1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1987N.O.M.A.D. is the code name of a remote-controlled robot. With it you have to destroy the worst enemy in the entire universe, Gross. The only way to get to him is to fight your way through corridors against assorted enemies who, in their unpleasant way, try to pepper your robot with some gizmo or other picked from anywhere between a cannon and a heat-seeking missile.

The graphics are middling, insofar as this game has any. Nomad is a pretty crude sprite. Often you can't tell right away which side of the blob is the front. Not much imagination has gone into the enemies either. Really the only nice thing in the whole graphics department is the fine loading screens and the music that plays over them.

The game's entire plot lies in killing. Everything that moves has to be shown the way to heaven at gunpoint. Surprising that kill-it games are still being made. Once you've worked out a couple of tricks for getting through the different sections, playing the game to the end is no problem at all.

Some people do seem to like these programs, though, and this one really isn't as low-grade as a lot of the other "top" games on home micros.

1991 KevätOcean's new coin-op conversion Narc storms the heart of the drug trade, Mr. Big's Krak Company. It's a long way there, though, through vertically scrolling junkie alleys, subway tunnels and a drug lab. The game has 12 levels in all, full of people to arrest, such as junkies, Mr. Big's bodyguards, small-time dealers and people who copy the game. The arresting idea is an interesting one, and so the game itself doesn't turn into mere slaughter of cannon fodder. You jump up next to the repeat offender, shove some cold steel between their ribs and "You're busted!". The hardened criminal floats off to the slammer under their own steam.

A second phenomenon unproven by physics is that the bloodhounds attacking you get half as big when you shoot them. The mutts are quite a pest when you're trying to make headway.

The third supernatural occurrence is, once again, that when you give the criminals a taste of their own medicine, they naturally vanish in a puff of smoke, though they do leave their belongings behind. Collecting these belongings gets you the ammo and missiles you need, while at the same time confiscating assorted doses of drugs.

Narc's screen is divided into a big action window, a radar along the top edge and the equipment info for both players. The players can also move in depth, from one side of the street to the other, even though the game gives no impression of depth whatsoever. The Amiga version of the game itself really doesn't come anywhere near the coin-op in splendour. The 64 version is run-of-the-mill, but as a two-player game both of them keep you interested. The Amiga's graphics could have done with some sprucing up, especially when you remember how Mr. Big moves on the arcade machine. There's a fair amount of sound effects; the game's loading (intro) music is lousy.

As a game Narc is good, and its idea sets it apart from the shoot-'em-up dregs. Worth trying as a coin-op too.

1987A column of refugees moves slowly west, towards safety. There are flashes and rumbling on the horizon, but this is no natural phenomenon; it is the handiwork of man. The refugees make way for an oncoming armoured unit when all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, a new sun fills the sky. This is not a nightmare, this is war!

The year is 1980-odd. The Warsaw Pact war machine has set off and is advancing westward. Can NATO's forces in Europe stop its advance? Microprose's wargame Nato Commander pits you against the Warsaw Pact. At your disposal is NATO's entire arsenal: tanks, motorised units, helicopters, jets and tactical nuclear weapons.

Nato Commander differs from normal wargames in that the action happens in real time. The action isn't divided into turns; instead everything moves at once, which makes the game all the more realistic.

Every second, five minutes of game time go by. You don't move the troops yourself; instead you give them an order to move, whereupon they choose a route and get going. It's possible to freeze time, which lets you hand out orders at a calmer pace.

Nato Commander is a highly authentic wargame. The atmosphere is built up by the bulletins on world events that pop up every so often, such as the already legendary "Finland surrenders to Soviet forces after two days of furious fighting". At the end of each day comes a newscast-style roundup of the day's events.

The object of the game isn't to destroy the enemy army to the last man, but to stop the red steamroller and inflict such heavy losses that peace talks get under way.

The game is very easy to get into, and there's plenty of choice. The levels run from "easy" to "impossible", troops can be commanded by corps or by brigade, and there are five different scenarios to choose from, even including a NATO sneak attack on East Germany.

Nothing is perfect. You don't always know what the helicopters are up to. Only one missile fire order can be in effect at a time, and it's impossible to know when the strike you've called in will hit its target (if ever). It would also be nice to be able to assign targets to the air force yourself. Minor flaws!

All in all, Nato Commander is still the best game depicting modern warfare, next to which even such a popular game as Theatre Europe feels primitive. The passing years have not diminished Nato Commander's appeal.

1989 SyksyNavy Moves carries on the image that Army Moves gave the Spanish Dinamic. Where in Army Moves you trundled along in a jeep, Navy Moves gives the player a feel for handling watercraft.

The task is to seek out and destroy the U-5544 nuclear submarine. The job is split into two parts. First the player gets frustrated trying to dodge mines bobbing in the water, which are so close to each other that a single wrong move proves fatal. The second part isn't one jot easier: find the submarine in a hermetically sealed hall, killing 1200-kilo sea monsters and octopuses along the way.

As for the graphics, suffice it to say that the C-64 is truly capable of better. They should just leave the graphics to men who know how to do them. The intro music, at least, is by Maniacs of Noise, and for that I'll give Navy Moves at least that one little star. The ST version's graphics are perfectly OK and the sound effects are sampled, but the game is just as irritatingly overdifficult.

Sure, a game is allowed to be difficult, but if the difficulty has been achieved with absurdly long courses that demand frustratingly precise work, then something somewhere is badly wrong. If you're after a military-themed game, pass by Navy Moves on the shop shelf with your face twisted in disgust.

1989 SyksyEvery successful game always gets its imitators, and Microprose's Airborne Ranger is not the first. Cosmi has made its own version of it, one that moves in spheres diametrically opposed to those of its role model: Navy Seal.

You are an elite soldier of the US Navy, a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land), who gets landed with the nastiest special missions. Navy Seal has four missions, each of which begins with a drop close to the enemy and continues with a splash-and-flail into their heartland. There you fight your way to the target and carry out your orders. From the very start, though, dangers lurk, not least in the form of sharks, mines and other divers.

Some may think this sounds good, but the execution misfires - and badly. Ideas can be stolen, but the skill is all too often missing.

Forgivable (just about) are the weak looks and the anaemic feel. What makes the whole thing unbearable is the excessive difficulty. Every time your warrior dies, the player has to start the level again from the beginning, which in the long run gets badly on your nerves.

It's hard to find anything much good in Navy Seal. The most amusing detail of the lot is probably the 'diver's watch' that comes in the box. But otherwise: bah. Forget the whole piece of junk, there are better things to waste your money on.

1991 SyksySeal - Sea, Air, Land, in other words the United States Navy's special forces, those men of ours on land, at sea and in the air. They are the brave Men of America who serve in the navy's special forces, defiantly bearing the Stars and Stripes. The ones who flash the ghost of a smile as they level their night sights in front of the TV cameras.

Conveniently just before last winter's military campaign, Hollywood's big shots put their swollen heads together. The result was Navy Seals, in which brave heroes clash with raghead terrorists.

Wouldn't you know it, such blatant propaganda wasn't let into Finnish cinemas after all, and had to make do with the back corners of the cheapest video rental shops. Even so, with no regard for the Finnish people's large share of the games market, Ocean decided to make a game of it as well.

So here we go again, assault rifle in our arms and Green Beret as the role model, through scenery that flows sideways and vertically. We pick up extra gear, stumble over Arab carcasses and set off explosives. This time, however, you don't have an absolute number of mere extra lives but a genuine navy special forces unit. Proof positive of this is the mug at the bottom of the screen, which changes with each death.

The Seal man can climb, jump, hang by his hands and pull himself up onto a higher ledge. His training has also covered weapons handling, from the flamethrower to the helicopter. The screen scrolls the backgrounds in exemplary Ocean style, and the sound effects are mostly on the thud-badam-aargh scale.

The Commodore 64 version has been crammed onto a cartridge. The game looks and sounds good, but the playability is awful.

Of course it's a positive thing that new games keep coming out. Sometimes, though, you do wonder whether that "new" game expression couldn't be replaced with something else. Plenty more shoot-'em-ups like this one will certainly follow it, too. There's demand enough for them.

1988On the planet Nebulus, all is not well. Someone or something has built huge towers in the sea, without even asking for a building permit! At the municipal old folks' home you wake from your afternoon nap to the phone clattering on your desk. The municipal manager is bellowing about some little demolition job you're supposed to do. Still half asleep, you listen to the boss ranting about a new Mk. 7 mini-submarine lined up for you. On hearing the words 'higher office chair' you're out of the office in a flash, the phone left dangling out of the window and the boss still going on about the terrible danger.

The game begins once you've arrived at the foot of a tower in your submarine, and your task is to climb to the top of each tower. To help you get to the top, the walls have walkway ledges, tunnels and lifts. But the towers are defended too. There are trapdoors, and bouncing balls that have to be shot. Some of the little balls merely stop for a moment, so it isn't going to be easy. To top it all, some creatures don't care one bit about being shot at. If you finally make it to the top of a tower, you just stroll in through the door and whoops, the tower sinks into the sea. Then it's off by submarine to the next tower. On the way you can do some fishing by shooting air bubbles.

For some miraculous reason Nebulus actually has new ideas in it, which for Hewson is nothing short of revolutionary. The progress of our hero, the characterful Yukka, along the tower wall has been done in an entirely new way: Yukka stays in place, but the tower walls rotate. In other words: Yukka appears to walk, even though the tower wall and the enemies are the only things that actually move from their spot.

A quite surprisingly good showing from Hewson. Yukka is the most likeable critter seen in ages. All the graphics are entirely satisfactory, and the sound effects are tasty. The music on the title screen is downright excellent.

It isn't quite worth the 97 per cent ZZAP 64 gave it, but it's a very nice game all the same. There's rather too much difficulty, mind you; it takes a long time before you get through even the first level. Give it a try anyway.

1987The arcade Nemesis is a real cult game which, as is typical in this business, has spawned a whole pile of offspring. Stavros Fasoulas drew his idea for Delta from this well, and now the game's maker, the King Of The Coin-Ops, a.k.a. Konami, is releasing the official version.

Cast as the underdogs are the Bacterions. The battle is fought in space and in cave complexes. Wiping out an attack wave completely is rewarded with new weapons, speed, and even a clone of your own ship, which helps its brother out in this bloody bit-opera. But are this firepower and a famous name enough in the fight against the arch-enemy, Delta? Well, sort of. The action scrolls smoothly from right to left and the starfield in the background is just like the one in Delta. The enemy waves are varied, there's plenty of action and it even manages to stay interesting. Not bad.

Unfortunately, though, Nemesis has the basic flaw that to succeed you have to memorise how each of the different attack waves fights, and after a visit from the Grim Reaper you don't get to carry on from the spot where you died.

Although Nemesis is very Delta-like, or vice versa, there are enough differences between the games that Delta can't be condemned outright as a Nemesis copy.

The graphics are quite good, not Stavros-class but they'll do. Nor do the sounds get on your nerves.

Compared with the abysmally bad Jailbreak, Nemesis is already a success. It would surely have been worth polishing the game a bit more, and then its place in heaven would have been guaranteed. Nemesis deserves the right to exist. The Commodore 64 crowd should give Delta a try as well, but for the MSX army Nemesis is close to a must-buy.

1987The Terminators, led by Torquemada, are "purifying" the universe of non-human life forms with religious fanaticism. But standing against mankind's stupidity is Nemesis, demon, warlock and leader of the resistance movement Credo.

As a comic, Nemesis is excellent. It is superbly drawn, a mixture of macabre humour and grotesque plots. Exactly the kind of material a computer game can easily ruin, as we have seen many a time.

But not this time. Martech has managed to make an impressive game that does justice to this, the weirdest of 2000AD's heroes.

Besides his cruel sword Excessus, Nemesis also has a pistol. By collecting ammunition, Nemesis can fill the screen with lead. And if things get really desperate, Nemesis can blow out a fireball that destroys everything it touches.

The plot is extraordinarily simple. Nemesis has to kill 25 Terminators and find an escape route, and then he gets through to the next level. In the end Nemesis comes face to face with Torquemada himself. Not terribly original, but...

Oh, but the execution! Bloody violence! Dead Terminators don't just explode and vanish, they die spectacularly and the bodies stay on screen. Eventually the whole level is covered in piles of corpses. But the worst is yet to come! Every now and then Torquemada's sorcery raises a corpse back to life. Guts fly and out steps a scythe-swinging skeleton. And these boys are tough ones! If Nemesis doesn't get out before Torquemada's spirit has fully arrived, all the corpses turn into the same thing.

And when the noble demon dies... The freedom fighter's body floats up towards heaven, while down at the bottom of the screen Torquemada's hand squeezes Nemesis's heart as the blood gushes out. Squish, squish, squish...

All this is accompanied by excellent graphics, good and finely detailed animation and decent sound effects. Rob Hubbard's title music is among the man's best pieces. Credo! Nemesis is an astonishingly good and bloody slaughter game from Martech. After this, rip-offs like Cobra feel more repulsive than ever. The Devil as the hero, blood and bits of gut... Mum, have you seen what your children are playing?

1988Netherworld is the second game from Jukka Tapanimäki, who debuted with Octopolis. Octopolis got a very good reception back in its day, so the pressure of expectation on the Underworld was great.

The player has ended up in another dimension, and instead of being glad of the change, wants to go back to our own humdrum world. Money talks on other planes of existence too, so the price of the ticket home has to be earned by collecting the required number of the local currency units (diamonds).

The screen scrolls smoothly in every direction as the player's ship nimbly chases after diamonds. A collection of hostile beings does its best to destroy the poor player, and gets a great deal of help from a tight time limit. Some enemies leave behind icons that give extra time, lives, points and other useful and essential things. You can take a gamble with the surprise bonus icon, the outcome being either exceptionally useful or utterly catastrophic. To put it the complicated way, Netherworld is a Boulderdash-influenced arcade strategy game with shooting in it.

Graphically Netherworld ranks among the very best of Commodore 64 games. Aesthetically the game pleases the eye with its smooth animation, flawless scrolling and well-designed sprites. The game itself isn't left in the shadow of its execution. The only cause for complaint is perhaps a time limit that's cut a bit too fine. The ST version is nearly finished too, but the demo disk had died in transit, so we'll just have to wait.

The music deserves a special mention. It's "The Purser Stole My Gun", a track by Jori Olkkonen, familiar from C=lehti, and a catchy guitar-driven number it is. The track has been made the Amiga way, that is, by sampling instruments and building the melody out of them. It'll be a wonder if Olkkonen's music doesn't start turning up in game after game, that's how impressive the result is.

So next time you go game shopping, leave the licensed slop on the shelf and give originality a chance. It pays off.

1989 KevätWilliam Gibson's debut novel Neuromancer has risen to cult status as it has scooped up every possible award a science fiction book can be given: the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Now it has also been made into a computer game, and a film is being shot at full tilt. Luckily Finnish book publishers at least have kept a cool head and have not been so misguided as to publish this foundational work of cyberpunk in Finnish (grind-gnash!, teeth grinding).

As a licensed game, Neuromancer is unusual in that it doesn't even try to reproduce the plot of the book itself. The events are simply set in the polluted cyberpunk future Gibson created, ruled by megacorporations such as Hosaka, Maas Biolabs and Hitachi. The greenhouse effect gnaws away, and a human life is worth no more than the resale value of its organs.

Besides the real world there is so-called cyberspace - a computer network to which all the world's databases, computers and artificial intelligences are connected. Even the little guy can get into cyberspace, by plugging the jack of their terminal into the socket behind their ear. The databases, however, are protected against unauthorised intruders. So a constant war is waged in cyberspace between the security programs, or ICE, and the hackers' icebreaker programs. If the human brain can be connected to a computer, then a computer can also connect itself to the human brain...

Neuromancer is a King's Quest-type role-playing game, spiked with cyberspace sequences and database services. The main character is a lone hacker whose pals start vanishing one by one. The answer lies somewhere in the mazes of cyberspace, but when your terminal is in hock and there's a measly six New Yen on your cash card, you're not laughing much... You need to get hold of extra cards for your brain from somewhere, and since you've already sold your lungs too, I suppose there's nothing for it but to sign yourself over to Hitahi as a guinea pig.

As a game Neuromancer doesn't reach the level of the book, but to friends of sick humour and of Gibson it can still be recommended with minor reservations (the C-64 version's four disk sides and sluggishness).

1987The Neverending Story is the tale of the imaginary world of young Bastian, which comes into being as he reads a magic book. It is a text adventure based on the film of the same name.

Bastian is a young schoolboy who doesn't seem to have any friends. He escapes into a world of books and dreams. One day Bastian happens to stumble into a real adventure in the imaginary world conjured up by the magic book. The world is called Fantasia. Fantasia is threatened by "The All-Destroying Nothing". The only person who can save Fantasia is the young hero Atreyu.

The game is split across four cassette sides. First you load the main program from the first cassette. Then you turn the cassette over and load the data and graphics for the first part from the other side. Once you have solved one part, you load the next. There is no way around this technique, since the program code together with the graphics and text adds up to more than 100 kilobytes.

The screen is divided into two parts. The top third holds the actual graphics, and the lower two thirds are text.

The graphics are unbelievably good. Colour is used unsparingly and no corners have been cut on detail. The graphics window shows the scenery of the moment. On top of it there is a closer picture of some important detail, along with pictures of the items you are carrying.

The text is written in a very unusual typeface. It is a little hard to read, but the overall look is fine. I did notice some flaws in the text input, though: if you try to type fast, a single keypress can produce two characters. An unusual feature is the automatic wait: about a minute after your last keypress the program presses Return all by itself, which means time passes almost in real time.

The game is among the very best adventure games meant for younger players. The only unfortunate thing is that the language is English. Then again, that is the drawback of all adventure games. The instructions are long, but they contain inaccuracies and outright errors.

1990 KevätThis game will turn your brain into a vegetable, the instructions claim. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I do know that Psyclapse's new release Nevermind is an original brain game.

The idea is to assemble jigsaw puzzles on the walls of an isometric playfield. The pictures to be assembled have been broken into pieces, and some of the pieces have been scattered around the play area, from where a barbarian-looking little guy has to pick them up one at a time and carry them to the right spot. To get to the pieces you have to clamber about on the walls, which you do by using the teleporters in the floor.

So that things don't get too easy, some of the pictures include animation. The task is also made harder by a tight time limit and by chess pieces bouncing around in your way, which have a nasty habit of scrambling the pictures even further if they find their way to the correct wall. If you're having trouble making out a picture, you can sacrifice some of your remaining time to take a peek at the finished picture.

The game has 250 levels, all of which can be reached with a password. There's a trick hidden in them: the codes for a few consecutive levels follow a certain pattern, so you can cheat a little. The game ought to continue automatically from the last level, since typing in passwords every time is a pointless chore.

The intro has pretty graphics in the familiar style, but the game itself uses strangely dreary and gloomy colour combinations, and the graphic style isn't the clearest possible.

Nevermind is an inventive idea, but the impression it leaves is somehow lacklustre. Besides, the game's difficulty level has been set completely a**-backwards. Try level 11 and you'll see. Putting jigsaw puzzles together is much more relaxing when you use the traditional finger technique.

1989 SyksyWally Walrus, that nasty walrus, snuck into a New Zealand zoo and made off with 20 kiwi birds. Tiki, the only kiwi still free, decides to rescue his comrades from the evil walrus's clutches. The brave kiwi's only weapon is a bow, but along the way he finds laser guns and bombs, among other things. Tiki can't fly, but he makes up for it by bouncing all the more. The journey also goes underwater, or flying on top of a teddy bear (the kind with a brain inside, that is). Snails, killer stars, flying teddy bears, bats and other assorted but cute dangers make the kiwi's liberation struggle harder.

The New Zealand Story belongs, then, to the "hop, bounce and shoot" category. TNZS also belongs to the "damn good games" category. The closest point of comparison for the game is Bubble Bobble: both are cutesy, deceptively simple, dangerously playable and based on a Taito coin-op. And both have plenty of secret features, too.

Choice, who converted the game, have done an excellent job. The graphics are first-class, and the game is bursting with detail and varied sprites. This time even the Amiga version isn't a straight ST port, but a smoothly scrolling epic.

The Commodore 64 version is unfortunately a bit odd. Tiki looks more like a baby chicken than a kiwi, and on top of that this version is much harder than the 16-bit ones. Nor are the graphics up to the usual Ocean standard, but luckily the game keeps most of its charm.

The New Zealand Story is a classic. As an added bonus, even girls like TNZ Story, so you can use it to sweet-talk the lass next door, say.

1989 KevätWell, virgins are safe no longer, for Count Dracula has risen from his grave without so much as a taste of blood in his mouth. Oh, these permissive, decadent times: there's not a woman to be found for Dracula's fangs; the victims are strapping men instead. Nor does the job end there, for the count has to collect five keys and three manuscripts from every level to get to the next one, and in the end manage to gather five medallions, whereupon the balance between Good and Evil tips in favour of the latter. So nothing terribly special.

Night Hunter isn't half bad as a game despite its rather thin basic idea, because vampire traditions have been respected. Dracula can turn not only into a bat but also into a wolf (the were- kind), and extra energy is obtained by a blood fill-up to the accompaniment of digitised Slurp sounds. What's more, the drained victim then flops into a jolly heap of bones. Don't go thinking even a vampire's existence is all too carefree, though. Archers, axemen, stake commandos, witches (?), priests and Van Helsing himself, among others, try to turn the living dead into dead dead. The levels hide treacherous traps, and as a bonus difficulty Dracula has to find a resting place before sunrise.

The execution makes the game. The quality shows straight away in the sampled snippet of Bauhaus's song "Bela Lugosi is dead" that plays as Night Hunter's theme tune. In these days of fake-chirpy game music, something like that sends a thrill through the ear. The count and the living creatures alike are animated in full-blooded style, and the highly atmospheric backgrounds, sounds and little touches give the game real punch. There's blood to be seen too.

As a matter of fact, I like Night Hunter surprisingly much. The reason is probably the chance to play the bad boy good and proper. Without rambling on any further, and without otherwise wasting the short night, I think I'll go and maul a peasant and bleed a couple of priests again. After that a round of Night Hunter will go down a treat again.

1988A cat? In a computer game? And in a Firebird game, no less? Funny they didn't throw in a rubber boot, some vaseline, a paintbrush and a chunk of bacon sausage while they were at it. Once the game has loaded, though, the mystery clears up: the title screen plainly announces that the game was actually produced by Odin, who haven't exactly startled anyone with the quality of their games in the past either. The idea is simply that you control a stray cat that is too stupid to go and miaow at the doors of sweet little old ladies. The result is starvation, naturally, and grub must be had even if it costs you your life. And in this game it does - all nine of them.

In every block you have to collect four fishbones, and on top of that the street is positively teeming with tasty mice. Once you have collected the bones you can declare the block part of your territory, but beware of Mr Brown, who lives at the end of the block and hates cats. Other hazards include prickly hedgehogs and owls making kamikaze dives. Your most dangerous enemy, however, is the flea. Once one of those finds itself a home in your golden fur, there is no way whatsoever to shake it off.

The graphics are above average and the moggy's animation has come off well. The hedgehogs are extremely hard to tell apart from the mice, so a would-be tasty morsel turns out to be extremely hard to digest. The music is a bit of a muddle, and nobody listens to it for pleasure. But then nobody listens to cats yowling for pleasure either, so the tune suits the game well. The sound effects are scant and few and far between. You play the game for a while to get to know it better, but then your interest fizzles out. On top of the joystick control, some of the functions have to be handled from the keyboard, which doesn't really work in the heat of the game.

Odin have outdone themselves, but I still don't get why Firebird have stooped to a product like this. Are they running out of ideas too?

1991 KevätAnd so Lucasfilm, too, is trying out its famous claws in the 'fascinating' world of action games, with its Night Shift, which mirrors the oppression of the working class.

The idea is to build Lucasfilm toys (Industrial Might & Logic, hohoho!) by bouncing around in the bowels of an enormous toy-making machine, yanking levers, kicking electric plugs and so on. Later on some stupid creatures join in and do their best to mess things up. We are not talking about the company's management, as you might think, but about vermin. Before the shift you're given a quota, and failing to meet it is rewarded with the sack.

Lucasfilm's flight sims and adventure games are the best in their field; this attempt at the world of action games, on the other hand, is dumb. Mostly the game consists of bouncing from the bottom of the big machine to the top and trying to work out what on earth you're supposed to be doing.

The graphics are well done in every version, and there's nothing to complain about in the character's movements either. I have come up with one use for Night Shift: if you're a balanced, calm individual, playing Night Shift lets you acquire a stress every bit as impressive as the marketing manager's in the building next door.

1987Nightmare Rally is a rally game with a simple concept. You have to drive a car through a variety of courses. On the early levels the courses are mostly a matter of dodging obstacles and slaloming in and out between flags.

True to its name, the game has some strange happenings in store: your car may suddenly rise into the air, or the screen 'flips' upside down. When you go off the jumps, though, your car may spin wildly through the air and still come down completely intact.

The 3D graphics are really good, if a little colourless. But then speed is the main thing in a game like this, and there's certainly plenty of that. The only sounds are the starting buzzer and the roar of the engine.

After playing for a long time, once the places start to feel familiar, the game may turn tedious, but of course that happens with most other games too. Either way, a recommended buy for fans of driving games.

1988Here is yet another of those games on the strength of which all programmers - or at least all software publishers - can be called barefaced liars. You see, the back cover promises brain-blowing graphics and knockout playability. In a way all of this is true enough, but the decay of your brain function is certainly not down to the excellence of said qualities - quite the opposite.

The program is a more-ordinary-than-ordinary (except worse) martial arts game. The only but is that when a theme has been gnawed to the bone like this one, at least the technical execution ought to be all the better, and not a botch job like this. Those who don't like beat-'em-ups won't like this one either, and those who do had better take a look at where they put their money.

PS. Not one of the weapons shown on the extremely saleable cover - a bear claw, a jatimatic clone and a short, impractical voulge-like weapon - is to be found in the game itself...

1990 Kevät1993 - The evil tyrant Bangler rules with an iron fist, and only the android ninjas, i.e. these Ninja Warriors, can cut the man's thread of life so that everybody can have a super nice time again. This standard plot serves as the excuse for a horizontally scrolling killing drama.

NW is based on Taito's three-screen coin-op. In the home version these three monitors have been squeezed into a narrow strip in the middle of the screen. And the solution works. The shuriken-throwing, knife-slashing ninjas (one on the C-64, two on the Amiga) advance, kill and every so often come up against Those Badder Dudes.

The C-64's simple backgrounds have been replaced on the Amiga by highly varied background graphics, which load in as the game goes along without disturbing it. The Amiga graphics have in fact been sucked straight out of the coin-op machine, which presumably explains the excellent animation and the thick-and-fast sound. Not that the C-64 has anything to be ashamed of either.

Ninja Warriors is a standard beat'em-up, but excellently converted and exceptionally playable. Admirers of the genre get their money's worth in full; the rest will barely stir.

1991 KevätHiiiiiaaa! Just guess whether the game box went all crooked when I gave it a couple of mighty karate chops. I'm fed up to the back teeth with utterly run-of-the-mill karate games, and No Exit is so preposterously boring that I'd rather spend the day counting my hairs than sitting at the game.

There are, admittedly, a couple of features that lift the score to somewhere around 'passable'. First of all, you can adjust the fighter's personality with two pairs of attributes, though their practical effect turns out to be pretty insignificant. A slightly more amusing idea is the limited and temporary chance to turn into a super monster.

The animation of the pitifully tiny runts of men has been crammed with some nice liveliness, such as the opponent hopping on one leg for a moment if you kick them in the kneecap. And if you don't do anything yourself for a couple of seconds, the little fellow passes the time by putting on witty interludes, such as striking a pose and doing a somersault on the spot. The grand finale is the opponent falling to pieces.

Before you get too positive a picture, let's hasten to clarify that the game's basic offering is reckless flailing with a repertoire of a few moves. At the start there's exactly one opponent to choose from, too, then comes a slightly nastier type, and once that one has smashed your face in, it's back to square one. By this point you're already so sick of the game that not even the two-player option can save it.

With such a thin sawdust gruel as this, it's truly masterful limbo-dancing to put every conceivable thing on a separate load from disk. And the screen doesn't even show a polite 'please wait' message, but 'take a coffee', whatever that's supposed to mean. A genuine B-grade product.

1987Nodes of Yesod, made by Odin Computer Graphics, is a combination of many game ideas. The game features a little man in a spacesuit who has to search the caves of the moon for various objects.

The idea of the game is to find eight keys, which get you into a special cave containing a mysterious object. In the caves you have to hop from platform to platform looking for the keys. If you fall, you lose one of your three lives.

The search is made decisively harder by alien-type creatures flying through the air and moon beasts of every description crawling along the cave floors. The spacesuit protects you from knocks for a while, but the life graph at the bottom of the screen slows down with every collision.

The spaceman can use a kind of magic wand that destroys all the creatures flying in the air. He also has his own assistant in the game, a little space mole, with whose help he can destroy creatures and dig holes from one cave to the next.

At the start of the game the Commodore 64's musical capabilities are put to good use, playing fine three-voice music that carries on during play too, although only in two voices. The music can be switched off from the main menu. The game's graphics and colours are well done, and the cave view moves along with the player without any jerking.

Nodes of Yesod is a difficult game. First you have to learn to control the spaceman if you mean to find all eight keys in time. The game loses its appeal as time goes by, because the caves are always basically the same, only the colour and the pattern change. Nodes of Yesod has adventure, action, good graphics and music, but the idea of the game is pretty simple. It is a challenge for a player with plenty of patience.

1990 KevätYou can easily imagine what kind of game Microprose would crank out about the American Civil War: a hundred-page manual oozing blood, sand, the clatter of sabres and the patina of history. But when the French Infogrames is on the job, the whole thing has been done a bit tongue in cheek.

Even the title screen menu twinkles with humour: clicking the icons is accompanied by amusingly arranged fanfares, the difficulty level can be read off the soldiers' faces, and the game is started by clicking the photographer's equipment case, at which the flash goes off and the screen is exposed in black and white. Even the photographer starts sniggering when you click its backside.

North and South is a lightweight strategy game seasoned with a few action sequences. The manoeuvres are made on a map of the 1860s United States by shifting armies from one state to another. You can also use your turn to send money by rail to headquarters to recruit new troops.

When a battle breaks out, the game switches to a tactical close-up in which the cannon detachment, cavalry and infantry are moved as separate groups. Battles have a time limit, which is just as well, since at the bridges the guns can make mincemeat of the only way across. And you have to hurry anyway, because the enemy gunners won't sit around waiting for their turn. Horses whinny, guns bang, cannons tear craters in the turf and the atmosphere is chaotic all round.

Storming the enemy headquarters brings on a short but frantic action sequence in which a soldier runs flat out, now and then leaping across rooftops, to hoist the home side's flag up the pole. When an enemy soldier blocks the way, what follows is a no-frills, to-the-point bout of hand-to-hand. So it's a smack in the gob or a knife in the chest. There's action in store as well when an army lies in ambush along the enemy's railway line. The player gets the chance to attempt a train robbery by jumping along the carriage roofs to the locomotive.

The French have a remarkable knack for getting a spark of inspiration into any game at all. The delicacies of the game kitchen are made to a time-honoured recipe: take a strong basic idea, let it simmer, and top it with understatedly witty sound and graphics effects. And finally the most important detail: enjoy in good company.

1988In the year 2499 the Earth is suffering from famine. Project North Star is meant to save people from starving to death. North Star is a huge space station where new ways of growing food for people to eat are developed. All went well until one day North Star no longer answered Earth's calls. You have been ordered to fly to the North Star to find out what is going on.

On arrival you notice that there is no sign of life anywhere. The life-support machines have been destroyed. Only your robot capabilities can keep you alive. Your mission is now clear: destroy the alien life forms on the North Star and save the Earth.

It is from such dramatic circumstances that Gremlin's new release sets off. The first thing you notice is the messy graphics. All the objects look as if they have simply been slapped on against the background. Your own bloke looks exactly the same as the enemies, apart from the colours. The screen scrolls right and left, and in the background there are clusters of dots representing stars, which stay put. There is nothing to complain about in the controls. The man goes where you yank him and shoots when you press.

At the start of the game the player has only one weapon at his disposal: a robot arm. Plenty more weapons can be found in the levels. In practice, saving the North Star means running right and destroying; shoot everything coming towards you and collect everything going away. Pretty middling. In the long run Northstar is not exciting at all. Playing seems to be one and the same running, dodging and destroying. The sounds are pretty middling. The title music by Benn Daglish is surely one of the man's most wretched efforts; short and irritating. Try it out first.

1987When licence fever strikes, even corpses get dug out of their graves. This time, though, the corpse belongs to the sort that is quite happy to rise without any help.

Nosferatu is a vampire, and the game about him is a "good" old action adventure. Jonathan Harker has to escape from Nosferatu's castle, then Lucy's life is in the hands of Harker and Van Helsing, and in the final part Lucy has to show the old bloodsucker a sunrise. This aesthetic experience naturally kills Nosferatu.

And there you have the moral of the story: if you gad about till all hours and drink too much, the morning sun can kill you. So true, so true...

The dangers include rabid dogs, bloodthirsty bats and poisonous spiders, not to mention villagers whom Nosferatu's bite has already turned into vampires.

Nosferatu is done in the 3D graphics that Ultimate championed back in the day. And that is where the problems start: the Commodore 64 isn't fast enough if there is more than one moving character on screen. The screens do at least change reasonably quickly.

As a game, Nosferatu offers nothing new on the decrepit pick-up-object-drop-object formula, but a decent execution and an interesting subject lift it above average. Still, when the subject is something like the living dead possessed by bloodlust, the execution shouldn't be this tame.

The market is bursting with games of this type. It's about time someone made something original for a change. Anyone interested in vampires would do better to invest their money in Stephen King's book Salem's Lot, which is a splendid example of how to suck fresh blood out of a worn-out subject.