1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1988You are your planet's only hope. The inhabitants of Tellus have betrayed your people. Having destroyed their own planet in a nuclear war, they intend to seize your world as their new living space. The only chance of salvation is to find a hidden escape pod and fly off to raise help from the neighbouring planets.

The way to the escape pod is not easy - mutants, robots and ice dragons see to that. So that no time is wasted on picking up points, a time bomb has been planted on the spaceship. The playing time, i.e. the bomb's timer, can be set from the control panel.

I Alien is an action adventure that takes careful study of your surroundings to complete. In the game you steer a creature with big, endearing eyes and two-toed paws.

The screen scrolls in four directions and you can move between floors handily by teleport. Getting through the game takes time, as the playing area is large.

For fans of action adventures, I Alien offers a good challenge. The graphics are colourful and of high quality, and the title tune squeals along decently. The other sound effects are run-of-the-mill. I Alien is a game some people like and others find bores them to death.

1991 SyksyInternational Soccer Challenge, a joint effort by MicroProse and Red Rat, was the first to try out the possibilities of a three-dimensional football game, though without much success. Now it's the turn of the almost unknown Simulmondo to step up to the penalty spot.

In the manual, the Italian Simulmondo boasts that the game is the first football simulator. You won't get much else of any sense out of the manual. The manual is downright dreadful, and it certainly won't give a shred of useful information to anyone except those who know enough Italian to read the Italian-language section of it.

Once the game has loaded, the first thing to appear is a box the manual says absolutely nothing about! Sure, you can move a bar up and down the team names with the joystick, and pressing the button brings up a picture of a joystick or a computer next to the name, plus some numbers. Although it isn't stated anywhere, this is how you pick the team the player controls and whether the match is against the computer or another human.

You can change the team's name to whatever you like, but nowhere does it actually say how. By fiddling about with the keyboard you'll find a few other functions that aren't mentioned either. In the end, pressing the letter O takes you to the copy protection, where the game asks for a word from some page of the manual. After the protection comes a second selection screen, where you choose the game speed, the match length, which position the player plays, whether the position can be changed mid-match and much more. By this stage even the manual knows what's going on.

In true simulator fashion there are functions galore during play, something for every occasion. A Kick Off-style radar can be switched on after some furious leafing through the manual; the control keys aren't grouped in any way, they're just printed in small type among the rest of the text. The replay only works on Amigas with MORE than a meg of memory. After the match you can choose whether to watch a replay of the first or second half, the first or second half of extra time, or the penalty shoot-out. During the replay you can move freely around the pitch with the joystick and watch the action from any angle you like. Pressing the button moves the camera behind the man you're controlling at that moment, and moving the joystick with the button held down moves the camera behind the other players.

The game has been built by mixing sprites and vector graphics. The players are sprites and the pitch is vector graphics. This way you can turn your player in any direction. The joystick packs a staggering number of different moves, although using them in the thick of the game is extremely difficult at first. 3D Soccer also offers a splendid two-player mode, with the screen split horizontally in two. The pace of the game then drops to almost half, as the Amiga has to do twice as many calculations. Still, a battle between two skilled players is a great thing to watch.

There's not much to complain about in the playability, though getting used to the controls and the perspective takes a while. The sound during play is nothing much to write home about, a few thuds and some hiss. The title music is a splendid disco ditty. All in all, I Play:3D Soccer is a good showing from Simulmondo and the best football game of its kind.

1987I've never before seen a mix of such wildly different parts as I.C.U.P.S. The game's first three levels are a gauntlet run towards the enemy ship. On the fourth level you bustle around the ship after the parts of an infernal machine, the way you do in Jetpac.

The graphics in I.C.U.P.S. are nothing special at all during the first three levels. The fourth level surprised me with how excellent it was.

If I.C.U.P.S. consisted only of the first three "gauntlet" levels, I would mercilessly have given it a 5 for interest. The whole thing smells a bit like someone has tried to make one fine program out of two miserable ones.

I would have given the graphics a 7, but in the bottom right corner of the screen there was one little special touch, a small TV screen where you can watch clips of Scramble, Pit Stop, Moon Buggy and a few other well-known game classics.

Personally I didn't care much for this game because of its simplicity, but for those who would rather get stuck into the game quickly than read the instructions, this one is just the ticket.

1988Ikari Warriors: the game nobody believed they would ever get to see. But come it did, just a measly two years late, or near enough.

The cover tells you what it's all about: two half-naked kids with sweatbands round their heads slaughtering everything that moves with grenades and assault rifles. So the good old Commando format rears its head once again. And why not, there's always room in the world for a decent killing game.

The excuse for the slaughter is rescuing General Alexander Bonn from the clutches of a foreign power. The Ikari soldiers can nail enemies not only with their obligatory assault rifles (two different firing modes, gosh!) and hand grenades but also with captured tanks. The Ikari Warriors, for their part, die not only from bullets but also by treading on mines, losing out to bunkers, getting run over by tanks and so on. Ikari is a perfectly decent game that's fun enough even played alone, but it's at its best with two players, and of course two assault rifles wreak more havoc than one. The graphics are perfectly acceptable even on the C-64. Admittedly the Ikaris look like the descendants of Lego men, but at least they stand out from the terrain. The ST Ikari is arcade quality, and the PC Ikari comes with an EGA version.

Ikari Warriors is a justified addition to the gaming world, mainly because there are hardly any other two-player commando games.

1991 KevätImmortal is based on a rather illogical situation: the teacher Mordamir has disappeared, and his apprentice sets off to fetch him back. Going by my own school days, I'd have set off in search of the depths of my bed.

The genre is isometric action adventure, where success rests on finding objects and using them at the right moment. The cartoon graphics that have become almost the standard have, however, been given the boot and replaced with really realistic lifelike graphics. The apprentice (albeit a rather old-looking one) moves nimbly with the joystick, and object manipulation is simple.

Among Immortal's biggest minuses is the linear game system, meaning you can only move on one problem at a time. Good old Grim Reaper also neglects his other duties, hanging around next to the monitor arranging sudden deaths for Immortal's bit-based alter ego, so you end up sawing back and forth through the starts of levels a bit too much. Luckily the game at least has a password system, so you don't have to start again right from the very beginning. Getting started is also made easier by the manual, which spells out the solution to the first level in words of one syllable.

In Immortal the fights are fought in real time, swinging a sword, with the move set limited to a couple of strikes and a dodge. You can't slink away from fights, since once they are close enough, opponents lock into hand-to-hand combat, which is fought to the death. That's a bit of a pain, because the apprentice falls to pieces far too easily and fumbling about with the stick causes needless repeat deaths. It's a matter of practice, of course, but still...

Will Harvey, the father of Zany Golf, really knows how to define the little dots on the screen so that they look really good. The illusion doesn't break even when a sprite starts moving: the animation throughout the whole of Immortal is truly top class. The sound effects don't reach the same level, but it's a small minus.

Immortal is a top-class action adventure even with the shortcomings listed, but it demands, oh woe, a one-meg machine.

1990 SyksyPeople have tirelessly kept making a noise about windowing, mouse control and graphical user interfaces for many years now. So it's something of a small miracle that the first game built entirely around windowing is only coming onto the market now. But good things are always worth waiting for, and with Imperium that goes double.

The idea of Imperium is that the voters, out of all the possible alternatives, mistakenly choose you as Supreme Chief Director Commander of the Earth Imperium. Nothing wrong with that as such, but there are three other empires next door, and their leaders are both megalo- and maniacs.

The aim is to stay in power for a thousand years. In other words, to create a realm that has been the dream of figures as different as Jesus and Hitler. Conquering the universe is no short-term project, so the player and their closest aides have to try to get their hands on as much nostrum, the elixir of eternal life, as possible - it works for as long as the supply lasts, whereas if a nostrum user's regular nostrum rations are taken away... (a handy way of getting rid of untrustworthy aides, by the way).

Other things important for survival in the game include, for example, trade with the other empires, taxing and restricting it, appointing aides to the tasks each is best suited for, building warships, founding colonies, developing technology, building intelligence antennas, winning elections, controlling the size of the population, setting production priorities, knocking together space arks etcetcetc. So Imperium is a wildly vast and varied game that's hard to get a grip on even within the first week. Luckily, some of the functions can be handed over to the computer, leaving the player with, say, only the warfare, or the economy, or... At the same time you can learn more than a little from the strategy the computer practises.

The player can easily feel they're drowning in a flood of information, and that flood consists mainly of the conquests and colonies etc. made by the other empires by the time the player has only just managed to get their first patrol boat out past the orbit of Pluto. Judging distances can also cause more than mild fits of agony, as Imperium's star map is three-dimensional, and if you forget to rotate it just to be on the safe side, a little hop can stretch into a few dozen light years.

So I recommend the game on condition that you have plenty of patience and interest. Otherwise there are better ways to waste your money - by sending it to the editorial office in the name of the undersigned, for example.

Imperium could almost be awarded the title "the most complicated strategy game in the universe". The amount of detail is bewildering, and yet everything works at such a general level that it even has a slightly alienating effect. For example, deciding which tactics to use in an attack is the job of a sizeable legion of underlings. It's even hard to follow which way the development of entire planets is heading. You rarely see such a supremely neat Macintos-like user interface in a game. A few illogicalities and needless convolutions have slipped into it, though.

Imperium is certainly not to everyone's taste; the time needed just to study the manual guarantees that. Like it or not, the game is magnificently varied and inexhaustibly vast, in a word the aristocracy of strategy games. 92.

Imperium's flood of detail could have been trimmed a bit, as could the compulsive overuse of the user interface, not to mention that the battle depictions could have been better thought out. A megagame for a small and patient circle. 90.

1988The great Emperor JOK delivers a thundering speech that is broadcast to every inhabited planet in the realm. As the speech ends, the gates of the docks open and over 140 heavily armed warships rise into the sky, followed by 255 transports. The gigantic war fleet sets its course for a distant star, bent on revenge against a former ally. Former because the 'friend', thought to be an ally until then, launched a surprise attack on a newly colonised two-planet system, wiping out all life.

The fleet cleaves through space for more than two years, finally arriving inside the system. A few guard ships are frazzled in an instant as the lasers strike them, and the fleet moves into orbit around the enemy planet and from there straight into the atmosphere. Ignoring the furious anti-aircraft fire, the ships land on the planet's surface and unload their combat troops. The enemy tries desperately to defend itself but is no match for the crushing superiority. Yet another new planet captured for JOK's empire.

A 'small' sample of the goings-on in Imperium Galactum. The game's advertising slogan goes 'as Julius Caesar once built the Roman Empire, now you fight to rule the stars and to create your Galactic Empire'. That line ought to bring the blood of every strategy game fanatic to boiling point.

The game is really versatile, and interesting. Up to four players can take part, human or computer-controlled. You can vary the number of players from one to four if you like. At the start each player holds one planet, and expansion is of course on everyone's mind.

As usual, the game is divided into different phases:

1. Adjusting population and mining output. Each planet can support only a certain number of people, depending on the quality of its climate.

2. The construction phase. On the planets you can build industry, mines, climate (if your technology is advanced enough), armies and defences, and trade ships, transports and warships, as well as raise your technology level.

3. Managing diplomatic relations with your opponents. Three attitudes are on offer: friendly, neutral and hostile.

On top of that there are a number of movement and combat phases.

At first the game feels difficult and complicated. Nothing seems to work out, least of all colonising planets, because that isn't explained anywhere. Later on you need nothing but the star map. The game gets drilled deep into your brain, and it feels so simple that...

The implementation is excellent, and there's nothing else to complain about except that the program loads after every phase. A turbo cartridge solves this problem too. The game's looks are nothing to boast about, which is a typical trait of many strategy games. But a good game doesn't necessarily need any supergraphics. Besides, graphics that are too good can draw attention away from the game itself. Most of the game consists of reading various tables, drawing conclusions from them and giving orders.

With its versatility and its appeal, Imperium Galactum is a must-buy for all strategy fanatics. The length of a game might throw you a little, though, since there's no real ending as such. The player decides when to stop, and the winner is worked out by population. No fanatic will stop before the whole galaxy is theirs.

1988Almost everyone believes that there are hidden or higher powers. Now this someone or something has created a planet that is about to crash into the Earth.

As usual, you are chosen as the Earth's last hope (can things really be that dire?) for the desperate mission of destroying this menacing celestial body. The last message you receive reads: "Good luck.......you're certainly going to need it!".

Your aim is to destroy all the planet's energy cells. The planet is divided into many zones, and once you've destroyed the cells in a given zone you have 10 seconds to reach the transporter or you die. As you fly around you can also destroy other cells, which then release four capsules. Capsules of certain colours give you extra equipment and the others kill you.

To collect the capsules you have to dive below the main level, and you easily lose energy if you crash into the walls or the grid. The faster you manage to do all this, the better your score.

Implosion's graphics are colourful and beautiful. All the sprites move quickly and smoothly over the neat background graphics. In terms of playability it is fairly interesting, and it's one of the fastest shoot-'em-ups currently available.

1987One fine day Alvin blurted out: "I think I'll build some nuclear missiles and threaten the world!" His friend cried out in horror: "Madman!"

"And a scientist to boot," Alvin remarked. "That's plenty of cliché in one go."

Enter the man himself, Mr. Cliché, Secret Agent, who must find the pieces of the code to Alvin's launch room so that Western Civilisation doesn't end in a mushroom. The gentleman has only a limited time for his heroic deed; luckily he has lives to the tune of a cat to the power of 10.

The dangers come in the shape of a dense horde of robots, who do their best to stop the hero from combing through Alvin's furniture in the hope of finding pieces of code. The tin men can be silenced for a while by finding the right "password", which can be entered into the terminal found in every room.

The execution of Impossible Mission is flawless. Even by today's standards the graphics are worth a perfect ten, and the sound... Few games have speech synthesis this perfect. The speech is exceptionally clear, starting with Alvin's words of welcome, going on through the robots' egging-on cry of "Kill him, my robots!" and ending with the hero's scream of agony as he plunges down a shaft and the phlegmy laugh that marks a failed mission.

In every respect Impossible Mission is a True Classic. Top-notch graphics meet top-notch sound, and the playability is of a high standard. Forgetting Impossible Mission is an impossible mission. Oh, the good old days, oh...

1988Three years ago saw the release of Impossible Mission, which to this day is still regarded as one of the best computer games in the world. When it came out, the game sold thousands of copies purely because the hero let out a truly magnificent shriek as he fell into the void.

And now the legend gets a sequel. The same agent searches Elvin's buildings for snippets of music with which to get at Elvin and save the world. All the old stuff is still there: the same somersault jump, the same death shriek, the lifts, the computer terminals, the robots and the pocket computer. In fact all the speech samples and effects are exactly the same as in the first one.

Still, some new stuff has been added. There are several models of robot, and by searching you can find, besides robot snoozes and lift resets, bombs for opening the safes (which hold the pieces of code to Elvin's lair). The arsenal also includes mines, with which you can blow the robot bas.. ..ket cases to kingdom come and back. Finding a clock gets you extra time. New this time, you can't get from one building to the next unless you've found the necessary code numbers and managed to put the right code together from them. Thank the Lord, the man still has an unlimited number of lives.

Graphically Impossible Mission II is just like its predecessor. Actually it's even worse, since the background colours have been chosen really badly. Every colour I hate or will ever come to hate is in there. The agent himself moves with the same smooth animation as before.

This game's charm hasn't worn off over the years. Everyone who fell in love with the first Impossible Mission is a goner when faced with this new one too. 'Another visitor! Play awhile, play forever...'

1989 Syksy(Indy fanfare) The man and the hat are here again, as are the film and the computer game Lucasfilm has licensed to U.S. Gold. In fact there are two games: a Zak MacKracken-type adventure game and an action game which, this time, is bound for the Temple of Doom. The film is said to be the best Indy of all three, but how does the game rank among the four (the four existing Indiana Jones games)?

The most notable scenes have been grabbed from the film and wrung into the game's action sections. First, young Indy clambers around a cave system looking for the Cross of Coronado and lashing the Nazis he meets with his whip. Once out of the cave you jump about among animals in train carriages. The third section is a rerun of the first, with the backgrounds changing from caves to catacombs. Finally you swing on your whip along the castle walls, cause chaos on the Germans' airship and end up reaching for the holy Grail in a temple. So there should be no shortage of action.

Trouble is, there's a shortage of execution. The action game is the work of U.S. Gold's English end, Tiertex to be precise. They have managed, in their familiar style, to fumble the whole licence. Like so many others, the effort is sunk by low playability and see-through ordinariness. The C-64 version at least has a successful Indy sprite, stubble and all, but the rest of the graphics are poor. There isn't really a sound side at all, unless you count the Indy theme, and even if you did, it wouldn't save this Raider of the Lost Playability. Mind you, what colours my opinion most strongly is the disproportionate difficulty of the miserable first level.

This license makes no sense, but let's wait for the adventure game version of Indy III. It is said to be a good, clearly playable joystick-controlled adventure, which will probably earn its place on the micro-Indys' game shelves better than the action game.

1990 KevätBy now everyone must surely be familiar with a character called Indiana Jones. The archaeologist, who has his adventures around the time of the Second World War, has already entertained film fans for three films' worth, raking in a tidy pile of money for his makers along the way. And if something is a success, you can be sure a computer game will be made of it. A truly huge success gets two games, as Indiana Jones III goes to show.

The Indy Action Game, botched together in England, was truly wretched to look at and to play, in my opinion at least. So I was eagerly awaiting the adventure game on the same subject from the American Lucasfilm, known for Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. Now the game is here, and I have to say I wasn't disappointed.

For those who haven't seen the film, here's the plot in brief: Henry Jones (Indiana's father) is leading an expedition in search of the legendary Holy Grail. The Grail makes whoever drinks from it immortal. In the middle of it all, however, Henry vanishes without a trace. Indiana sets off to look for the Grail and, while he's at it, his father. The search takes him to Italy and from there to Africa. In the end everything turns out happily. (Really brief, wasn't it?)

The thing is, the game follows the film's plot only in its very broadest outlines. Father is sought and the Grail is found, but nearly everything in between is done a little differently. Having seen the film still comes in oddly handy.

Anyone who has played Zak McKracken will feel at home from the very first seconds. That's because Indy's adventures have been done in exactly the same way as Zak's hunt for the crystals. The game system has been improved a little, though, more animation has been added, and on top of that the game teems with cinematic fades, close-ups and camera moves. Playing works neatly with the mouse or the keyboard, and on mouseless machines with, say, a joystick.

Graphically the game is excellent, and there's enough animation even for the action sequences. Boxing with a German guard and flying a plane make pleasant interludes in the middle of the adventuring. An adventure game doesn't really need much in the way of sound, but the start of the game does feature the film's theme music, rendered fairly nicely, even on the PC.

All the factors mentioned above add up to a game that's hard to stop playing. Certain sections may be a bit on the tricky side, but as in Zak, there's always something to be found that gets you a little further again. The disease typical of adventure games, once-playability (you play it through once and the game doesn't interest you any more), has been avoided by making it possible to play the game through in several different ways. By taking different routes you come across scenery you never even saw on earlier attempts. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is an excellent and recommended purchase for fans of adventure games and of Indiana Jones.

1988Harrison Ford IS Indiana Jones; you control a sprite in a game based on Atari's coin-op (which is based on the film of the same name).

As everyone who has seen the film will remember, Temple of Doom tells of Indy's efforts to get back the stolen Sankara stones, and along with them the stolen children, from the clutches of the evil high priest Mola Ram. The following scenes from the film have made it into the game:

Jones runs around the mine freeing children. For a weapon he has a whip, with which he can lash villains, snakes, bats and fireballs out of time and into eternity. The whip also doubles as a master key that opens the doors of the children's cages, and on top of that you can swing on it like a jungle vine. Wow! Once the required number of kiddies has been freed, Indy gets through to the next screen. And then it's off in a mine cart, fleeing from Thuggee villains. The dangers are missing track, bats, more Thuggees and a giant Thuggee, which I never actually got to see.

In the third part the idea is to nick the three Sankara stones from in front of the Kali statue, after which the heroarchaeologist can try to escape across the rope bridge. A mysterious bonus round awaits the winner. So there you go.

This isn't the first game to feature the adventures of Dr Jones. Some may remember a game called I.J & Lost Kingdom. Happy are those who don't.

Temple of Doom is, luckily, light years better. The sounds ('music') ought to be banned by law, but laws breed like flies as it is, so the volume knob gets to save your nerves. Not having seen the arcade version, I can't judge how well the C-64 emulates its graphics. It isn't strikingly gorgeous, but it'll do. All in all, the Simpleton of Doom is a passable game you can keep playing without any major howls of anguish. If you own a disk drive.

You see, Temple of Doom is a multiload, in which even level one always has to be loaded again, even if you happen to die on it. Considering that the game is practically a hit from birth thanks to a strong licence, U.S. Gold could have gone to a tiny bit of trouble over the cassette version.

1988Sports games seem to be the hottest thing of the early part of the year, at least judging by the releases. Databyte, too, has converted its Indoor Sports, which stirred up mild enthusiasm, to the Amiga and from there straight on into a coin-op. The Amiga version contains four events: bowling, darts, some strange puck game played on a table, and table tennis.

Bowling is clearly the best of the events at first. The difficulty is pitched just right, and if there are four players along, things get really fun. But the initial charm soon wears off. After 15 minutes of practice you've learned a good technique, and a perfect game is a piece of cake. Darts is off-putting to Finns at first because of its strange rules, but reading up on the instructions clears things up, and this event is really cool too, even on your own.

Air Hockey, as played in English pubs, is a strange apparition to a Finno-Ugrian. Two players each take a weird flat paddle in hand and start shoving a wooden puck across the surface of a table that looks like a billiard table. The idea is to slap the puck into the goal at the other player's end. Once you've got used to it, it's a perfectly passable two-player game.

Table tennis, then, is a true festival of summertime ball-bashing. The Indoor Sports version just has the wrong rules, and the computer version is much harder than real ping-pong. There's only one kind of spin, too, and the instructions that come with the game know nothing about it.

Ping-pong aside, Indoor Sports is a pleasant pastime for 1-4 players, and the graphics range from good to average. The Amiga's title music is truly dreadful, but the sound effects are digitised.

1990 SyksyTimes are hard on a distant colony when hostile aliens break into the buildings, wolf down the residents and pop out enough ominous eggs to fill the corridors.

The game's author has presumably seen the film Aliens. But there's no point expecting some monster-mangling orgy; rather, Infestation is a vector-graphic action adventure that moves along at a calm tempo and looks and feels very much like Freescape.

The adventure starts on the planet's surface, where the first job is fending off a robot attack and working out how to get inside. After that, all that's left is to find 167 eggs of alien origin in a six-storey research centre and gas them with cyanide. Extra nervous tension comes from the central reactor, since the previous residents, may they rest in peace, have switched the cooling system off. One could of course ask what the point is of poisoning stupid eggs when the whole place is about to blow itself to atoms.

Illogical as it is, the framing plot sets the stage well for an intense atmosphere, which the game's convincing high-tech environment supports splendidly. The fine execution starts right from the pressure suit's openable helmet, which is like the cockpit of a fighter plane, complete with instrument panel and a HUD display projected onto the visor.

Strongly Aliens-flavoured ideas include crawling around in the ventilation ducts and browsing the building's floor plans with the help of a computer. Perhaps the finest atmosphere-enhancing detail is the authentic sound of breathing, especially when it quickens into hard panting on long crawling expeditions.

The graphics update a bit sluggishly, but that's understandable considering the amount of detail. The furnishings of the computer centre on the very bottom floor, for example, include a desk, a ceiling lamp, a working wall clock and a few terminals, on one of which you can even play Asteroids.

The worst shortcoming is the scarcity of clever puzzles. There's a little something, like a neat two-dimensional Rubik's cube, but compared with the Freescape series the game concentrates more on showing off with its high-tech environment. The action is limited to eliminating a few robots. Beyond them, your main worry is keeping your vital functions going. Death usually comes completely out of the blue and in undramatic form, such as from lack of food or catching a chill.

Measured in playing time, Infestation gives reasonable value for money, but there could be more content and challenge. Harsher criticism would be unfair, though, after such a memorable gaming experience.

1987Infiltrator is an action and adventure game made up of many different stages. It starts with a helicopter flight to the target. The flight is made easier by a device that tells you the direction to the target. Unfortunately, both friendly and hostile aircraft patrol the airspace. You can end up in dogfights with them if you don't know the right password.

After landing in the target area you have to get through a minefield into the enemy camp. In the camp you must make your way forward using your forged ID papers as often as possible. If the papers don't pass muster, you have to either run away from the guards or knock them out with knockout gas or knockout grenades.

The mission for each level is given at the start. Once it has been completed, you move on to the next level.

The graphics in Infiltrator are excellent. Unfortunately, loading the pictures adds considerably to the waiting time. The sound effects suit the situations; at the very least they are above average. Interest in this game won't run out in a hurry, as the game gets a great deal harder towards the end. It is not impossible to beat, though. Personally I like Infiltrator a lot, and I'll keep on playing it from here on too.

1989 SyksyLevel 9 is an old friend to everyone who plays text adventures. The company has produced several text adventures that have achieved classic status, although it has never quite reached Infocom's level. The main difference between the two companies is graphics: Level 9's text adventures have pictures, and that takes its own slice of the performance. Never mind - Level 9 knows its stuff.

From the very first encounter, Ingrid's Back! is one of the funniest text adventures I have seen. It's fun, after all, to toddle about as a little gnome girl while trying to save your home turf.

There's certainly no shortage of humour in the whole affair, and that is in fact the best reason to play Ingrid. A mutt hangs at your heels the whole time and stirs up all sorts of action. You can't leave it inside the shop for a moment, but the dog is some help too when you've been buried under a heap of turnips. At least one scrap of a joke, though, is clearly borrowed from D. Adams: do you know what happens to a steamroller when it rolls over you? Nothing.

The parser is clearly an improved edition of Level 9's earlier ones. The old Ram save/Ram load and oops options are available, and the parser also understands go/run to commands. Communicating with others works too. Sort of.

Ingrid contains nothing out of the ordinary, so the revolution in text adventures has not happened yet. Still, you play it gladly: there's fun to be had and the graphics are a treat for the eyes. There's nothing to complain about in the playability, and Level 9's special options deserve a special mention. In how many other companies' games can you save to memory? Or jump back a few moves if something goes pear-shaped?

So: an excellent and playable text adventure. Extra colour comes from the stuff in the box, a poster, Ingrid's diary and other nice things.

1988Original game ideas seem to be thin on the ground, but that Microdeal should stoop to making a mediocre vertical scroller...

So the idea is that the landscape scrolls beneath your ship from top to bottom, and the ship gets shot at from the ground as well as from the air. On top of that, bonus features that you bomb out of the ground have been crammed in, which are supposed to make staying alive easier, but they don't seem to be of much use at all.

On top of all the other evils, the instrument panel has been put at the bottom of the screen, which leaves the actual scrolling landscape very narrow, and you don't get anywhere near enough time to react to the targets coming at you.

1990 SyksyBy now you could fill so many rubbish tips with vertically scrolling shoot-'em-ups that these days these peculiar products turn up stealthily out of nowhere and are forgotten straight away, and nobody minds one bit. There are exceptions, of course, like the superb visual experience offered by Xenon 2, but Intact isn't one of them. It's so ordinary that it's hard to find even a single feature that would set it apart from its billions and billions of identical relatives.

In any case, Intact is reasonably well programmed, almost as well as Mastertronic's Sidewinder from a couple of years back, but nowhere near as enjoyable. The most repulsive feature is the utterly botched weapon system. To start with, the ship has almost as much acceleration as a Trabant whose gears from second upwards are shot, and the guns only now and then spit out a few little lumps that vaguely resemble bullets. Once the screen has scrolled a couple of miles, you finally get to upgrade your tub into a killing machine of normal power.

Weapon selection uses almost the same system as the Commodore 64's forever-lovely Delta: at regular intervals the level is decorated with a row of icons from which you can pick whatever takes your fancy. The difference is that destroying the attack waves isn't enough to rake in the money; you also have to pick up annoyingly spinning wretched little icons. The most interesting feature is two players running riot simultaneously, but in practice that also means there's even less firepower per head to go round.

The metallic and forested landscapes in the backgrounds, and especially the giant mid-level and end-of-level ships, are graphically polished, but far too ordinary to really thrill. The sound side is pointless hippety-hoppety rap.

After the numbing opening stretch, Intact turns into a pretty playable average blaster, the kind you could play a dozen of a day without feeling a thing.

1990 SyksyIf all the sports games were gathered together and stacked in a pile, the pile would reach the height of a basketball hoop. Then again, if the bad ones were taken out, you'd be left with a teeny little pile. There are plenty of good car games, fewer football games, athletics games are just joystick waggling, and other sports have been rather neglected. Good tennis simulations have certainly been seen on the 16-bits, such as Great Courts, but the 8-bits have been left on the sidelines here. Palace, however, has something to say about that.

Viewed from behind the court, diagonally from above on the left, 3D Tennis has at least chosen the right angle to show the game from. And if you're not happy with the camera angle, you can pick one from ten different options. When on top of that the game is done in simple but extremely clear and functional vector graphics, a greater interest in the game starts to awaken.

In the opening menu you can choose the usual one- or two-player game and whether to play a single match or a whole tournament. On top of all this, the player can also play a separate season, during which eight separate tournaments are played. Besides these, the player can also choose the playing surface (grass, artificial grass etc.), adjust the crowd noise or change the difficulty level, which in turn affects the automatic serve and the spin.

On the easiest difficulty level (amateur) your player moves automatically to the right spot on the court and flashes when you should hit the approaching ball. As you change the level, first the automatic serve goes, then the flashing, and finally you can also use spin in the game. On the hardest level the game already offers agonisingly tough resistance, because there are several different kinds of opponents, too.

The player figures move around the court realistically and the artificial three-dimensionality looks really convincing. The line graphics are also fast enough, and there's no jerkiness to be seen at any point in the game. The sound in the game is admittedly sparse, but this time that actually works in the game's favour, creating a tense atmosphere.

Palace has managed to create a classic of its kind, one of the best tennis games of all time. One of 3D Tennis's strong points is its extremely well implemented difficulty levels, which make the game enjoyable and challenging for beginner and veteran alike.

1987International Karate is surely one of the very best, even though there are plenty of karate games on the market.

In the game you fight either the computer or a friend, under real karate tournament rules. Japanese-style music that suits the occasion well plays in the background. The game's graphics are fine; in the backgrounds you can see, among other things, the Statue of Liberty and the pyramids of Egypt. The karatekas are well made too, and the rustle of their suits as a karateka moves creates an authentic-feeling atmosphere.

The game also has some nice little special touches: in two-player mode there is a skill test at the end of every stage, which both players take in turn.

Disappointingly, the moves are the same as in the old Exploding Fist.

As a whole the game is an ordinary karate game, with interest dragged down by the old idea and the already familiar moves. A small plus compared to Exploding Fist is the referee's speech bubbles.

The game can be recommended to karate fans who don't own Exploding Fist. Otherwise it's worth thinking twice before buying International Karate, as interest drops off quickly.

1988One morning while shaving I looked in the mirror and suddenly said: "Karate games are dead!" The blind forces that steer the lives of us poor mortals in this gloomy world must surely have heard my words, because the morning post brought Archer Maclean's International Karate+.

International Karate+ is an improved edition of the old champion of karate games, namely International Karate. The changes are more than cosmetic, because the Plus has three, that's right, THREE karatekas. That alone is enough to lift the fun into whole new dimensions, but when the animation has been improved, the sound effects likewise, not to mention the music, and the only background is unbelievably gorgeous, what can you say? At least this: unlike many other karate games, IK+ is a justified ging, you get the notes.

The very best part, though, is Microvocal. Its drum sounds are syllables spoken by a human voice. Drumming away on Microvocal I nearly died laughing once I'd worked hilarious sentences into the rhythm. By way of example, take the following sounds: Yeah, pow, hey, aah, ooh, tah, clonk and hujap... release and a fine testament to a game genre that has been sucked dry. Let's hope this really is The Last Karate Game.

Oh yes, and there are three new moves as well. The head-butt, a fancy backward cartwheel and a handy double kick breathe new life into a worn-out genre. The game is full of amusing details, for example a karateka's trousers dropping round his ankles in the middle of it all. This is in fact the first karate game you can play even on your own without getting too bored. As a two-player game it is, naturally, something unbelievable.

International Karate + is an absolute must, worth buying even if you owned every other karate game and were bored to death of every single one of them. Believe it, just for the fun of it.

1991 KevätWith the World Cup the supply of hooligan games grows remarkably, and this time too they've been dumped on the market like penalties in championship clashes. Naturally Prose had to get its football boot in the soup as well by developing a sequel to Microprose Soccer, or at least that's how ISC is being advertised.

For a change, a footy game with a fresh angle, namely from close to the surface of the grass and in three-D. The view, shot from your own half, follows either the ball or the player you control, depending on which is nearer your own goal. When attacking the system works fairly well, but less well when defending, because the positions of the players lower down have to be sleuthed out from the small overhead view on the panel. Really the pitch ought to swivel round to follow your line of sight, so that playing downwards, for example, would go more smoothly.

The other critical point in the implementation is the smoothness of the half-vector graphics, since it doesn't take much juddering before the playability starts to suffer. It isn't actually slow as such, but a slight stickiness in the feel of the controls is bothersome.

If we forget the problems that 3D brings with it, ISC is a pretty comprehensive take on footballing. Throw-ins are included, as are goal kicks, free kicks, corners and penalties. The last of those is the only situation where you may have to take on goalie duties; otherwise he handles things under his own steam. Just as well, because aiming the kicks is quite enough work already. The principle is that first you set the power with the button and then you have a split second to decide whether to kick low, high or perhaps with swerve. The lack of heading is a bit puzzling, since it would have suited the game's down-to-earth viewpoint unusually well. There are no fancy tactical patterns to be found in the game.

As far as I'm concerned, one good football game would have done for a while. Prose's realism-chasing vision doesn't work well enough to replace the likes of Kick Off 2. Try it and marvel at how much a change of angle really counts for. Football fans will naturally leave the local game shop needing a refit if the game isn't on the shelf.

1990 KevätI first saw this game a couple of years ago at the PCW show in London. Back then the demo looked incredibly fast; in fact, I had never yet seen faster three-dimensional vector graphics. Unfortunately the game has been on its way for that same couple of years, during which time progress has overtaken the routines of the day, and the current game no longer seems quite so tremendously nippy. Even the game's name has changed a couple of times over the ages, from Mainframe to Interphase, back again and who knows which way round.

The game's idea, however, is Cyberspace, which has been cropping up frequently in science fiction books lately, and its captivating possibilities in the field of entertainment. The game is set in a future where yuppie sports are old hat and entire nations enjoy what the brains of professional dreamers turn out. These professional dreamers dream particular kinds of dreams, which are then stored in a huge mainframe computer. Citizens all over the country slap a kind of helmet on their heads and sink into a dreamlike trance. The helmet connects them to the mainframe, and thanks to the electronics of the future, the dreamers experience the dreams in an unprecedentedly realistic way. The experience is so powerful that on waking, the dreamers believe they really lived through the events, and never for a moment even suspect them of being a dream.

The game begins when the most skilled professional dreamer notices that the company controlling the whole vast entertainment industry (the Corporation) has for years been slipping subliminal commands into the dreams to make people behave in a certain way. The dreamer and his girlfriend, a computer genius, decide to put a stop to the whole business.

So the dreamer puts on a helmet of his own design, which lets him "travel" around the innards of the mainframe. The dreamer's girlfriend is inside the mainframe too, but physically on a different level. If the mainframe's numerous security systems destroy the girlfriend's computer image, the lass dies for real as well. The player's task, then, is to destroy the computer's defences and open up gates to the computer's various levels. All this while also protecting the girlfriend's image from the computer's attacks.

The game is played with the mouse, and everything is shown from the player's own perspective, in the same style as in flight simulators. The player can read messages from his girlfriend, plan his routes with the help of a map, blast away and move objects around. Graphically the game is splendidly designed, and the complex three-dimensional objects create atmosphere. The sound effects are sampled clinks and clunks that don't much sway you one way or the other. There's nothing to fault in the mouse control, although sometimes there's a bit too much to do and the whole game runs away from you. The difficulty level could have been set a notch or two easier. The confusion at the start easily frustrates, and the excessive difficulty hardly helps matters, but the patient player will find an excellent science fiction adventure underneath.

1987Next up, the best Gauntlet copy. If this one also let two players play at the same time, Gauntlet would have suffered a defeat clearer than clear. The graphics and music are better than in Gauntlet, and in other respects too Eagles Nest makes a better impression.

The game is set in the Second World War. The task is to infiltrate the enemy castle, rescue three buddies, steal the enemy commander's antiques and, by way of thanks, blow the castle to kingdom come. Easy, you say? It might be, except that your gun only holds 99 rounds and the castle surely holds a thousand times as many soldiers.

Luckily the castle has ammo stores where you can top up your ammunition. An extra nuisance on top of that is the hit meter. Take 50 hits and you die. Realistically enough, you only get one life. The graphics are extremely detailed, although the characters, seen from above, are drawn fairly simply. The title music is middling, and so are the game's sound effects, if perhaps a little bare.

But this game has that certain something! You simply can't tear yourself away from it; you just end up playing it again and again and again. Even without a two-player mode, Gauntlet gets flung into the corner, deeper mazes and all. Pandora has made a shameful start with a plagiarism, but I have certainly never seen a better plagiarism.

1988"Old shoot-'em-ups never die, they just get better graphics and new music added, and get released all over again."

Here's how you cook up hit-game soup: first toss a tried-and-tested theme into the pot, in this case a game of wholesale destruction. Add to the broth a stylish implementation, a good code-wrangler and a renowned software house. Stir for three months with colourful, eye-catching adverts. Taste. Ask Bob Stevenson to do some flashy graphics. Release. Count the profits.

All of this is IO. Reviews of games like this have been written since the dawn of time, and coming up with new adjectives isn't exactly easy. Let it be said of the game that Bob Stevenson (the man behind the graphics of The Last Ninja) has once again done an astonishingly good job. I haven't seen more impressive graphics on the C-64 in ages. But then nice graphics alone don't make a game.

Playability goes a very long way in deciding what kind of hit or flop a game turns out to be. Douglas Hare has pulled it off so well that IO is a guaranteed hit. Not even the 'merely' average sound department can stop it. The only minuses in the game are its difficulty and the fact that there are quite enough of these games in the world already.

1990 SyksyOver the past six months, French software houses have carried out a real beach landing on the Nordic countries and the rest of the world with a heap of good games. A good example is the same company's Pro Tennis Tour, which is easily the best tennis game so far. Iron Lord continues the offensive with somewhat Cinemaware-style moves.

The plot of the game goes more or less like this: you are an overthrown prince who not so long ago had a rosy future ahead of him. Your father was king of the land and you were his heir. But then your wicked uncle killed your family and destroyed your castle. Now your goal is to raise an army and crush the army your uncle has raised.

The game is divided into two sections. In the first part you move and act very much in the manner of Defender of The Crown, travelling from town to town chatting with people and trying your skills in little action games, which frankly bring welcome variety to the tedious trudging about. You can talk with the people you meet, but the conversations are usually very much alike.

The action sections are archery, a dice game, arm wrestling and swordfighting. Of these, archery and swordfighting are the hardest and the most important for progressing in the game, so they're worth practising a whole lot. The dice game is pure luck, and you can't influence anything but the size of your stake. Arm wrestling, for its part, is the good old familiar joystick waggling.

Raising the army can be done in two ways. You can either earn a reputation as a tough customer by doing well at swordfighting and archery, but an easier and quicker way is to carry out the tasks people give you. Once the army is assembled, you move on to the second section of the game, a small, mouse-driven and fairly easy wargame. In it the player shuffles their troops from place to place, skirmishing with their uncle's troops.

Iron Lord's looks have been polished for nearly a year, and it shows. Graphically the game almost reaches the level of its role model, Cinemaware. The music consists mainly of 'pleasant' plinky-plonk pieces going for a medieval vibe, which start to get on your nerves in under ten minutes. What little animation the game has is of high quality. The mouse and joystick controls work practically flawlessly.

Iron Lord is a game that lands on the better side of average, one that keeps you entertained for a few evenings but is too monotonous with longer-term play in mind.

1990 KevätRumours that Cinemaware had grown tired of Amiga owners and would stop making Amiga games have been greatly exaggerated. This is a fine thing, at least judging by Cinemaware's latest, It Came From The Desert.

The more mature readers will probably remember the monster films that were hugely popular in their day, in which two enormous rubber monsters knocked each other's limbs off above some big city. In the same category belong the countless "threat from outer space" films, in which a danger arriving from space by some means or other threatened the inhabitants of the Earth.

Variations range from Martian spaceships to meteorites carrying diseases or radioactive matter. A popular theme was a meteorite falling to earth that somehow changed the planet's wildlife, usually by turning some harmless animal into a huge bloodthirsty monster.

It Came From The Desert is a tribute to exactly these films. The plot is more normal than normal: a flaming meteorite drops into the American desert. The local newspaper runs a little article on what happened, after which the matter is mostly forgotten. But the meteorite stewing in the desert does strange things to the fauna and turns the ants into house-sized humanists, in the same way that people can be vegetarians. So the giant ants' favourite food is human flesh, served fresh and at body temperature.

The player is a natural scientist living in the area who gets wind of the upheaval that has taken place. Naturally nobody believes him when he tries to convince representatives of the press, the law or the army. So the job of defeating the ant menace falls on the player's shoulders alone. The player has to keep the ants away from his town while trying to come up with a poison that would kill only the ants but wouldn't affect people, other animals or plants in any way.

Cinemaware's trademarks are present once again. Superb graphics, excellent atmospheric sound, commendable playability and a cinematic presentation make ICFTD Cinemaware's most successful attempt to create an interactive movie. Even the opening intro looks as if it had been plucked straight out of the monster films of the 50s. A digitised (gravelly and mysterious) narrator's voice rabbits on for an incredibly long time about nature's secret mysteries and ancient prophecies in the finest B-movie style. The action sequences are at last decent, workable and interesting.

In return for the fine graphics and sound, the disk access is really time-consuming and grating, especially for owners of a single disk drive. Other minuses are hard to find in the game even if you go looking. So all that's left to say is that if you liked the same company's earlier games, you can buy this one too without a worry.

1991 KevätNext up among the sports stars who have had games named after them is Ivan Stewart, a Californian off-road racer who has won fame by competing in long marathon races for two decades.

IISORR is based on the familiar Super Sprint: four cars race on a track that fits on a single screen, shown from above. The worst one or two drop out, though always in such a way that the same number of drivers come in to replace them. Money bags and nitro packs appear at random on the track during a race. Nitro briefly raises the car's top speed, while money can be spent between races on better tyres, shock absorbers, a higher top speed or acceleration.

The Commodore 64 Super Off Road looks a bit smudgy, but the graphics do their job. The playability is good, although winning is all too easy, since getting through to the next round poses no problems whatsoever for race after race. Played solo, the game doesn't give you cause for excitement for very long, but played with two it naturally takes on a new and considerably more fun flavour.

The Amiga Ivan Ironman's Super Offroad, converted by Graftgold (Andrew Braybrook, the man behind Paradroid, Uridium and Rainbow Islands), is a success. The difficulty level stays reasonable, and instead of Badlands' two human players, three can play at once here, although one of them has to make do with the keyboard. Despite the small graphics, the playability is excellent.

1990 SyksyAlthough French software houses have certainly made plenty of good games, they have also managed to churn out at least twice as many truly wretched botch-jobs. Ivanhoe ranks right up at the top of the latter. In the game you steer a brave knight on a journey to rescue the king from the castle of wicked wizards. Yes, the game is every bit as dull as it sounds.

Within the very first minutes, frustration and boredom start gnawing their way into the poor player's skull. The side-view action adventure, tried a thousand times over, really does taste like sawdust unless there is something startlingly new in it, and in Ivanhoe there isn't. The music is irritating bleeping, and the graphics are nothing to cheer about either. According to some advert the animation was done by the animator of Asterix, but looking at the end result all you can say is: 'So what!'. In fact the characters' animations consist of a couple of measly frames, and the hero has nothing at his disposal but a few blows and a swing of the shield.

Don't get me wrong, though. Ivanhoe is not a complete failure, just grey middle-of-the-road stuff, which is where any game at all sinks when it is this nondescript. By all means try it before you slip up and buy it.

1987Iwo Jima is (yet again) a new attempt to make war strategy games more interesting. Instead of a dumb map, this game has sound effects and even a little animation, which should make things easier for younger players. The game is controlled with the joystick alone, so there are no difficult key commands to learn.

The basic idea of the game is to capture the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese. In the historical battle some 22,000 Japanese and 7,000 Americans died. The game does not follow the course of history perfectly, however. It has only a third of the Americans' actual forces, which makes the task somewhat harder.

The execution is quite interesting in itself, but in my opinion a failure. For example, if you try to fire on an enemy unit beyond your own unit's range, the result is that the unit loses its chance to move.

Graphically the game is average. Apart from a few sprites, there were nothing but graphics characters on the screen. The game offers animation when air strikes take place, as a Japanese (or American) air unit bombs its target.

The Battle of Iwo Jima was famous, but that still doesn't make this program any good. The target audience is presumably the very young, for whom more advanced strategy games go way over their heads. If the player is more experienced, the game starts to taste like sawdust pretty quickly.