driven by the player and the criminal's red Ferrari are dropped in the middle of an extensive road network, and then it's just pedal to the metal and away you go.

The desert view beyond the windscreen uses a mixture of graphics styles, in which the road is drawn with filled vector graphics and the other details are pre-drawn graphics. The other consumers of asphalt are finely drawn; in fact they look almost digitised. Nor are they tiny little pixel blobs: at their biggest they fill half the picture. The animation, on the other hand, isn't anywhere near as convincing.

The road doesn't roll by quite as smoothly as it should, but the car's behaviour is pretty believable, right down to tyre-smoking skids and reverse gear. The feel of the steering is almost better than in Hard Drivin', since you can see the position of the wheels from the hands gripping the big steering wheel.

HP2 could be described as a car chase simulator. The realism is boosted by the fact that at every other junction you have to yank the car over to park and study the road map included in the package. Once you've closed the gap on the crook, it's just siren on, escape route blocked and, if need be, the demand reinforced with a handgun. The nastiest lowlifes shoot back, and bullet holes appear in the windscreen at an alarming rate. The arrest procedure feels unclear, because sometimes you can smash up the villain for minutes on end, while at other times they give up at the slightest nudge.

After the arrest, the fun is over. You may have some bonus points left in store towards a promotion, but this small detail doesn't dispel the game's aimless nature. Chasing a handful of more or less pathological criminals over and over again soon starts to feel mind-numbing.

1987Hobbit came out on the British market as far back as 1982, but it still holds its own against many brand-new adventure games.

Hobbit is based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien called The Hobbit. In Finland it is better known under the title Lohikäärmevuori. The hero of the adventure is a little hobbit whose task is to steal back the dwarves' treasure, which a dragon took from them by foul play at the dawn of time.

The little hobbit naturally has lots of friends, such as dwarves and elves. The task is tackled with their help. The good thing about the game is precisely that you can talk to all the characters and creatures that appear in it, or ask them things and ask for their advice. This is something that has been forgotten in many brand-new adventure games. It drops many an otherwise good adventure game down a notch.

The adventure has a very wide vocabulary: it knows about 500 words, and there are nearly a hundred different command words. Even so, there are only about 50 different locations in Hobbit. Some adventure games can have as many as several hundred different locations. Hobbit is a so-called semi-graphic adventure, with pictures in only some of the places.

All the pictures are neatly drawn, and in every respect the game is extremely well made.

1988For a change, a game that tries something new: you steer a string of balls over a landscape scrolling from left to right, dodging ground obstacles and other nuisances. You also come across balloons, and bumping into them gets you bonus points, extra lives and so on.

Doesn't sound much good, does it? Maybe it doesn't sound it, but it is anyway. Hopping Mad proves that simple ideas are usually the best, especially when the playability is got just right and nobody tries to rig up anything the machine can't handle. The graphics are perfectly passable, though they won't draw any gasps. The sound side has been left somewhat neglected, but, as I said, the playability is top class. Thanks to that you'll keep at it for much longer than some middling shoot-'em-up.

On the minus side, the game's monotony deserves a mention. Things don't change much in the later levels, but the fun lasts a long time. Hopping Mad is easy enough that you'll get through it fairly quickly, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

1991 KevätBrain-destroying living corpses are on the march! No, it isn't Pulttibois, but an army of mortal husks raised from the dead by the forces of evil, and it threatens Count Valdemar's beautiful mansion. So the Count thunders his way through six levels on the principle of 'jump, collect and shoot and the game cracks open'.

On each level the Count collects the required number of skulls, two types of key, an extra weapon and a few extra abilities, while fighting the stock characters of horror films. The subject matter is promising, but once again nobody has dared to draw anything from the world of horror beyond mild and surface seasonings. The game has been stylishly squeezed into the frame of a 50s B-movie, but the end result won't give even the littlest ones in the family so much as a baby nightmare.

The graphics in the test version are presumably the final version, and quite stylish they are too, though the comical monsters could have been swapped for slightly fiercer ones. Plentiful sampled effects liven the game up.

What annoyed me most was HZFTC sinking into the pixel-perfect category in places, as well as the difficulty, which is generally tuned for the quick-reflexed. Good, but a run-of-the-mill action adventure.

1989 SyksyCounter-terrorism is the word of the day in France, as witness French Infogrames' terrorism-themed Hostages. True to the name, hostages are in the picture. The player is tasked with leading a four-man strike team into a seized embassy, where a bunch of terrorists, number unknown, is holding high-ranking officials hostage.

The game is divided into three sections. In the first you have to guide the strike team's men into suitable firing positions around the embassy; in the second the action is shown through a sniper's telescopic sight, while at the same time you try to sling one or more men in through an embassy window. The sniper is needed when silhouettes of terrorists or hostages show up in the windows, since a man dangling from a rope can't storm into a room where a terrorist is waiting with his gun at the ready. Or he can, but it's probably not very smart. In the third section the player controls a member of the strike team inside the embassy.

The graphics in the ST and Amiga Hostages are identical: stylish and well animated. Worth mentioning is the third section, where the action is shown in three dimensions. Where the Amiga Hostages pulls ahead is atmosphere. The music thumping away in the background seems ripped straight out of some thriller, swelling and fading with the action on screen. Getting into the game takes a little acquaintance with the manual, but it can be done without it by trial and error.

Hostages is fun and harmless terrorist-squashing, if not exactly very long-lived.

1988For once, a game that thrills with its name alone! True to its name, this game offers the chance to be a pig good and proper.

Your name is Ade, swine of swines. You've been invited to a yuppie do on the outskirts of town. As usual, though, the party starts to get on your nerves and you decide to make a mockery of the whole thing. There are several options on offer: you can throw and smash objects, pour yoghurt down Miss Helen's cleavage, booze, run riot and fart away. Your task is to ruin everyone's day with your antisocial behaviour before the party is over.

You play with the joystick. The display consists of two pictures showing the rooms from different directions. You can choose the directions yourself. The astonishing thing about the program is that it remembers the appearance and position of every object from every possible direction. At first this "3-D" system feels awkward, but in time it turns into a wickedly neat way of presenting the playing area.

The graphics are monochrome hi-res. All the partygoers move about "with some thought" and don't rush back and forth like space invaders. When you bump into an object and press fire, the game tells you the name of the person or object in question and presents the options for action, e.g. Search, Throw, Smash, Pour, Eat etc.

On the left and right edges of the screen are the Drunkometer and the Smellometer. They show how drunk you are and how badly you stink. Pulling the nastiest possible pranks builds up a points tally, pithily called Bastard Points. Once you've misbehaved enough, letters of the phrase Complete Bastard start lighting up along the bottom. When all the letters are lit, you are Master of the Bastards, in other words king of the arseholes.

In all its revoltingness and piggishness, the game is an interesting experience. A little brutal perhaps, but interesting. I don't recommend Complete Bastard for the very youngest, but older joystick-wagglers are sure to get fun out of it for a long time!

1989 SyksyKarate and fighting games have started to turn into hazardous waste, and in marketing them anything goes. Flaunting itself on the box is a Schwarzenegger physique festooned with knives and sticks of dynamite, but on screen a wimpy-looking Thai boxer flails about with Korea written on his trouser leg. Strange.

Well, anyway, this Kwon (surname no doubt Kim) has the job of knocking Igor the militiaman's teeth back into his gums and smacking the Arab gent's Koran into his cheek, and generally trying to break free of a low-profile foreign policy. For the sake of balance there are sparring partners from the West too, such as the toreador Miguel and his bull Brutus.

The next baffling thing is the game's pathological difficulty. At first I couldn't get Igor's energy meter to budge even halfway, however much I strained. The joke is that it only moves by fractions of a millimetre at a time, whereas a few blows from a rifle butt flatten Kwon into the pavement. What's more, Igor's strength quickly recovers however much he jigs about doing Russian folk dances, but you yourself have to stay completely motionless. It's so wrong.

Eventually I had the sense to dig out my stick with the ultra-extra-fast automatic muscle and brought out the good old sweep kick. A vot, at which Igor toppled over and I got to admire how sweetly Igor's doggy gives a paw. My grit didn't stretch any further than that, but I'd assume every opponent feels impossible to beat until you find the right tactic. In practice that means repeating one sequence of moves as mechanically as possible.

The characters are nicely drawn as such, but the animation is a hastily presented series of poses. The backgrounds have been successfully ruined with strange washed-out pastel shades. The flatness is rounded off by dull music and the absence of sound effects.

Now then, Kwon and Igor, be good boys and go and do your fighting somewhere other than my monitor.

Jori's comments: There's no playability to speak of. You can get through the whole rubbish heap using one single move out of the eight available. Someone could be bothered to make a fancy scroller for the title screen, but the hiscore tables judder along ST-fashion one character at a time. The music is downright awful. Human Killing Machine is utter rubbish.

1991 SyksyThe Soviet choir strikes up the song of the revolution. The great diesel engines hum into life. The pride of the Soviet people - the silent, secret, deadly missile boat Red October - is getting ready for its maiden voyage.

The plans of the submarine's captain, Marko Ramius, an instructor at the Vilna naval school, differ from the ones issued by the Party. The boat's entire officer corps has decided to defect to the West and bring the tub along as a dowry. As the periscope sinks below the surface, the greatest manhunt in history begins: the hunt for Red October.

When Tom Clancy's book came out a few years ago, a submarine simulator game on the subject bobbed to the surface. After all, in civilian life the author is a wargame expert, and was involved in developing the best strategy game in the world, Harpoon. Last year the book became a movie, and the movie, naturally, a licensed game.

The new game on the subject could well have been left unmade, since it is based on the film's action scenes, and loosely at that. First CIA special agent Jack Ryan tries to get from a helicopter onto the USS Dallas on a rope, then you navigate polar ice-cap tunnels, go round in circles and torpedo the Red Fleet in the North Atlantic.

The graphics look like they were knocked together in Dpaint in a hurry; the sound side rescues things to some extent. The playability grows ever more mind-numbing from one sub-game to the next. The book and the film deserved their success; this, to put it bluntly, does not.

1991 SyksyIn an age of games that repeat themselves, it's always pleasant to see a game that offers something new as well. Activision, these days owned by the French, has managed to pull one off.

In Hunter you control a lone vector-graphic commando, whose task is usually to wreak havoc across an archipelago and get back to headquarters before the time limit runs out. Hunter can hop into a legion of vehicles (for example a bicycle and a surfboard) and use all sorts of guns and bombs, as well as fascinating gadgets and whatnot. Apart from the helicopter, the contraptions are easy to keep under control.

Hunter's technical implementation is impressive. The vector graphics are surprisingly fast and smooth, and the sense of speed is heightened by, among other things, vehicles bouncing over the hills. Besides, who could fail to be amused by the vector ducks and vector hares you come across out in the countryside? The sound effects department is decorated with the cries of gulls and waves swooshing onto the shore. Hunter's walking style looks more or less like Juha Mieto without his skis, but otherwise there's good vector animation by the bucketload.

In terms of playability Hunter is top class. The whole shebang sits in memory at once, and such good innovations as a map you can bring up over the screen and an uncomplicated user interface make the game an enjoyable experience, especially since you can save your commando to disk so you don't have to grind through the same routines over and over. Shooting, or rather hitting, is admittedly disproportionately difficult.

Hunter oddly resembles a poor man's version of Midwinter II, but actually playing it reveals that MW II is in fact a megalomaniac version of Hunter. Considering Midwinter's constant disk-swapping, the choice is certainly an easy one. I sorely fear, though, that Hunter will become a forgotten cult game like Warhead.

1987Hunter Killer is a submarine simulator set in the Second World War. The player, or several players together, command an S-class submarine off the coasts of Denmark and Germany. The aim is to disrupt the enemy's, i.e. Germany's, submarine traffic. Enemy aircraft also patrol the area, dropping depth charges here and there. The game's execution is excellent; the only drawback is the countless keys used to control the submarine, the same problem as in flight simulators. But relatively quickly (within a few hours) anyone who knows English gets on first-name terms with their submarine.

The game has three different modes; mostly you're in the engine room twiddling knobs and watching various gauges and radar gear. From the engine room you can look through the periscope, and from periscope mode go back to the engine room again. Likewise, you can move from the engine room to the navigation room.

The game gives a good picture of life aboard a submarine. Most of the time you just wait around, but when the alarm goes off you're in a desperate hurry to get deep enough to escape the depth charges. Getting by with nothing but the gauges and the periscope also takes some getting used to.

1990 Syksy16-Blitz, in other words Mastertronic's fast-food games, are munchables sitting stuck in the gag-inducingly cheap five-pound price bracket. The quality has usually been just as gag-inducing, but a submarine simulator is such a rewarding subject that it's hard to botch it completely.

And Hunter Killer isn't from the very dreadful end of the range, either. The knobs and doodads are roughly what you'd expect, so the icon-driven environment has periscopes, torpedoes, deck guns, echo sounders and all the other stuff essential for survival. Among the necessities there are also a few convenience options, for example saving your game position and a time warp that lets you trim the dull cruising to taste.

The setting is the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War, with the Japanese as the opposition, naturally. There are fourteen missions on offer, including heavily eased training rounds, patrol and attack operations, and demanding special missions such as spying on the enemy. The mix includes operating both by night and by day.

Looked at superficially, HK has everything that matters, but irritating features start to reveal themselves as you play. It would be nice, for example, to get advance warning when the boat is about to crunch into the rocks off the shore. The distance of enemy ships is also hard to judge, which results in surprise collisions when the other party seemed to be at least a hundred metres away.

The action sequences have small shortcomings in their execution; for example, you can't see the torpedo, so hitting anything is down to guesswork. The graphics used for the seascape don't work especially well, the most irritating thing being the way ships and islands vaguely vanish and appear when you change course. The enemies also have a strange habit of carrying on firing furiously even when their ship is on its way at full speed to becoming a seabed ornament.

In a game in this price class it would be rather surprising if there were no technical shortcomings at all. Still, there's clearly more content than in the average 16-Blitz game.

1988The spaceship Hunter went and blundered right through a black hole, and when the hapless pilot glanced around, it dawned that this was a dimension called Loopspace (I'm not even going to try translating that). The place is inhabited by an alien race that has nicked its social model from the ants, workers, soldiers and all.

The only way Hunter will find its way back to its beloved home is by collecting enough Starcells. In the first solar system you need one, in the fourth, four. Logical, as Mr Spock would say. After four planets you move on to a new star system, and there are 16 of those. So in practice Hunter's Moon has 128 levels. In between comes a bonus game where you have the chance to win extra features for your ship, and extra ships.

Graphically Hunter's Moon is truly excellent. The sprites have been skilfully designed and the screen looks interesting.

With skilful shading, Mr Walker has made the Commodore 64's 16 colours look like many times that number. Everything moves smoothly to the accompaniment of good music and well-made effects. As a game, too, Hunter's Moon rises effortlessly above the average shoot-'em-up.

Surely Thalamus won't miss one man. It will be interesting to see whether the standard stays just as high in the future when new men step into harness.

1991 SyksyThe decision-making body has decreed: "We'll take an old game and proceed to publish it in a new disguise, and the young ones' buying fever will rise." Roadblasters got the honour of serving as the mould, the keynote of the boating theme, all told. The packages must be delivered where they're due without them falling to the terrorist crew. The air and the rivers are packed with villains by the ton, so you can clear the soot out of the barrel of your gun. The biggest difference from Roadblasters is plain to see: there's water where the tarmac landscape used to be. And at least, thanks to the turbo's might, even a boat can take to flight. Otherwise the action's all the same: drive fast, and collecting stuff's the game, money and fuel above all, you see, for without money there are no extras for me. You usually get too little fuel to spare, and the game comes to an end right there. You can't slate Hydra as bad, but nor can the praise go bang like mad, since this Tengen coin-op conversion is a thoroughly middling version. If anyone still has the stamina for this sort of play, they'll get just what they pay for, as they say. Though you'll get it for a whole lot less on Domark's very next compilation, I'd guess.

1988Software Projects has made a brisk arcade game with plenty of action, brilliant graphics, good music and absence of sense.

Credit to the company: there has been no attempt to dream up any kind of backstory for this game, about what has happened and how vital it is to survive. No, all that's included, coolly, are the playing instructions briefly explained, and a smidgen of other information.

And here are those playing instructions: you have to bounce around the playing area (preferably running constantly to the right), shooting the oncoming skeletons, nags, centaurs and whatever-they-are. Every so often you spot a blob sitting on top of a pillar or on a roof, which has to be shot down. If the blob leaves an object behind, you have to take it. This way you can get new weapons, defensive devices or a flying gizmo. Unfortunately a new device may eliminate the previous one.

Once you've brought down all the little blobs, the Big Blob itself turns up, and it too wants a taste of your weapon's firepower. Unfortunately the Big Blob takes many, many hits, and it's easy to give up the ghost yourself. If you manage to put the Big Blob six feet under, you get a well-earned break, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is happy and the world is a good place to live again. Until the next level starts...

The graphics are really good, and they are indeed the best thing about the game. The screen scrolling is also smooth and fast. But that's where Hysteria's merits end. A game-thingy that wallows in its graphics, nothing more. Even the music is only middling, not good by any means.

I really don't understand the good reviews Hysteria has got abroad. Incredible how people lap up rubbish like this. Stay away!