1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1989 KevätActivision paid a pretty penny for its rights to the cult classic R-Type, and so was less than delighted to see preview versions of U.S. Gold's Katakis. The battle broke loose from the screen and carried on, bloodily, in the courtroom, ending at last in victory for Activision. Katakis never happened.

So is R-Type really so outstandingly gorgeous that it needs legal protection? You give the Bydo empire a smack in the mouth with the R-9 fighter and pick up extra weapons along the way. The special feature is the pulse laser, whose power grows the longer you can be bothered to hold the fire button down. The poverty on the ideas side is supposed to be made up for by in-your-face gorgeous graphics and playability. Admittedly, the destruction a fully kitted-out R-9 can wreak at the press of a button is commendable.

R-Type is playable, and the Alien-style biomechanical graphics are in places really quite striking. On the ST the game scrolls a tiny bit jerkily, but not in a way that really gets in the way. Generally speaking, the graphics look strangely washed out, yet garish. Unfortunately games of this type have been around for so long now that the enthusiasm meter doesn't exactly twitch. Better-than-average shooting, and not much else.

1987Racing D.S. is an interesting car game for the player who might not be satisfied with 'ready-made' tracks.

For starters, the game can be played either solo or by two players. Each of you can design your own car or motorbike. You can also build the track to your own liking by putting it together from various pieces. The width of the pieces can be adjusted, and on some of them even the height, which makes jumps. The road surface can be ice, sand or asphalt.

On top of all that, you can choose the difficulty level of the driving. On the hardest setting, steering the car is really tricky. The track's background can be chosen too, as can the gravity acting on the cars!

The execution unfortunately isn't quite top class. The screen scrolling is jerky and in places the car is hard to see. The colours have certainly been used well, but sparingly. Most of the sound consists of the engine's sputtering.

1990 KevätBlack smoke billows and bits of rubber go flying as Spiff floors the greedy turbo monster past two hundred kilometres an hour. But alas, the red-bodied daredevil stopped to admire its own handiwork and is now doing a couple of somersaults on the verge.

Programming racing games is a demanding precision sport, but Rad Racer conjures flawless results out of old-fashioned microchips. Instead of the usual colour-striped salt flat, the terrain rolls up and down briskly, though it's not quite an Out Run-grade roller coaster. The 3D scrolling is smooth, but the roadsides could offer something more to look at than a couple of lamp posts and signs warning of bends.

The car's gearbox is automatic, so the player is left to worry about the accelerator, the brake and the turbo switch. You can tell the turbo is in use not only from the sound of the engine but also from a slight shaking of the picture. A minor detail, but it adds a surprising amount to the sense of speed.

A special feature of the game is the option of using 3D glasses, but unfortunately that means tinted plastic lenses in cardboard frames. The graphics, flickering in blue and red, look every bit as messy with the glasses as without them. Not even adjusting the colour and brightness seemed to help.

The tracks follow the formula familiar from the arcades: at the start you have a minute to make it to the first checkpoint, which gives you more time, and so on. To balance out the merciless tightness of the tracks, when time runs out the car keeps rolling in neutral for a long while and quite often manages to inch its way all the way to the checkpoint. After the first track the time limits seem to get a bit more lenient and the roads twistier, so the rise in difficulty is nicely balanced.

Rad Racer is a fast-paced and extremely playable racing game, so it absolutely belongs in the cartridge library of anyone who plays on a Nintendo.

1987The state of Bungeling is nursing grand plans again. The warship under construction guarantees it the firepower to bring the neighbouring countries under its heel. Unless somebody happened to send an aircraft carrier and a handful of choppers to destroy the factory area...

So the mission is to destroy five factories and, in between, bomb the nearly finished warship off to Ship Heaven. The attack chopper can carry 9 bombs, and it takes 8-18 bombs to destroy one factory. When the first factory meets its end, the Bungeling war machine wakes up. Fighters glue themselves to the chopper's tail, bombers get acquainted with the carrier, the AA gunners are issued with spectacles and the heat-seeking missiles are dug out of the attic.

It pays to look after the carrier. If it sinks, your supply of choppers comes to an abrupt end and repairing damage is no longer possible.

Besides the factories, there's plenty of other stuff to shoot at too. Supply boats, AA batteries, radar stations... These have an effect on the game as well. Destroying the boats delays the building of the warship and the repair of the factories, destroying the radars leaves the fighters lost, and so on.

The whole thing is viewed from above. The screen, which looks like a map, scrolls freely in every direction. The game doesn't just give your joystick a workout, it also calls for a slight strategic touch.

When and if the very last factory is lying in millimetre-sized lumps, the player gets their reward. A black limo drives the hero pilot through a cheering crowd, and the feat makes the front page of the paper. Gosh.

Despite its age, Raid On Bungeling Bay is still an excellent game, complex enough to guarantee a long playing life.

1987This is an exciting national defence game in which you have to attack the Soviet Union from your space station before their rockets reach their targets in the United States.

You have to destroy three Soviet bases before you get to Moscow. There you have to shoot the Kremlin's doors in, kill the snipers on the walls and destroy the tank.

After this you get into the nuclear reactor room. Depending on the difficulty level, there are more or fewer robots there feeding the atomic reactor with coolant, without which the reactor will be destroyed.

Once you've destroyed all the robots the game ends, and you get bonuses.

The game has comparatively good graphics. And if you've ever got bored of what may have been poor explosion sounds, now in this game you can easily change them. Otherwise the sounds are very boring.

Even if the sounds are poor, the game at least doesn't get boring straight away, since it has many different difficulty levels and the action changes very quickly.

The game is very varied. You can't make it much harder, though, so once you've played it through, it doesn't hold much interest any more.

1990 SyksyDid you play with toy trains as a child? Have you always wanted to be a train driver? MicroProse, the king of simulators, has made just the game for you. Mind you, Railroad Tycoon doesn't just have you blowing the train whistle; it loads onto your shoulders everything that goes with running a railway company.

After choosing the difficulty level and the play area, the player is given 1,000,000 units of money, with which to finance a new railway. The player can build on the east or west coast of America, in England or in Europe. In America the game starts in the mid-1800s, in England in the early 1800s and in Europe at the beginning of the 1900s.

First you need to find two big cities close enough to each other. Then you survey the terrain between the cities and plan the cheapest possible route between them. Here you have to bear in mind that the faster passengers get from one city to the other, the more they pay. Every bend and climb slows the train down and frays the passengers' nerves. Freight, such as steel and coal, doesn't care even if the journey takes twice as long.

Once the route is chosen, you build stations in the cities and start laying track between them. It pays to choose the station site carefully; that way you can save as much as 100,000 units of money. Every station has a catchment area in keeping with its size. The people and companies within this area make use of the railway's services. The goal is to get as many people as possible into the catchment area of as small a station as possible.

When the track is finished, you have to buy a train. Depending on the year, what's on offer ranges from cheap, slow trains to fast, expensive ones. When ferrying passengers, speed is what matters most. When hauling cargo, what counts isn't speed but power, since freight pays a flat rate. An underpowered train can slow almost to a standstill on even a small hill if it's carrying a big load of steel, whereas a strong train hauls its way up the same hill at a steady speed.

Once the coffers have filled up nicely, it's time to build more railway to the next city, and soon you'll have to buy a second train. And a third. And a fourth. When you have lots of trains, schedules and route choices start to matter more and more. Nor is there any sense in running a train empty in one direction. So it's worth checking what kind of freight is coming back the other way from the terminus and swapping the train's cars to suit the new cargo. Changing the cars costs money too, of course.

After a while the railway runs pretty well almost by itself; small changes have to be made from time to time, but otherwise the money rolls in quite nicely. In Railroad Tycoon, though, the player can never just breathe a sigh of relief and watch the trains puffing from one station to the next. You have to make sure your rivals don't get to buy a majority stake in your railway. Stock speculation is a fast but difficult way to make money. Rival railways can also box the player into a small area, since you can't lay your own track across someone else's line.

That was just a small taste of Railroad Tycoon. Let it be mentioned that the player has to coordinate the transport of raw materials so that something can be manufactured from them in another town. That's when the game starts getting really difficult, but at the same time even more interesting.

RT wastes most of VGA's 256 colours and uses only a 16-colour display. Even so, the game looks quite good. Apart from the title music there's no music to speak of, but there are some sort of sound effects now and then. RT supports AdLib and Roland, but the Roland's better sounds go pretty much to waste. The mouse control works flawlessly and comfortably.

Railroad Tycoon is perhaps a slightly odd move from MicroProse, or at least that's how it feels at first. After a quick skim through the manual (a hundred and fifty pages, in English) the game becomes strangely gripping, because it has more depth than any other Prose game. RT gives the grey cells more to do than a hundred thousand shoot-'em-ups put together, and that's no put-down, considering the games being released these days.

1987Rails West belongs to the nobility of Strategic Simulations Inc's games. Unlike SSI's other games, this is not a war strategy game. This game demands a great deal more. In Rails West the players have to steer the development of the railways of the United States in the latter half of the 19th century.

The game has many different starting situations and ways of playing. It is always a real historical situation. The games differ in their length. The longest is the hardest and the most time-consuming. It covers the years 1870-1900. Slightly easier is the part covering 1890-1900, and the easiest is the period 1890-1895. All the options can be played at four different difficulty levels. There can be up to eight players, and the computer can, if you like, play in the name of four different companies.

Each player is given 500-1300 dollars at the start of the game. You have to know how to invest the money properly. At the outset there are already railway companies that own railway lines. If a player buys a majority of a company's shares, they can start running it. Shares are available on the stock exchange, which is of course part of the game.

At the head of a company you can do whatever you like, as long as the company can afford it. You can buy shares in other companies, build railways and raise the standard of your own railway's rolling stock. When planning future moves you must remember that a depression can strike out of the blue at any moment. When that happens, going bankrupt is all too easy.

The game never comes to a premature end. Good times always follow bad ones. For lack of money a player can end up unable to do anything, but even that state can be escaped in a few moves.

Taken as a whole this game is extremely interesting, since at every moment there are lots of different courses of action open. You have to know your strategy to make a fortune. The game also offers something other than the eternal attack on somebody or other. This game offers exactly what you expect from a real strategy game.

1990 SyksyRainbow Islands is THAT Rainbow Islands, in other words the Bubble Bobble II that very nearly stayed stuck on Microprose's shelves. So far only Judy Garland and the pirates have made it over the rainbow; now the way is open to everyone else too.

The heroes of Kupla Kopla have literally undergone evolution: the dinosaurs have morphed into big-eyed human children. That's how games reflect reality in reverse: after all, the big-eyed children of yesteryear have partly turned into small-brained dinosaurs.

The objective is simple: you have to make for the top of the screen before your trousers get wet, since the water is heading skywards too. A whole horde of assorted bugs naturally does its best to close those big eyes in the sleep of death. For offensive armament the cuties have a mighty weapon: the rainbow. With it you can either whack a monster or trap the baddie under it and bounce it to death. And the optical light phenomenon even takes care of temporary transport needs, forming bridges and jumping platforms. There are plenty of assorted bonus fruits and extensions for the rainbow to collect. When moving from one island to the next, you clash with a big but unusually un-nasty-looking end-of-level monster.

The first coin-op conversion by Andrew Braybrok and co. is incredible: the implementation is a straight photocopy of the original arcade machine. The screenshots and the team's Commodore 64 track record give reason to believe that the 8-bit version will also be a worthwhile buy.

As a counterweight to the usual machotechnobullshit, RI is pure manna. Rainbow Islands is a worthy sequel to Bubble Bobble, and with it you can once again sweet-talk the girl next door who's already got bored of New Zealand Story.

1990 KevätMicroprose is known mainly for its warlike simulators in which you slaughter little red aliens from the other side of the globe. So it comes as quite a shock that it is publishing a game that completely openly and without inhibition advertises the environmental organisation Greenpeace. The game comes with a high-quality, thick booklet printed on recycled paper, which describes the organisation's activities and, on the side, hands out a hefty dose of information about environmental problems. As a matter of fact, it makes rather fascinating reading. Did you know, for example, that the ozone layer lies at an altitude of about twenty kilometres and its concentration is only 1/100 000?

But now on to the less important matter, namely the game itself. Rainbow Warrior consists of seven separate parts based on stunts staged by Greenpeace. The first of these is plugging pipes that pump out radioactive waste water. The idea is to guide a diver to the pipes with the help of a dolphin. The job is made harder by fishermen's nets, poisonous jellyfish and other sea creatures, at least the smallest of which the finned hero can keep at bay. Every now and then you have to pop up to the surface for a gulp of air, since the dolphin is, as everyone knows, a mammal.

The concept of the first part seems exciting, but what about the others? On offer would be protecting seal pups, harassing whaling ships and other civil disobedience. Unfortunately the C-64 cassette version has the fundamental blunder that you can't choose the game yourself; instead they have to be played through one at a time. To top it all, even the first part is agonisingly difficult, although the player is given no fewer than ten lives. This is a truly outrageous waste of material, as I'd wager that 99 percent of players will get fed up long before the second section of the game.

In the ST version, as apparently in the C-64 disk version, you can choose the game you want yourself. The graphics are in fact partly even excellent, but sadly that doesn't make the games any better. On offer is break-out, bouncing, climbing and this and that in an ecological package. The simplicity of the games isn't enough for a seasoned player, but apparently the idea is to hand out eco-info to younger players. I guess. With the same effort they could have made a proper game; Greenpeace has certainly earned one.

Rainbow Warrior at least has the good side that you can buy yourself a clear conscience with it. Part of the proceeds, you see, goes straight to Greenpeace.

1990 KevätSuper Sprint, excellent in its Atari ST version, has surely picked up dozens of imitators over the years, but the original version is still the best. This time the one trying to beat the old king is Anco, which has lately upped its game tremendously, mainly with Kick Off and Kick Off Extra Time.

At the start of the game the player(s) choose their controls. Up to four players can play at once, two on the joysticks and two on the keys. It certainly makes for quite a traffic jam in front of the monitor, and a squabble isn't far off either, with the players shoving each other both on screen and in real life.

After this a control system is also chosen from three different options. With the joystick, the players choose, for example, whether the fire button accelerates or does the opposite. The third option is an automatic brake that locks the servos up when the finger is lifted off the fire button. Right before the race the players also get the chance to tune their cars. Each has a certain number of points which they can add to, e.g., acceleration, tyre grip and suchlike. Once everyone has fussed about to their heart's content, the race can finally begin. If there's a full complement of four players, it can easily happen that the multitude of choices takes longer than driving a few laps round the track.

As in Super Sprint, there are several different tracks, and their difficulty rises the further into the game you get. On top of that, all sorts of junk turns up on the track and affects the course of the game.

The graphics are really colourful and finely detailed, although the cars aren't very well animated. For most of the playing time they seem to hover 10 centimetres above the track. If you can be bothered to watch the edges of the track, you'll see lots of amusing little snippets of animation there.

You can't bear to listen to the engine roar pouring out of the speakers at any great volume, it's that irritating. The playability varies a bit depending on the control method the player chooses, but the Super Sprint-style steering is of course the best. At its best Rally Cross almost reaches the level of its role model, but on the home straight it falls flat on its face on the finish line.

If you're looking for a really fun racing game of this type, buy an ST and dig up a Super Sprint for it somewhere. If the money doesn't stretch that far, Rally Cross is the Amiga's best equivalent.

1987The player has to step into Rambo's shoes as he carries out his mission. In the film Rambo is given a clear mission. He has to search the Vietnamese jungle for American prisoners of war from the Vietnam War. If any prisoners are found, they must be photographed.

The commanding officer's order to stay out of any fight with the enemy is forgotten when, on reaching the prison camp, Rambo finds a tortured American soldier. Rambo takes the prisoner with him. An escape follows, which the Vietnamese soldiers nevertheless put a stop to. In the end, after many twists and turns, Rambo still manages to rescue all the American prisoners and make it back to his base.

The player has to be capable of the same as Rambo. The player is given many different aids for carrying out the mission. At the start of the game you have a knife and a hunting bow, with both normal and explosive arrows for it. In addition, a machine gun and hand grenades can be found out in the terrain, and a rocket launcher in the helicopter.

The course of the game is clearer than in the film; it is divided into parts. In the first part you have to get into the prison camp, rescue the tortured prisoner from the torture stake and get to the helicopter. The helicopter is north of the prison camp. The helicopter has to be flown back to the prison camp and the rest of the prisoners taken aboard.

This is followed by the hardest stage of the game. The player has to escape by helicopter to the safety of friends. The escape is opposed by the pride of the Soviet attack helicopters, the Mil Mi-24, known for short as the "Hind". This gunship carries four 32-rocket pods under its stub wings, plus four heat-seeking missiles. With good flying skills and some luck the player gets past this obstacle too and escapes to friends in Thailand. At this point you get a hefty bonus and have to start all over again on a slightly harder level.

The game as such isn't just about shooting, since some tactics are needed too. If you use noisy weapons, you can be sure the place will be swarming with enemies like ants. That's why it pays to use only the knife at first. When it's time for some serious action (that is, something has to be destroyed), the best weapon is the explosive-tipped arrows. In the whole game there's no sensible use to be found for the machine gun or the ordinary arrows.

Even though this game is based almost entirely on killing, I think it is very good. Perhaps the reason is the film's "certain something", which is probably the reason almost everyone buys the game. As far as playing the game goes, seeing the film is practically compulsory, unless you can get more detailed information about how the game goes from some friend. The thing is, the game follows the film's story far more closely than, for example, Ghostbusters and A View to A Kill do.

1989 KevätI can imagine the glee of the Afghan guerrillas as they sit by the campfire watching on video how Sylvester Stallone, in not quite a couple of hours, kills more Soviet soldiers than there have ever been in Afghanistan. It just goes to show that there's always somebody who's interested in Rambo. Mumble III has, of course, come out as a game too.

In section one the aim is to rescue Colonel Trautman from the vile clutches of inhuman torturer-Soviet-soldiers. As in the previous Rambo, Sly starts out with a knife again, but finds more weapons along the way. Other gear turns up too, right down to a mine detector and infrared goggles. It goes without saying that they're not there for nothing.

The fortress rolls past in Gauntletian fashion, though it ditches the scrolling. As well as Trautman, bonuses come from rescued Afghan guerrillas. On the C-64 the section's biggest blunder is the unbelievably stupid Russian soldiers, who don't notice Rambo until he jumps out in front of them and says: "America has abandoned its veterans."; on the ST, at least, faint traces of intelligence can be detected.

Part two is otherwise identical to part one, but this time Rambo's job is to arm the bombs planted in the fortress and take to his heels before the Soviet army moves up to the great kolkhoz in the sky. Finally Rambo races to the helicopter at the controls of a Soviet tank. Charging at him from the horizon come tankses, soljers an' landmineses, which Rambo has to destroy with his trusty cannon before they leave his tank deeply touched.

All in all Rambo III isn't a bad game at all. On the C-64 the sound effects are pretty miserable and the graphics give no cause for extravagant praise, but on the whole it still comes out on the plus side. The ST version is naturally quite impressive graphically. Besides, Spritester Stallone knows his limits as an actor better than his living model does: It doesn't even try to talk.

1988Don't we all sometimes get so cross that doors slam, flowerpots shatter to smithereens and computer hardware, after some aggressive handling, turns into software? At moments like that you'd love to be able to tear to pieces not just the petty movables but the whole real estate. Well, now everyone can give free rein to their lust for destruction, because Rampage, familiar(?) from the coin-op boxes, has arrived on home computers. Admittedly the house-smashing and other vandalism happen only on screen, but never mind that - at least the money you'd have spent on renovation is saved for, say, buying new arcade conversions.

It so happened that three unsuspecting customers of Lardburger Consolidated got into their systems, along with their lunch, some experimental additives that had ended up in the food by accident. An incredible mutation took place, and so George, Lizzie and Ralph tore their clothes to shreds and turned into a fifteen-metre gorilla, lizard and wolfman, who charged off roaring, without paying their bill, to destroy the city.

So in Rampage the players' task is to rip, crush, shatter and destroy as many city blocks as possible before their energy runs out and the reverse transformation back into a human takes place. Up to three players can join the wrecking bash at once, either as a team or - which is definitely the most fun - against one another, competing in their frenzy of destruction.

On the C-64 the multiplayer game has been done by leaving the third player with keyboard control while the other two wrench at the joysticks. Especially at first it feels as if your monster isn't really taking the joystick's commands seriously, but once you get used to the controls the monster starts toddling along as it's told. The keyboard players, for their part, get extra fuel for their rage from the illogical placement of the action keys.

On screen the mutant monsters clamber up the walls of apartment blocks, bashing windows, walls, tanks, police cars, helicopters and each other while the concrete colossi collapse into clouds of dust to the accompaniment of a rumble. The people and objects found in the crumbling buildings can be gobbled up before you give the heap of cement its final mercy blow. Mind you, a television or a cactus isn't good for the digestion.

The animation is successful on the whole, and the monster characters look fun. I was left missing a little polish in the graphics, though - most irritating are the projectiles flying across the screen, which could do with standing out properly from the background and also flying less jerkily.

The game has no background music, just plenty of crashing and exploding sound effects. There is title music, though, and it's apparently the same as in the coin-op version.

As an idea, Rampage really is a fun game. Especially with two or three players it's good for a laugh for a while, but how many of you can be bothered to do nothing but smash sorry excuses for houses for fifty screens' worth? Rampage doesn't seem to offer anything more to rack your brains over, after all. So I'd guess the game will split its audience in two. Some will love it and never tire of playing it; others it will leave cold. Before you sacrifice your wallets to the block-smashing party, consider which group you belong to. On the arcade side Rampage has become something of a cult game - time will tell how it fares on the home micro side.

1987Rana Rama is one of the Gauntlet clones that have flooded the market. Judging by their number, you could conclude this is a well-disguised plan for world domination by aliens from outer space. With its frogs and magic runes Rana Rama sits towards the more original end of the scale, and the graphics don't, at least not right away, give away where the thing was really cooked up either.

The gimmick of the game is taking on the role of a sorcerer's apprentice named Mervyn. To his misfortune, the apprentice got his magic potions mixed up before heading out on a date and, instead of Dior aftershave, rubbed some gunk on his chin that turned him into a small, slimy-green frog.

A kiss from a witch girl might perhaps have helped, but what can you do when the evil wizards came along and left only Mervyn alive, because they took a liking to its ugly colour.

Mervyn now has to clear his home caverns of wizards and their helpers alike, so that he has even a chance of trying to find the potion that will turn him back into himself.

All the action is based on spells of different types and levels. Staying alive, 'zapping' the creepy-crawlies and anything else you care to name are all handled with spells. Spells can be cast with runes obtained from the wizards after some friendly persuasion, as long as you are standing on the right type of floor carving. There are floor carvings of other sorts too. Maps, travel from one level of the caverns to another and guaranteed total destruction are all on offer.

Rana Rama was evidently programmed for the Spectrum in the first place. That's how typically Spectrum-like the single-colour stick figures hopping about the screen look. The meagre sound effects point in the same direction too. Otherwise the technical execution is perfectly tolerable, apart from the fact that Mervyn doesn't respond to the joystick in the best possible way. Close combat with the wizards' helpers, along with the weapons flying through the air, can therefore turn into a problem, and a fresh energy spell into a necessity.

1991 KevätWho has more strength than Superman and Batman put together, more hard-boiled lines than Eddie Murphy cracks in a minute, and a smaller brain than a toaster?

RanXerox. Not the photocopier, but a seven-foot robot covered in pink flesh, which is also equipped with a truly stupid central computer. Ranx prefers to spend its time mangling innocent (well, not quite) fellow humans, picking up girls and improving the world in its own personal way.

RanXerox is originally a comic character created by the Italians Tanino Liberatore and Stefano Tamburini, and there's an album's worth of it available in Finnish too.

Ranx lives in Rome in a warped era where psychos, gangs and drug dealers run rampant. The comic is realistically drawn adult comics, in which evil doesn't always get its just deserts. In the game, which is based on one of these albums, once again the whole world, and along with it Ranx's underage girlfriend, Lubna, needs saving. The streets are walked vertically and the world really lives around you: already in the first screens a dachshund leaves its "regards", cars honk and a gang member keeps trying to start a chainsaw. You can of course always bash everything that comes your way, although conversational technique and hand grenades will sometimes get you further.

Money is needed too; you get it by, say, emptying parking meters. Extra energy is tanked up by smashing lamp posts.

Graphically the game looks snappy, and sampled effects caress the ears. 90 percent of the comic's violence has been cut, but the rest is enough to annoy the softest of parents.

There is cause for complaint in controlling Ranx: it can do lots of tricks, and usually what appears on the screen is not what the player was hoping for. That's enough to kill off even the keenest enthusiasm for playing. On the other hand, as a bonus you can save the game.

All in all, Ranx has managed to capture the atmosphere of the comic, but something is missing. The thought springs to mind that I've played this very same thing before, albeit under a different name and in a different-coloured box. As it stands, Ranx is a good effort, but it doesn't stand out from the crowd. Znort!

1987Action adventures just seem to keep on multiplying. Now it's the turn of Operation Bring Down Rasputin.

The hero is a knight whose task is to find and destroy The Jewel of the Seven Planets - the gem that keeps the spirit of the mystical Rasputin alive.

The game moves on two planes, the temporal and the timeless. One is ruled by soldiers, the other by creatures each stranger than the last, all of them deadly to the game's hero. Not that the hero is unarmed, oh no: a magic sword and shield help in destroying the creatures and the soldiers. Rasputin is an interestingly built game, since it starts from the end. The stones you are searching for, once collected, form a bridge to the jewel that keeps Rasputin's spirit alive, after which you get to destroy the spirit blazing behind it.

The three-dimensional graphics are more or less perfect, apart from "perspective errors" in some places: some steps don't show up when they should. Likewise the sluggish controls in the combat scenes are irritating, as is the fact that when the hero has given up the ghost and you return to the game screen, all the creatures you destroyed are alive again. So there's no shortage of difficulty in the game. As in all games that call for quick control, here too the joystick is the be-all and end-all.

1988In brief: Rastan, king and hero, gets it into his head to tell the future from the entrails of the evil wizard Karg. The latter, you see, has been plaguing the whole kingdom by, among other things, abolishing the violence tournaments and generally being a right nuisance. On the way to Karggila Rastan has to hack up a whole bunch of the wizard's minions, so there should be no shortage of fun. If and when Rasta-N. makes it to the wizard's gate to yell 'Trick or Karggi!', the dirty-fighting wizard turns up in the form of a dragon. The final battle can begin.

The animation has one flaw that has been bugging me for ages. How is it possible that nobody can get the background scrolling in sync with the character's plodding? Otherwise, too, Rastan's graphics aren't up to much. On level two the sprites get lost in the backgrounds, and so on and so forth.

At first Rastan seemed quite a pleasant acquaintance. You could even continue the game from where you died, if you wanted. But alas! the playtesting has been forgotten. Even a butterfingers like me got to the second level easily, but then came the end. Rastan is supposed to get across a lava lake with the help of three swinging ropes. After a hundred rastans I hung up my gloves - and myself, from a rope. The program probably has a bug too, since if death comes on level two the game always starts from there. Nice otherwise, but the lava lake episode comes a minute into the game. And all the magic weapons are on level one.

No, Rastan is not much of a game at all. Playtesting would have helped a lot, since all the ingredients of an interesting game are certainly there. As it is, the only good memories left are the lovely loading screen and loading music.

1989 KevätReach for the Stars really is one of the trickiest things to review that has ever landed in front of me. Firstly, for a strategy game it's a shamelessly simple space war simulation. Secondly, its rules have many points whose sense I'm not all that convinced of, and thirdly, it's almost impossible to stop playing it.

How can a game this simple, this stupid and this graphically helpless be this interesting?

The idea of the game is that in a universe of 23x34 hexagons, four races simultaneously discover a way to travel faster than light. Each of these four can be played either by a human or by the computer.

The races can build different types of ships and bases, modify planets' climates to suit them better, and build new factories, to mention just a few of the options. And once you've got the basic game under your belt, the game can be developed further with either different kinds of natural disasters or more advanced rules.

The snag is certain features of the basic game that spoil the sense of realism. For one thing, the ships can move so fast that interstellar distances have no strategic significance. On top of that, the universe is far too small for ships this fast.

In the basic game the tactics favoured by the computer-controlled races also start to get on your nerves. You see, they assemble one monstrously huge fleet, which they then shift from planet to planet until they run into another race's colony - skadaboommm! Not the faintest whiff of a proper fight or of strategy. So the best thing is to play the basic game only long enough to get the hang of the rules, and move straight on to the advanced rules.

The PC version's controls, windows and menus and all, work unusually smoothly. You rarely see such a well-implemented user interface - and it doesn't even need a mouse to prop it up(!) All the information is quickly to hand as and when it's needed. Perhaps part of the game's charm lies right here. Normally, after all, the problem with a strategy game is precisely how awkward it is to get at the information you need. Unfortunately the Amiga version not only loads via Workbench but also runs through Intuition. That, of course, means Guru Meditations, a slowly updating screen and generally sluggish operation. The mouse control is on the stiff side, but then again Amiga owners have presumably got used to their girlfriend's faults by now.

Reach for the Stars is a decent game, and especially among friends, with the computer playing one or two races, it's really yummy. (I like it too! -NN)

1989 SyksyAnd once again Activision is making money off the dead. The previous Ghostbusters, rubbish game though it was, was a massive hit. It was at least based on a watchable film, but when the roots of this effort are an unwatchable cartoon series and possibly the world's worst comic, the result is a foregone conclusion. This one wouldn't even do as the ghost of the previous one.

The plot is, if possible, even more primitive than in the comics: a Ghostbuster marches along an eight-way scrolling playfield, zaps oncoming monsters with a laser, and the resulting ghosts can be captured with a proton beam. You're supposed to hunt for keys and other junk so you can take on a giant monster and get through to the next level.

The Amiga version looks awful: ghastly colour choices, rudimentary animation using roughly two frames, and the playability follows the same pattern. Thank God, the Commodore 64 version refused to load.

I don't believe even a die-hard fan of The Real Ghostbusters would be happy with this trash. If you absolutely must have Ghostbusters, at least wait for Last of the Ghostbusters, coming out later. It can't be any worse.

1989 SyksyWho still remembers an old game called Lode Runner? It first came out back when Adam was a boy, for the VIC-20 and the C-64. Now the old idea has been warmed up again, and once more we get to curse the sleepless nights spent over it.

In Realm of Trolls the Lode Runner idea has been disguised behind pretty graphics, a scrolling screen, a few extra features and a funny fairy-folk tale. The idea is to get through the game one level at a time by collecting all the items on the level and then getting out through the door that has opened.

According to the story, the game is set in the Stone Age, when the world was ruled by evil trolls and good fairies. Once upon a time the trolls went on a raid into the fairies' world and stole everything that wasn't nailed down. One after another the fairies tried to steal their belongings back, failing miserably. The only loot brought home was a map of the trolls' caves. How did you guess: the player is one of those fairies, and the task is to try to get the family heirlooms back.

The trolls keep a close guard on the treasures they have stolen. If they catch an intruder, a terrible walloping begins and the fairy loses energy. Fortunately the fairies' witch doctor has given each candidate magic powers. With magic the fairy can eat away a piece of the ground beside it or shoot freezing arrows that make the trolls go stiff for a moment.

The trolls' caves consist of platforms and ladders. So the fairy can eat a hole in a platform and drop down through it. The caves also have teleports and wizards who pop up here and there. The wizards can restore the fairy's energy if it is close enough. Further torments come in the form of falling rocks, water, fireballs, lifts and rolling mine trains.

The game as it stands would no doubt be pretty dull.

Fortunately ROT has a built-in level editor with which players can design nasty puzzles for each other. The editor on its own is extremely versatile, since the player can change every single thing: the trolls' movements, the routes of the lifts, the appearance of the wizards and so on. When you add to this versatile disk options, game saving, the chance to practise a level and playing against a friend, you get a downright delightful gaming experience.

The graphics of Realm of Trolls are highly polished and suit the atmosphere. The sound effects and the title music are skilfully chosen too. Playing is very easy and enjoyable thanks to the skilful scrolling and joystick-reading routines. The only minus that has to be mentioned is a slight sloppiness in the disk reading. If the save disk is broken, the program crashes and asks you to reboot the whole lot. Despite this, Realm of Trolls scores the points, and interest in playing it will surely last far into the future.

1991 SyksyI had already come to believe that Microprose's Knights Of The Sky was the unbeatable First World War flight sim when Red Baron landed in front of me. My starting assumption was a "quite nice game" on the level of Blue Max, but the box turned out to hold a masterpiece that wipes its feet on the other WWI games.

And what's it got going for it, you ask? Firstly, Red Baron has 28 aircraft models, which is eight more than KOTS. Secondly, in Red Baron you're also free to run riot on the Jerries' side, making Bloody April live up to its name. And thirdly, in Red Baron you don't fly alone but in formations of up to four aircraft.

There's no need to make do with a doghouse and your imagination, since the play area is an authentic battlefield, divided into five sectors, in the triangle bounded by London, Paris and Germany. In the way events unfold, Red Baron and KOTS are very close to each other. In both, the hardware changes as time goes by, the player moves from one unit to another, all is not quiet on the Western Front, and every now and then an ace from the other side sends a personal challenge. Suspicions of espionage between software houses were confirmed once again.

The biggest difference in the game is the close teamwork practised up in the sky. At first you tag along as a wingman with the others, but with promotions you get a flight to lead more and more often. The other aircraft are by no means there for decoration; they're sometimes downright annoyingly effective. Anyone building a career on the German side can even land a posting in the squadron of the Red Baron himself.

Compared with Blue Max's overly stiff and KOTS's overly sensitive Snoopy-killers, the aircraft have a more solid feel, and the dogfights are just what they should be: long, agonising pursuits with the adrenaline rushing through your veins. No philosophising about the relationship between realism and playability is needed, because there's plenty of room for adjustment. You can add extra excitement with, for example, unstable weather, sun glare and engine icing in winter, and at expert level even the wings can go floppy under rough handling.

There's a recording function similar to the one in Their Finest Hour, with the difference that you can record the flight from start to finish. While watching the recording you can of course freely rotate, switch and twist the camera angle. You can also edit your memorable flights into flashy mini-movies. You could list a page's worth of subtler touches, such as the screen flickering blood-red after you're wounded, the landscape dimming when the sun goes behind a cloud, the machine gun's ammo belt jerking in time with the shots, and so on and so forth.

The trend in Yank games seems to be that they're made for VGA, and EGA is supported if anyone can be bothered. This version, at least, used VGA graphics only. And the look is touchingly beautiful throughout; in capturing the lines of the aircraft in particular they've gone completely overboard. Or what do you say to being able to make out the rubber on the wheels up close? That's starting to be too much even for a 386 machine. The graphics have, however, been simplified so that during combat most of the terrain is left undrawn.

When you add the Ad-lib's thunderously realistic sound effects to the soup, I thought I must be daydreaming. The engine, for example, has a sound that depends on the aircraft type and genuinely changes with the revs, and the metallic clangs drawn by a hail of bullets sound so nasty that your body parts start coming loose out of sheer empathy. Separate pats on the back go to the excellent manual, which besides a wealth of information includes, among other things, colour pictures of the different aircraft models.

If Knights Of The Sky is fantastic, then Red Baron is, um - I'm running out of superlatives - Wing Commander set in the First World War. I reckon that's enough praise.

1989 SyksyRed Heat's plot is quickly explained: Soviet detective Ivan Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a Yank cop (James Belushi) join forces against Chigago's drug trade. The drug trade is run by Soviet refugee Viktor Rostavili. The best thing about what was in itself a standard "Two different cops who become buddies" movie was Arnie mangling his lines with a Russian accent. But then explaining the plot is a waste of effort, since the similarities between Red Heat and the film of the same name are largely coincidental. Naturally, James Belushi doesn't appear anywhere except on the box.

Red Heat is a normal beat-em-up that tries to spice up the soup with various in-between games. Mostly Arnold makes use of his mighty arsenal of combat equipment, that is, he can take a swing with his fist or butt with his head. Arnold can also shoot once he has found a gun, and there are still four levels to get through all the same.

The real "buy me" gimmick, however, is the graphics. Instead of the usual full-body little dung beetles, the musclemen are shown from the stomach up, which gives a certain cinematic feel. Especially as the sprites are big and well animated on all the machines. Never has Schwarzenegger looked more like himself. Points are docked for the unimaginative way the bad guys are defeated, since they just go flying off over the back edge.

Red Heat is a perfectly OK game of a perfectly OK film, and it offers nothing new to anyone jaded with the genre. Neither did the film.

1988It is the year 2379. Despite today's gloomy forecasts, our planet's energy reserves have lasted this long. Now, however, the electricity is running out, and a terrible fate threatens our beloved computers... Think of the withdrawal symptoms when we can no longer stare into our monitors night after night playing this game!

Substantial energy reserves have been found on a total of 37 worlds, and so lattice-like routes are to be built between them.

Once you've chosen your target world and a droid suited to the task out of the three available, it's off to the battlefield. In each three-dimensional world you must find four energy capsules, placed in different parts of the large playing area. Along the way you can collect bonus letters and destroy robot generators, though that sends the surviving robots into a rage. Once you've found all the capsules, you can move on to the next world through the exit.

You have one hour of real time to complete the whole game. Every fall off the playing area, however, knocks a minute off that time. Death can also come from running out of energy, colliding with an enemy robot or falling into an acid pool.

Red Led is an enormously large game. Completing it is a challenge worth taking up. The control system in particular deserves a mention, that's how flexible and pleasant it is. This game has that certain something!

1990 KevätIt all started quite innocently. NATO's stealth planes struck East German air bases at roughly the same time as the Baltic Marine Infantry Division landed near Copenhagen. World War Three had begun, and who the aggressor was would only be established at the war guilt trials organised by the victor...

Red Lightning is an operational-level strategy game set in the 1990s, with a battlefield that stretches from Denmark to Austria and from Belgium to Poland. In addition, the course of the fighting is affected by the outcomes of battles fought outside the play area in Norway, Iceland and the North Atlantic, in which the player(s) can take part by sending some of their landing forces to Norway or Iceland.

So Gorba-style détente has been thrown where, in the opinion of all militant strategy gamers, it belongs. If the reform policies in Eastern Europe and the troop reductions carry on at the current pace, there will soon hardly be any subjects left for decent games.

RL is, in true SSI style, a very versatile and detailed game. Norman C. Koger, Jr has managed to solve a whole bunch of problems that have plagued strategy games. Supply, artillery support, home front morale, the effects of unit activity, fatigue, the different levels of intelligence, the different aircraft types, traffic jams, chemical weapons, digging in and assaulting, just to mention a few, have been implemented commendably. When the program, for example, reports the aircraft shot down in the previous turn, the figures are by no means accurate, since by no means all the enemies shot down are confirmed kills; the foe may even make it all the way back to its own airfield before its drag chute is destroyed and it overshoots the landing...

The effect of home front morale is a completely new idea. Every unit destroyed and every piece of territory lost to the enemy (especially (capital) cities) weakens the nation's will to fight, and victories naturally boost it. If the nation's will to fight drops to zero, the state starts negotiating a separate peace with the enemy - the negotiations have a 50 percent chance of success each turn, after which that state's troops/aircraft no longer take part in the fighting. Allies slipping out of line weakens the morale of the other warring nations even further, meaning that one dropping out can bring down the whole military alliance.

Information on enemy movements depends entirely on how many reconnaissance planes and your own special forces are out gathering information at any given time. In stormy weather, when satellite pictures are no help and the recon planes can't get up, the traditional desant paratrooper is the only source of information. On top of that, the Warsaw Pact has a nasty habit of creating so-called Maskirovka detachments; a thousand T-80s made of plywood in the right place can throw NATO's plans into complete disarray.

The focus on strategic realism does show elsewhere, though. The user interface hasn't been thought through to the end, and about a quarter of the playing time goes on pointless fumbling. To find out the status of a single unit you first have to go into examine mode, after which you pick a square, after which you pick the unit. If you want to move one battalion of one division from rest to reserve, you need two more selections on top of that.

The scale of the map is also, in my opinion, too large. Not all the factors affecting the tactical situation fit on the screen at once, so you have to keep scrolling it all the time. The strategic display covering the whole of Central Europe isn't much help when planning individual moves. The scale also easily makes the player lose detachments belonging to the same unit to different parts of the battlefield, in which case not all of them benefit from being close to HQ.

And then finally the last gripes, about the game's instructions, which are a real blot on the history of SSI's strategy games. In order to get anything at all out of a couple of muddled tables, the player needs to own a library's worth of reference literature. Luckily the most important sources are at least listed at the end of the manual, but yuck all the same.

1990 SyksyA Los Angeles-class attack submarine creeps along on tiptoe near the thermal layer. 'Captain, the target has been identified as a Moskva-class aircraft carrier, with several Krivak 2s as escort. The problem is we can't get a decent firing solution for the torpedoes.' The fish are scared finless as four Tomahawk cruise missiles break the surface.

And all hell breaks loose. The Krivaks' active sonars start sweeping the surroundings and helicopters drop sonobuoys around the USS Enterprise. 'Launch transient bearing 276, range 2000 yards!' A submarine, apparently. Oh, drat.

After a long wait, good old Red Storm Rising has come out on the 16-bit machines. The game is based on Tom Clancy's good book Red Storm Rising (in Finnish, Myrsky nousee), in which a Soviet Union caught in the grip of an oil shortage starts a war with NATO. RSR, though, drops the tanks, the aircraft and the warships alike and concentrates on attack submarines.

Modern submarine warfare is a game of hide-and-seek with death, and completely different from the Second World War's periscope-up, torpedoes-away technique. Silent submarines lie in wait for each other; surface vessels need only a hint and the hunt is on. The result is nerve-shredding moments far beneath the surface.

Graphically, apart from the animation sequences, RSR is a very bare-looking set of instruments. The ergonomics work well, though, compared with EOA's 688 Attack Sub. What matters most is the game, not the graphics.

Red Storm does have its shortcomings, of course. Friendly vessels are missing entirely and the missions repeat themselves. The ST's animation sequences look like they were ported from the Commodore 64, and the Amiga's 64-colour versions aren't much better. The Amiga version does, however, earn plenty of plus points for using extra memory and for its improved effects.

Despite everything, Red Storm Rising is still the best modern submarine sim, whatever the graphics lovers may say. Let them buy 688 Attack Sub for all I care.

1989 KevätBingo! The sonar picks up a faint contact on bearing 322. Judging by the sound signatures, Soviet ships, and (hopefully) the very convoy that USS Enterprise, a Seahawk-class attack submarine, was sent to snap a Kiev-class aircraft carrier out of. The sonars comb the convoy until the Kiev turns up. Course is changed so that the target can be neatly lined up alone in the path of the missiles.

Wonder of wonders, everything goes as smoothly as a torpedo out of its tube. An inversion layer keeps the Soviet cruisers from detecting Enterprise until the Tomahawk breaks up the dance of the waves and heads for the doomed ship. Now all that's left is to tiptoe little by little away from the net woven by surface ships, helicopters and other submarines.

MicroProse has returned to the world beneath the surface, and the result is yet another groundbreaking attack submarine simulator. Veterans of Silent Service are going to be surprised at how much submarine warfare has changed.

There are weapons enough to sink a medium-sized warship. Besides Mk-48 remote-guided robot torpedoes, there are Harpoon missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Targets flitting about above the surface come down promptly to Stinger missiles. And that's a joy you get to savour right down to the bottom when the enemies are armed the same way, since the defence systems are anything but watertight. The motto of modern submarine warfare could be "Torpedoing is silver, silence is survival", that's how important a quiet acoustic profile is.

You can choose your own submarine from the entire US range. The simulator includes practice battles in which you can take on various enemy configurations.

But how does RSR tie in with Tom Clancy's book? The answer is provided by the actual main game, namely World War Three. The player carries out various missions, and the success achieved in them affects the course of the war. The price of failure is terrible: the Russian bear conquers the Free World and the player ends up in a Gulag far out on the Siberian steppes.

Naturally the package includes the obligatory hundred-page manual, and taking it all in is the only way to come through World War Three alive. There is even more of the normal Prose sabre-rattling than we're used to, but if it helps produce simulations this good, then by all means. The graphics are on the primitive side, but they do their job.

Once again MicroProse has married realism off to playability and (once again) come up with a milestone of computer entertainment. Recommended even for those who found Hunt for Red October boring.

1990 SyksyWhat on earth, Space Invaders in the nineties? And three more archaeological arcade finds on top of that: Megapede, Draxians and Rockstorm.

Space Invaders is an old familiar face, as is Rockstorm, although its name is a bit baffling, since it's plain old Asteroids. And if you don't know what Asteroids is, then let us tell you: it's that classic spinning-a-triangle-ship affair where you split rocks in half, then into smaller pieces still, and finally into space dust.

Draxians is very much like SI, and I remember playing it myself at some point: at the top of the screen there's a cluster of enemies, from which individuals and formations peel off to attack. Megapede is the oddest of the bunch, but even it was seen on the Commodore 64 long, long ago under the name Exterminator. It has a gun moving about the lower half of the screen and a playfield full of little destructible blobs, with worms and other little molluscs wriggling through it.

The first question that springs to mind is what sense there is in releasing these games even as a compilation, when there are loads of quality PD versions of, say, Space Invaders and Asteroids. The package's gimmick is apparently that every game comes in both an authentic and a remade version. The idea is presumably to show that 'this is what they made ten years ago, and this is how far we've come today'. Judging by this package, not very far, since the only difference is modernised graphics and a couple of new ideas.

For some strange reason I found myself much preferring to play the authentic versions. Presumably because the 'improved' contraptions are just plain dull, whereas the originals at least have the charming patina of age. Their authenticity is a little questionable, mind you, since in Asteroids, or rather Rockstorm, for instance, the ship's inertia is implemented oddly stiffly.

The best thing on offer is David Whittaker's music, although this time the maestro doesn't reach any great heights.

Plenty of people will surely be interested in getting original-looking classics into their collections, but you might just as well poke the software house in the eye with a stick for trading on old memories this shamelessly.

1990 SyksyThe year two thousand and something, Los Envegas, USA. Crime is on the rise, and drug couriers are threatening to replace the law with chaos. It is time to apply Resolution 101: a convicted lawbreaker is pardoned if they pull off a suicide mission set by the guardians of the law.

The player naturally gets the role of this pardon-hunting criminal, with a machine-gun-armed glider as the tool of the trade, and the job is first to seize enough drugs and then to pepper the head honcho's three-engined turbo full of holes.

Los Envegas is a miniature world assembled from box-shaped buildings that look like cardboard stage flats, with the scenery drawn in vectors and the moving objects in hand-drawn graphics. As the mouse-controlled craft shoots off, all you can do is marvel at the speed of the graphics. At best the picture is redrawn twenty-five times a second, which in practice is so flawlessly smooth that you start taking it for granted. Until you make the mistake of playing some stickier vector game.

Besides the drug capsules you also collect dollar signs, which can be invested in extra equipment for the glider, as long as you first find the shopping block among the mazes. For this, as well as for tracking down the villain, the handy arrow guidance on the control panel is a help. The chase is repeated in four districts, and after that the whole round is gone through three more times. The area is pretty big, but it still smells badly as though the game's bakers ran out of bun dough before the batch was done.

The scarcity of ingredients isn't a serious flaw as such, since R101 is a no-nonsense shoot-'em-up where speed and spectacle come first. The effortless control is dazzlingly enjoyable, but the looks are not. The only cheering detail in the graphics is the criminal mug grimacing on the mini monitor.

The atmosphere is ruined by silly UFO sprites and garish colours. The sound effects are crude too, but the most ghastly thing of all is the background music. If it's going to be this bad, it would have been better to leave it out altogether.

Archipelagos, the team's previous work, was so inexhaustible that next to it R101's thin content is a mild disappointment. The whole shebang rests on playability alone, but luckily there's no end of that. Very rarely has anyone managed to create a furiously fast-paced action game with vectors, so it's well worth a look.

1990 SyksyWhen Thalamus releases something, Commodore 64 owners hold their breath. You're entitled to expect fantastic graphics, amazing new programming tricks, colour and sparkle. The new release from this software house, which has been lying low for a long time, is, as you might guess, a shoot-'em-up.

Never mind the plot, the idea is to hammer the fire button till your finger smokes. In the play area, which scrolls in two directions, the upper part of the landscape is black sky, crammed chock-full of fast-moving aliens from space. You can shove your metal-armoured hero into the thick of them, lasers blazing, if you dare. Along the bottom edge runs a narrow strip of ground where you can plod along more or less safely and thin out the monster population with a short-range power fist. Despite the narrow space, the scenery packs in a tremendous amount of colour and even Hawkeye-style layered parallax scrolling.

Dying aliens leave behind, as keepsakes, Ara cubes of varying value, which you can use to buy weapons. Depending on the type, these can be set to fire in two, four or eight different directions, and at best nine bullets fly out with a single shot. The meagre initial selection of weapons gets new additions after every level, but I didn't spot anything very original in the weapons; the variation is mostly in looks and power. One of the most fun is a laser beam that wriggles along somewhat in the style of R-type.

To clear a level you have to collect planet bombs, which are taken down into underground caves. In this vertically scrolling section a truly fantastic effect has been created by playing tricks with palette switches. Last up is a fierce battle with a hefty and graphically superb nightmare creature.

The playability suffers from that quintessentially British basic blunder: everything has to move at such an insane speed that the player can't possibly dodge in time. This has been balanced out by making extra lives easy to come by. In fact you get them a bit too easily, since you could hang about carefree on the early levels and even spin the score counter right round.

Retrograde's reckless feel gives cause for a little nitpicking, but it is nonetheless such a fast-paced package and such a treat for the senses that it can be recommended without reservation to all shoot-'em-up junkies.

1989 KevätAnd so Domark's Star Wars trilogy has reached its final part, namely Return of the Jedi. The Rebel Alliance must destroy the new Death Star before the Empire deletes the entire rebel alliance, leaving behind nothing but teeth and the gnashing of weeping.

Like its predecessor games, Return of the Jedi consists of numerous sections tied to the film. This time there are no vector graphics, just perfectly ordinary sprite graphics. First Luke Skywalker rides his speeder bike through a fairly dense forest with the Empire on his tail. The pursuers can be shaken off by riding through Ewok traps and between tree trunks, or by coolly wedging the space Teittinens into the side of a tree.

Then you play Chewbacca at the controls of a Walker, dodging tree trunks, from which situation the game surprisingly pops over to the Millenium Falcon battling its way through TIE fighters. For the finale the Millenium Falcon flies through the Death Star and whacks the main reactor, bringing about the destruction of the Death Star, much to the Empire's chagrin.

Jeddie Come Home loses to its predecessors hands down. Every section is just a diagonally scrolling dodge-and-shoot game, and the variety it needs never gets a chance to develop. The visual side of the Commodore 64 version has been done really sloppily. The Ewoks look like queasy tooth trolls and the Millenium Falcon is made of enlarged sprites, not to mention the fly-like TIE fighters. Still, it works better than its predecessors' vector graphics.

The ST graphics are an order of magnitude better, and the diagonal scrolling has been done really well considering the machine. Samples from Return of the Jedi liven up the game, and the music isn't half bad either.

Return of the Jedi is a good film, but the game is a standard-issue licence knock-off. If only they had at least kept the vector graphics, but of course it's nice that all the Star Warses have finally been converted. The only ones worth buying are the 16-bit versions of the first two, especially the forever-lovely Star Wars.

1988Return to Atlantis can, with a bit of goodwill, be filed under action adventures, but it has ingredients from so many different games that this doesn't tell the whole truth. Sadly, when laid on too thick, even interesting elements can get in the way of the whole, and that is exactly what has happened with Atlantis.

The plot goes roughly like this: the player steps into the wetsuit of a top agent trained by the Foundation, with the aim of carrying out a series of underwater missions. In the game the Foundation stands for all that is good and right, fighting against the evil and immoral Louskuleuka and associates.

The game's backstory is in itself a pretty sickly mix of ecological sanctimony, an oceanography lesson and international power politics. A no-frills adventure with its good guys and bad boys would have done the same job far more enjoyably. As it is, tuning in to the plot and the right atmosphere is a bit of a forced effort.

Every mission is preceded by instructions from the Amiga's speech synth: Blöbööö..Blö..Blö..

Pressing the mouse button makes the ordeal easier to endure.

In the next phase you get to interview possible sources of information at the local cafe. The graphics in this part of the game are downright gorgeous. The interviewing technique is pretty primitive, if effective: those who have money can make people talk with it, and the rest will have to settle for physical persuasion or whining.

If Atlantis hasn't managed to serve up any special gaming moments by this point, it doesn't rise to any later on either. The main action of the game is set in a marine environment, where there are more than enough options to steer and to program. There are compooters of every stripe and underwater research vessels. On top of that, our hero goes floundering about on the seabed, where robot crabs chuck cans of barley juice around to tempt the diver. The three-dimensional scrolling of the landscape may be an algorithmic feat of acrobatics, but in the long run the end result looks fairly dull.

Not enough attention has been paid to the game's playability. There are admirably many different functions, sure, but using them sucks the life out of playing. As for the sound, what sticks in the mind most is the synth's burbling, and as for the mothership's graphics, primary school drawing lessons.

If you have a long fuse and an extra disk drive for your Amiga, Return to Atlantis may well turn out to be a lasting pastime. A lot of energy has evidently gone into making the game, so playing it also takes more effort than average.

1987Into third gear and pedal to the metal. The Formula III shudders beneath me. The revs climb to 6000, begging for a higher gear, but the hairpin looms menacingly. I shift down and the engine howls. Even braking doesn't help and the left front tyre takes a bite of the grass. In that instant the car spins round, the horizon whirls before my eyes and the crash barrier wails as the heavy car rips it to pieces. There goes pole position. Drokk!

Revs+ is everything a novice formula driver needs. Revs came out a year ago and since then Firebird has been analysing feedback from players. Now Revs+ tries to plug even the gaps its predecessor left. More tracks, easier steering and the option of an analogue joystick are additions that make Revs+ almost perfect. The only thing I missed was the chance to design my own tracks.

The graphics do their job better than well. The laziness and sluggishness so typical of the C-64 seem to be missing, and you really feel the speed. The sound, though it seems crude at first, completes the atmosphere once you turn the TV up loud enough.

The player can choose two of six tracks to drive. On top of the old ones there are four new ones, programmed into the machine in precise detail with every bend, dip and climb. Going up a hill you catch yourself craning to see further, even though you know perfectly well it won't work.

CAS, Computer Aided Steering, is another addition that Firebird threw in at the players' demand. This makes the game easier without making it too easy. While the computer handles the steering, the player has to take care of the speed. Even the computer can't keep the car on the track if you come into a bend too fast.

Revs+ is clearly the best racing car simulator you can get for the C-64. If you like this kind of game, look no further.

1989 SyksyRick Dangerous is evidently Indiana Jones's twin brother. The same brimmed hat, the same leather duds, the same handsome Harrison Ford mug. The game package contains a skilfully drawn four-colour comic that tells of the events leading up to the game.

Rick has got his hands on a map of the cursed Goolu temple and decides to go treasure hunting there. The cursed temple is a dangerous place. Not a single person has made it out alive. The player's task is to guide Rick through the sprawling temple, watching out for natives and traps and collecting treasures.

Rick Dangerous is a platform-type game. Rick can jump from one platform to another and climb up ladders and rough walls. He can also crouch and jump. For armament Rick has a six-shooter, and ammo for it can be found along the levels. With a sturdy stick Rick can poke push-buttons, assorted critters and natives. The temple has nasty cave-ins, and to clear them Rick needs dynamite. Fortunately the god of adventure has provided that too, in wooden crates along the way.

The temple has many different traps. Right at the start of the game Rick has to run away from the rolling boulder familiar from Indiana Jones. Every now and then sharp wooden stakes fly out of statues in the walls, and Rick has to know how to dodge them. Here and there sharp spikes stick up out of the floor. Doorways may also be booby-trapped. That's why it's a good idea to give the opening a prod with the stick before going through. To top it all off, the temple is home to temple guards and assorted bugs. The bugs can be put to sleep by poking them with the stick, but the natives need some lead from Rick's revolver before they settle down.

Rick's graphics are just what they ought to look like, i.e. an old Aztec temple. The playability is very good and the sound effects are brilliantly humorous. Four really long, different levels guarantee gaming pleasure well into next week.

For all its good points, Rick is still a platform game: playing relies heavily on memory, since Rick always has to know in advance what is coming round the next corner. When death strikes, Rick goes back to the previous checkpoint, and there is one roughly every ten screens. In the long run this is frustrating and exhausting. So Rick is best recommended mainly to adventure-minded fans of jump-about games.

1991 KevätWell then, this of course couldn't be avoided: Rick D. is off adventuring again! The first instalment of Rick's adventures was quite a nice, if not very varied, game. On the back of its reasonable success the sequel has finally been completed, but has the wait been worth the trouble? Will Rick's tracksuit bottoms split in a public place, and will Rick become an object of national shame? We decided to find out.

In the game Rick's adventures are split into five sections, each of which can be played separately, the only exception being the last level, which is guarded by the number one target of weight watchers everywhere, The Fat Man (the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki had the same name!). After each level the player is rewarded with an extra life and a restocked arsenal.

The idea is the same as before: solve the individual problems that stop Rick's adventure from continuing. The problems are now somewhat more elaborate, though, and there are considerably more levers of various kinds to operate than in the first instalment, which on its own already makes the sequel worth playing.

Rick moves really splendidly and responds well to the player's control inputs, so at least the game can't be faulted on playability. The backgrounds and animation work in all their simplicity, although a couple of levels have had more attention paid to their backgrounds (the last section contains more little graphical jokes than usual). The game also gets suitably harder, although generally speaking the problems have been made too easy to solve. Not that it matters - easy-ish games are fun to play every now and then.

Rick needn't be ashamed of existing, and good design and a successful reuse of an old idea see to that. It's harder to judge how long interest in the game will hold up, given how easy it is, but as a piece of programming RD 2 is at least a match for its predecessor. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with making sequels, as long as the software houses remember to change more than just the packaging each time. And Rick's tracksuit bottoms didn't even split.

1988Palace is a company that releases few games, but good ones. When the firm's best forces are behind a game, there's reason to expect something extra.

The idea in Rimrunner is to defend the Insectoids against the Arachnoids. Rimrunner, riding a lizard, has to maintain the defence satellites that keep the invasion at bay, and at the same time pick flying enemies out of the sky with their beloved shotgun.

Rimrunner is truly professional work. The insectoid rider and their lizard steed are animated first-class, the backgrounds are splendid and the sound effects have been made with care. The hiscore table is truly excellent.

Which makes it all the more a pity that the game itself doesn't excite. In typical English fashion the screen has been crammed full of flying sprites, and because of the limited field of fire the insectoid is hardly a match for them. Sometimes it feels as though the English idea of a shoot-'em-up rests on the rule "The more and the faster the sprites, the better the game." Rimrunner hasn't got even a token amount of depth, so it soon starts repeating itself, and it doesn't convince even on a purely spinal-cord level. Satisfying violence is missing.

So much for the something extra. For the first time, Palace's axe strikes stone. Let's hope future games sharpen the blunted blade.

1989 SyksyAfter dreary street-fighting games of every stripe, it's refreshing to punch a bloke in the face in the name of the noble sport. Time to take on the Tysons, in other words to fight your way to becoming boxing's world champion.

The gladiators of the squared circle have been simulated in game after game, but Ringside makes a more convincing first impression than usual thanks to its versatility. The power of the different punches can be set separately for each hand, and a bout can be set to last 3-15 rounds, each 1-3 minutes long. Before a fight you can go down to the gym to spar and build up your self-confidence. When you beat a boxer ranked higher than yourself, you are given extra power points to share out between your punches and your defence. So the best chance of toppling the champion comes once you've first battled your way up to number two in the rankings and your blows are starting to carry some hefty oomph.

The realistic line carries on into the fighters' animation, which is a joy to watch. Nice touches include knockouts being shown in slow motion and the hero slumped in his corner between rounds, whom you can revive by flapping a towel. The start of each round is announced by a winsome young maiden with serious shortcomings in both her clothing and her arithmetic - the cheeky thing claims that 20 comes after 9!

In theory it's all well in hand, but let's slap an ice pack on that eye and take a closer look. First of all, you can beat the bottom-feeders of the rankings just by holding the joystick in the right-straight position while watching television at the same time. Even conquering the title usually works out after a couple of attempts (that is, if you first have the patience to club your way through the other challengers). You can of course make the game harder, but the real problem is that the player feels like half a mere spectator. For that reason I recommend a second joystick-wrangler as an optional extra for the game.

It niggled me a little that the winner isn't announced by a raised hand but with bare text, especially since every other time the computer can't even be bothered to do that much.

The scoring has been botched too. Along the top edge of the screen are boxes in which pictures of gloves appear every few hits. In a close fight they fill up within a couple of rounds, and after that you have no idea how things stand.

It's a shame that seemingly trivial flaws manage to flatten an otherwise good package, but in any case Ringside offers plenty of fun for two players.

1991 SyksyIn an age of corruption, as twilight falls, the Dragon rises again...

The year is 2056 and the place is the terrorism-ridden megacity of Los Angeles. A new drug is wiping out the population and sowing mutation and death. Crime is a disease, but luckily there's a cure for it: William 'Blade' Hunter, kicked off the LA police force for his violent methods. Lo and behold, the player ends up in the role of Blade.

Hunter wakes up in his studio flat of a few square metres and thinks back to last night. Major Vincenzi, a big shot in the police force, dropped by his hovel to make a deal. Vincenzi's daughter has died from the drug, and Hunter was hired unofficially to find out why.

On the VidPhone on the table there are video messages, the tap is dripping in the kitchenette, Blade remembers hiding his gun under the pillow... a bachelor's everyday life in the year 2056. Next comes a shower, then just throw your clothes on and off you go gumshoeing. First, of course, you might pop round to placate your girlfriend over standing her up on last night's date. You could buy flowers, say.

Blade Hunter travels by subway from one part of the city to another, gets information out of thinking, characterful fellow humans, collects stuff and every now and then ends up in fierce action. The game is built on an ingenious windowing - click & voila! - technique in which you don't have to touch the keyboard during the game itself. All actions, conversation included, are handled with the little mousie, though the side-view action sequences call for a stick or the cursor keys.

The game's graphical side is simply astonishing: who has had the stamina to draw this many 256-colour pictures, and with such warmth? Nobody looks at the EGA version voluntarily. The people you meet talk with Blade in comic-book style, partly animated. The sheer amount of text is one of the plus points, and the language is easy-to-follow Yank-comic English. You can get through the game's plot without finding everything essential, though in such a way that evil gets its reward and inherits the earth.

The aurality of Dragon is a delight, since deep in the bowels of every true Sierra fan's machine there is of course a Roland. Of course, for lack of capital you can listen to the SoundBlaster for a while, which puts out cheerful beeping in this game too.

The game fascinates with its cinematic execution and its randomness. When Game Over dawns, you wonder where it all went wrong. Should the bodybuilder lounging at the bar counter have been treated a tad more kindly?

1989 SyksySometimes a person gets lucky, and this is one of those times. I found Risk, a superb board game that has come out on the Amiga very much on the quiet.

In Risk you operate on a global scale. The main task is to wipe the other players off the map, but it can be done more subtly too. If you pick the mission option from the menu, you may have to 'liberate' one/several particular continents from the other players' hands. Sometimes you may be given the task of bumping off one particular player, or otherwise just eliminating all the other players from the world map.

As in the original it is modelled on, the implementation in the computer version is simple and functional. You just pick the 'liberate' option and start liberating countries from under the others' yoke. At the start you have three armies, one of which always stays behind to hold the liberated country. However, if the dice aren't kind, it can also happen that more armies get used up liberating a country, and they may even be sent back with bloody noses.

A good intermediate goal is to get a continent or two liberated before the other players. That earns you the so-called continent bonus, i.e. extra armies. The number of armies you receive each round can also be increased by liberating more territories: one new army for every three countries. And the more armies, the stronger your position.

The cards bring an interesting extra bonus of their own to the game. If you liberate a country during a round, you get a card. When you have three matching/different cards you get bonus units, anything from 4 all the way up to 250. At that point the others don't have much say in the matter.

There are plenty of different game options. In the menu you can set, among other things, the number of sides on the dice (2-9), which decides quite a lot in battles. You can choose how many bonus units the cards give you (0-250), and best of all: 2-5 players. You can also use ready-made scenario choices, in which each player is automatically given a level and starting countries (e.g.: Darkness - five players, four with one starting country each, one with 38).

Risk is a game in which strategy decides a great deal. Luck (=the dice) is just as important, but the right tactics usually settle it. It has an atmosphere all its own that pulls you back in again and again, even if an hour earlier you'd already had your fill of it. A recommended purchase.

1987The idea of this game is to raise the Titanic from the bottom of the Atlantic. The player is the leader of the expedition. The task is no easy one, since you have to manage to raise the wreck, keep on good terms with the press and, on top of all that, look after the finances.

The game begins in April. A month earlier a robot had attached eight lifting balls to the wreck. Because of a memory fault, nobody knows where the balls are. The player has to try to find them so that the Titanic can be raised.

The game is run from the main menu. From there you can go to the submarine, the press room or the office, or save your current position.

The submarine is steered with the keyboard and joystick. On screen you can see a window, the objects you're carrying and various status readouts. Inside the wreck you can leave buoys in different rooms to help you find your way.

The submarine's mechanical arm is easy to break if you don't steer the sub carefully. That isn't dangerous, but the repair bills are staggering and can drive the player into bankruptcy.

You have to know how to make proper use of the objects you find in the wreck. Some are needed to open doors, while others can be sold to raise more cash.

From the office you can apply to various backers for grants and see to equipment repairs. In the press room you have to hold press conferences where journalists interview the player. The questions have to be answered as truthfully as possible, while still keeping the backers' wishes in mind. Good publicity brings in more donations.

This game has lots of nice touches. The disk loading is turbocharged. All conversations with the various characters are done with droll animation. You see the speaker's head, which, with animated movements, "talks" into a speech bubble one word at a time.

The graphics weren't sensationally good, but they did their job. The sound effects sounded good, even though they were mostly limited to the signal beeps of the marker buoys.

1988Road Blasters is surely the dream of everyone who fancies themselves a driver. Not only do you get to speed, you also get to shoot all the friggin' morons and Sunday drivers into wafer-thin slices. That sure beats honking your horn and the international language of gestures every time.

Unfortunately the other drivers are armed too, and the roadsides are full of gun emplacements, so the guns really come in handy and aren't always even enough. Luckily a friendly neighbourhood helicopter delivers heftier shooting irons. And fuel, logically, is collected off the road. Road Blasters is basically an armed version of Outrun, but without the latter's varied terrain.

A warning light ought to flash up on the dashboard when you realise that Road Blasters was converted by the same outfit responsible for the C-64 Outrun. This time, however, they have outdone themselves, since Road Blasters is even duller and more primitive-looking than Outrun. And it sounds as awful as it looks.

The graphics are shoddy. Your own car and the plane that brings the equipment look more or less tolerable, but everything else on the screen is unpolished and crude. The animation is infuriatingly jerky because of the use of character graphics, and getting any impression of tarmac racing by beneath the vehicle takes imagination.

The sound is modest. When you drive normally there is no engine noise of any kind; it feels like trundling along in an electric car, speed-wise too, even though the speedometer claims you're doing well over two hundred miles an hour. Only activating the nitro injector (optional extra) coaxes a proper acceleration roar out of the speaker. The snatches of music are short and the other sounds are random pops, explosions and squeals.

Playability is miserable. The car obeys the stick well enough, but when the character-animated opponents move down the road clunk-clunk style in three steps from the horizon to right in front of your bonnet, targets at different distances seem to be exactly the same distance away. Which one do you overtake first? The roadside objects move on the same principle, and by the time a gun turret destroys you by shooting clearly wide of you, at the very latest, the curses start flying.

You can make a good driving game on the C-64, but you have to put some effort into it. Road Blasters has never even heard of that. The 16-bit machines may be in for a decent arcade conversion. Road Blasters would have the makings of one.

1987I'm a roadrunner, honey, and familiar from the Nakke comic. And the mean coyote chasing me really is Kelju Kojootti. The plot of Roadrunner, converted from the coin-op, is simple: the roadrunner dodges the pursuing coyote and fills its crop with birdseed, of which the road is full. If there's too long a break between meals, the soul leaves the body to go looking for a snack.

Just as in the comic, Wile E. Coyote has a bunch of lousy inventions with which he tries to get hold of the ingredients for a roadrunner roast. These include, among other things, a rocket-powered skateboard, a pogo stick and a strap-on backpack helicopter. Other hazards are mines, cars, ravines and whatnot.

The execution is highly professional. You recognise the main characters in the graphics straight away, and the backgrounds scroll along nicely. The bird also moves smoothly wherever the joystick tells it to. The spirit of the comic has been captured well, and the game in itself is fun.

The music is a chapter all of its own. Well-arranged versions of pieces such as the Sabre Dance and the Light Cavalry Overture keep things moving and don't grate on the ear like the fake-chirpy tra-la-la music of so many games.

There are about five different levels, after which extra hazards are added to them as required. Roadrunner does, however, have The Bad Thing: the cassette version is a multiload. The reason is, of course, the game's American origin. Over there, after all, cassette drives are pretty much a joke.

Roadrunner is an excellent arcade conversion. If only everyone aimed for the same standard instead of flooding the market with half-baked second-rate goods. Beep beep, as they say.

1987The date is 7 June 2000. 82% of the population of the United States has died in the grip of an artificial plague spread across the country, the Soviet Union has wiped out the major population centres with nuclear missiles, and on top of that, occupation troops vaccinated against the disease are patrolling the coastal cities.

Only heavily armed road gangs can move about in a land ruled by anarchy, cannibals and mutants. But there is still hope, because eight men of science (women!!) have been researching the secret of a vaccine in different parts of the country. A solution is close, but now they all have to be brought to a secret central laboratory so the results can be analysed. You, a novice gang leader, have been chosen to find those eight precious people and deliver them safely to their destination. At first you have just one little car and eight men. To save the human race, however, you have to acquire men (hundreds of them), vehicles (trucks), supplies (car tuning kits and whatnot) and specialists (a drill instructor, a doctor and a politician) so that you survive the journey across the devastated land.

Now this is what I call action. Never mind that the plague has killed four fifths of the gum-chewing Yanks, there still seem to be plenty of them left to kill. Round every bend there seem to be motorcycle gangs armed to the teeth lying in wait, at least judging by the amount of blood on the blade (the meat plough) of the bulldozer that clears the road for my gang. On top of that, in the cities the local gangsters as well as the occupiers try to set up ambushes, but a volley from a couple of hundred guns in the direction of the first rustle usually has them cooling off in coffins. Captured cities are of course taken under your own control (Long live the Lake Erie Vegetarian Power!).

As an idea, Roadwar 2000 is magnificent. The thought of leading a road gang that stops at nothing across a war-ravaged United States makes every soul corrupted by violent entertainment (Mad Max) rejoice. And since Roadwar is also fairly detailed - five different grades of fighter, 19 different vehicle types from a motorbike to a truck with a full trailer, without going overboard with things like different types of firearm or crew seating positions in each car (which someone will of course miss as well) - it has what it takes to become one of the classics of strategy gaming.

But, but - Roadwar's weakness is its all-pervading clumsiness. It has clearly been written in Basic, so everything happens as if in frozen molasses, even though it isn't even real-time. A couple of bugs have also slipped in, such as a road battle ending prematurely even though a vehicle that was originally yours, captured by the enemy, is still in the baddies' hands, or the mutant attack that always follows an epidemic among your troops (about 10% die) - somewhere a RETURN statement has been left off the end of a subroutine.

1988Njamcrunch! Just when life was starting to seem all too easygoing after the pacification of the American continent, terrorists led by Wunatolah Toumein (funny thing, it's as if I'd heard that name somewhere) are literally tearing life in Europe to shreds. The scars of a biological war fought some twenty years ago are still visible in Europe, as is the crater left by a nuclear bomb the terrorists set off (model: extremely dirty, i.e. it produces a magnificent radioactive fallout). And more craters are on the way unless the hero who already saved America in Roadwar 2000 (pronounced 'you') puts things in order and finds the hidden bombs and the terrorists' headquarters in time. Everyone who loves Mad Max, mindless blood-splattering and above all Roadwar 2000 can start squealing with delight, because this time players get to run riot in, say, Helsinki after first dropping in to clean out the Hermitage in Leningrad. You can also bring along the gang you put together in Roadwar 2000, and you'd better, because although the player gets quite a band of cutthroats right from the start, the terrorist death squads patrolling Europe's roads are such tough opponents that you can't really hold your own against them with just a Corvette.

Along the way you can try to find or hijack new vehicles as the paint flakes off the old ones, recruit new troops, shoot up mutants and cannibals, in other words have some real fun for once. You can also search for all sorts of supplies, have an audience with the Pope, tune up your vehicles, get messages from a terrorist organisation fighting against the terrorists (hmmmmm) and of course seize new cities (long live the Oligarchic Republic of Botanistania) etc.

Someone may ask what the point of a game like this really is. At the very least it makes every educationalist stick their head in the nearest bush. The idea of the game, after all, is to overthrow a reign of terror by being even worse than the terrorists, and along the way to carry out a rather dubious population reduction programme, i.e. to shoot half of the Europeans who survived the war, the plagues and Marvel comics.

Point or no point, Roadwar Europea is just insanely fun to play. The Amiga and ST versions in particular are a pleasure thanks to their speed, whereas owners of the 8-bits will find their last nerve taking a beating as the action gets badly sticky, especially in the combat scenes. On the other hand, like a good role-playing game, the plot is all the more gripping. Buy it before this fun gets banned too.

PS. 'Njamcrunch!' is the sound you hear when an armoured bulldozer tuned to do a hundred (miles an hour) collides head-on with a motorcycle and sidecar.

1988For the seventeen millionth time, an era of peace and prosperity once again reigns in the universe. Computers take care of all the boring jobs, such as testing games, and people concentrate on travelling and reading Marvel comics.

But alas! The computer overseeing the space roads that link the moons orbiting the dead planet Armageddon, the scene of the last war, has gone haywire. So there's nothing for it but to take the old combat vehicles - the Battlespheres - out of their storage grease and send them to clean up the space roads. Only somebody forgot to mention that, unlike in the comics, these creepy-crawlies shoot back!

As is the fashion these days, Roadwars can be played either alone or with a friend. There are always two battle spheres on the track, though, with the computer controlling one of them when needed. The game can be played either as a duel or as a fighting pair, in which case you're not quite so likely to end up running your buddy off the edge of the road.

What's puzzling about Roadwars is that although the action is really fast and the game characters are well animated, the tracks don't change enough. Even just varying the colours more would make pushing on to the next level more worthwhile. As it is, nothing happens except that the baddies get an order of magnitude crankier.

For fans of fast-paced, well-made action games Roadwars is a real must-buy. It can even be recommended to those more inclined towards Zen Buddhism, as a snack between meditation sessions.

1990 SyksyYou don't often run into original ideas in console games, but Robo Warrior at least tries to be something more than a Mario copy that has been faded threadbare by being duplicated for the umpteenth time.

A robot toddler championing the cause of heroism toddles through top-down, horizontally scrolling mazes. Besides a pea-spitter, the armament includes time bombs, with which bushes, pillars and other obstacles in the terrain can be blown to smithereens. On top of clearing a path, the point of all the blasting is to dig up equipment and uncover secret passages leading to dark vaults. The range of equipment is wide, covering missiles, light for the darkness, energy chargers and other mostly familiar stuff.

To clear a level you have to find two items, a vase and a key. Without the vase the level never ends but repeats the same scenery endlessly, while the key is needed to get out. You don't get a proper grip on the game straight away, since already on the first level you have to blow up a zillion scraps of bush before the vase finally turns up.

You can always continue from the last level you reached, but you still won't get through the game in one sitting. Totally pitch-black levels have been slipped in along the way, so if you've squandered all your light sources, you're better off giving up of your own accord. There are no passwords, so a game that has run into a dead end has to be started over from the beginning. Somewhere around the halfway mark the game gets so numbing that it's doubtful whether you'll ever have the stamina to play it through.

1989 KevätRobocop was a film that blew like a fresh breeze through the stale film offerings and made you forget all the bloody stupid rambo-eddiemurphy idiot flicks. It was funny, intelligent and satisfyingly violent, even though the butchered Finnish version was like Pommac compared to champagne. Anyway, this masterful film is now a game as well.

Robocop follows the film's plot admirably closely (which you, dear reader, are assumed to know, and if you don't - your own screw-up), which is why the game too comes in nine pieces. Police officer Murphy was in considerably more pieces, until his usable parts were combined with a cybernetic body and the result was Robocop - part man, part machine, all cop.

In fact the game follows the film's plot so closely that a synopsis won't fit in this space. That is no virtue in itself, of course, so what is the game like? As a matter of fact, the outward look of the film has been captured very well.

Thus cloaked in the robe of objectivity, and taking Robocop as a game among games, it can be stated that Robocop is a pretty good conversion. The graphics are truly excellent, and the variety offered by the different game sections improves the overall picture. A minus goes to being forced to listen to a soundtrack that doesn't belong to the film, as a result of which there are no sound effects. Even though the playability isn't top class, emotionally uncommitted gamers are nevertheless likely to be satisfied.

But I'm not! The game deals with possibly the best film in the world, Robocop, and against that background Robo has gone badly astray. As early as the first part, a few pathetic little punks armed with popguns effortlessly snuff out the cyborg who, in the film, got shot at in a way that makes the faint-hearted shudder, and Robo didn't even flinch. And why does he have to collect extra weapons, when the film's impressive power pistol already comes as part of the basic kit? This isn't the Robo I love, this is some stallone in tinfoil.

Even though I'll probably end up the only one in the world, I can't help but shed a couple of tears and say that I'm really disappointed with Ocean's take on Robocop. Well, that's life in a big city.

1987The idea of the game is simple and the action is simple, but the game demands a certain amount of planning, and that is where much of its charm lies.

Your task is to fasten the girders that slide back and forth across the level, either in any arrangement you like or in a predetermined one. They are fastened with bolts, which the construction worker you control deftly spins into place at the press of a button.

Once all the girders have been fastened, the man has to walk back along them to the starting point to get to the next floor.

If the placement of the girders is free, you can bolt them down in any position you like, as long as you remember to leave yourself a way back! If, on the other hand, a 'blueprint' appears at the bottom of the screen, the girders have to be fastened exactly according to it.

The colour of the bolts also helps here; if you fasten a girder in the wrong place, the bolt turns red and you have to fix it.

Extra men or bonus money can be had from the yellow or green bolts that appear on the level every now and then. So in this game you don't collect points but money, which you get for every bolt you screw in. The higher the floor, the higher the pay for each bolt driven home. On the top floors (of which there are 100 in all) the pay is as much as 170 bucks a bolt!

The game also has a time limit. You have a set amount of time to fasten the girders on one floor. If you don't make it in time, your man vanishes into thin air and a new one takes his place. You start with three men, and more may be had from the bonus bolts mentioned above.

For beginners there is a practice mode in which the time isn't counted at all. No pay comes your way either, since this way you could carry on playing forever. After all, the man only dies when the time runs out. You can't knock him off a girder even if you try.

The game has a two-player option, and three difficulty levels and three pay levels to choose from. Its good points are fast loading, clear and pleasant graphics, suitable background music, easy playability and a pause option. If you like climbing games that call for some thinking, Rock'n' Bolt is a good buy.

1990 KevätThe game's misleading name refers quite literally to rolling and not at all to rock music. For in Rock'n Roll you steer the pet character of offbeat games, the rolling ball. Mind you, you can no longer really talk about originality, since this loose branch of the game family is getting crowded too: Marble Madness, Spindizzy, Quedex, Red Led, Incredible Shrinking Sphere and so on.

In RR you roll the ball to the goal, but the journey turns out to be downright winding. Obstacles and hindrances include locked gates, one-way lanes, breakable floors, acid pools, ice fields, fans, Quedex-style pipes and whatnot. If that wasn't enough, the mazes also hold supplies to collect, such as keys and money, with which you can get an armoured ball, snow chains and other useful stuff. By collecting eyes you can piece together a map of the play area, which is just as well, since the area is vast and using the teleports scrambles your sense of direction.

RR has ideas by the basketful, but nearly all of them have been nicked from other people's games. So what, when the result is a product this polished. The little ball obeys the mouse control without a murmur and the scrolling follows along smoothly. The pleasantly clear and crisply defined graphics have been given some extra eye candy by scrolling the lower level, visible through the holes, at a different speed.

The twistiness of the levels is just the thing to keep your interest alive, but there's one bad blunder in the design. With 32 large levels in the game, using passwords would have been a kind gesture towards the player. The instructions offer a little comfort, since according to them the game is supposed to have shortcuts. Another irritating feature is the perkily rocking background music, which you can't stand without screaming, but then again nobody's forcing you to listen to it.

Maybe ball-rolling is starting to be a subject that's been drained dry, but even so RR is a risk-free investment for fans of skill games.

1987Rock'n Wrestle is a 3-D beat-kick-pummel type of game. This time the sport is American pro wrestling, with a total of 28 different throws, punches, holds and maulings at your disposal, complete with crushing sound effects.

Once the program has loaded, a demo starts, showing off the most spectacular moves to the sound of rollicking music.

If you choose one-player mode, you are the blond Gorgeous Greg. You have nine opponents standing between you and the world championship. The computer is a pretty tough opponent, so you won't beat all the men in a hurry. A two-player game is also possible.

A bout lasts five minutes, after which whoever has the better score wins, or if you manage to pin your opponent under you twice, you are the winner. During a pin the computer counts up to three in a really garbled voice.

In the game you can, among other things, spin your opponent above your head and then slam him to the mat, put on a full nelson, headbutt, kick, punch, squeeze and even climb onto a corner post and dive off it belly first, and other such fun.

A nice little extra is the camera flash that goes off now and then in the dark stands. Rock'n Wrestle is a good game, especially if you happen to like its hugely popular predecessor, The Way of the Exploding Fist.

1989 KevätCinemaware is known for its 'interactive movies'. Up to now, beautiful graphics and clever sound effects have concealed an extremely superficial game that quickly gets boring, but Rocket Ranger, which has been the subject of a couple of years of programming and constant redesign, seems to be a different story altogether.

The game is set in 1940, when the nasty Nazis are at the height of their power. People in another dimension notice that the war in this dimension is having effects on their own lives too, so naturally something has to be done. Having chosen a suitable person (you, of course), they send that person a rocket pack, a radium pistol and instructions.

The player's task is to overthrow the Nazi tyranny by flying to the moon and destroying the Nazi base there. But the only way to the moon is by moon rocket, and one can be built by stealing four moon rocket parts from the Nazis. Where the parts are kept can be found out by sending agents around the world. By letting the player decide how the agents operate, Cinemaware has managed to give the game a touch of strategy as well, which in turn adds depth to the game, that vital ingredient so clearly missing from its earlier concoctions.

The game is spread across two disks, but efficient packing routines have squeezed in rather more data than that. The cinematic interludes, such as the Ranger flying across the screen, don't always play out the same way.

As is Cinemaware's way, the graphics are excellent, but the sound effects also play an important part. The German interrogator's digitised questions, spoken with a German accent, do their bit to create atmosphere in the game. The action scenes, though simple, are well designed, and there are enough of them, and varied enough, to keep interest up.

Rocket Ranger is excellent not only in its playability and outer shell but also as a game. Clearly Cinemaware's best game so far.

1991 Kevät2000 AD's comics have been getting some heavy recycling. The game versions of Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper are already on their second round, and they certainly deserve it too, if only they could capture at least as much of the spirit of the original stories as the Commodore 64's Nemesis the Warlock did.

An adapted Murphy's law fits these games: 'The better the subject, the bigger the disappointment'. Once again the ideas people have frolicked through the fence where it's lowest, or rotted away altogether. The result is a characterless contraption in which you run back and forth on flat ground and now and then change floors by lift. The game does stand out from the crowd to the extent that, for a change, the hero's skin colour is blue.

Enough moaning; at least an effort has been made to make full use of the hero character. The mohawked mutant's first job is to find the comrades-in-arms stored on biochips, Gunner, Bagman and Helm, in other words the kit. The Norts polluting Nu-Earth are swept out of the way as a matter of routine, and on the side you solve simple puzzles, a few of which contain some clever touches. For example, you can neatly get round a retina scan with a detached head.

In keeping with the spirit of the comic, the equipment stays alert, which in practice has been implemented so that the icon representing a biochip starts flashing if the buddy spots something interesting. Surely it would have been more effective, though, to pop a speech bubble on the side of the piece of kit.

The middle section of the game, meanwhile, is Space Harrier-style flying over a chequered floor scrolling in three dimensions, which doesn't look especially interesting.

A dark-toned background would have suited the subject better than a garishly coloured toilet-tile landscape. The hero's anatomy isn't quite right either. The swipes with the rifle butt and the knife look good, but the walk is like an orang-utan's and the jumping like a kangaroo with a bad back. And it's a strange thing that such a good subject hasn't inspired some proper background music.

Apart from the fine opening and closing strips, the game doesn't do its original enough justice, but it does at least have playability and a suitable difficulty level. You also feel you're getting more for your money, since the manual has the first two Rogue Trooper stories printed in it, drawn by the master Dave Gibbons.

1988Do you have what it takes to be a Rolling Thunder agent? Does Rolling Thunder have what it takes to be a game?

1960 - New York. Maboo intends to take over the world. A subdivision of the World Criminal Police sent female agent Leila on the job, but a man's job takes a man. Leila got caught. Agent Albatross was sent on a rescue mission.

Albatross walks along corridors shooting hooded enemies, who are colour-coded according to how much punishment they can take. The hooded men naturally shoot back, but as long as Albatross just keeps low there are no problems.

Now and then Mr Agent tanks up his gun with ammo, and before long he even finds a machine gun. Every floor has a time limit, and Agent Albatross has to be at the end of the floor before it runs down to zero.

The C-64 Rolling isn't much of a show. Not many frames have been spent on animating the Lego men, and the agent himself flounders about comically. But then, what can you expect from a man called Albatross. On the Amiga the graphics don't exactly dazzle either, but at least the walking goes better. The C-64's sound side is pretty pathetic too; on the Amiga at least the guns bang properly.

Rolling Thunder is a really middling shoot-'em-up whose best side is that the enemies at least go flying satisfyingly when they get hit. Maybe that's exactly why the Amiga version got played a lot more than the game deserves.

1988Nothing gets you interested in a game faster than the phrase "Forbidden to under-18s". And when the back cover promises the chance to adventure (or rather, debauch) in a private club, as either a man or a woman, and to try for "deeper contact" with the opposite sex, the disks were in the machine before the shrink-wrap had time to settle on the floor.

The Dome is supposedly a fancy private club, with both a bar and a nightclub as hunting grounds. Should any prey get caught in the net, the Dome also offers hotel rooms.

REATD is done text-adventure style, i.e. the player types in their tactical moves on those rare occasions when the program gives them the chance.

Anyone expecting the same level of lyrical and sensitive depiction of physical love that "men's" magazines offer will be disappointed. Although you hardly need to use your imagination, the scenes are described in good taste.

There are practically no graphics at all (dang), just text flickering on the screen. Even so, the disk spins every few seconds, which on the Amiga's turbo disk drives costs you not only time but your nerves too. Naturally there's no sound at all. But who cares, if the game is otherwise good.

Which it certainly isn't. Instead, it's a feeble multiple-choice exercise that has been sneakily disguised as a complex game. The parser is utterly hopeless, there seem to be only a couple of options in any situation, and on the whole the execution is more dreadful than dreadful. What finally ruins everything is the option to pick any scene and even start it from any point you like, so it'll be a miracle if anyone can be bothered to play it for more than a couple of days.

The most interesting thing in the game is the chance to test your knowledge of the sexual behaviour of the opposite sex, but that's no reason to buy Romantic E. Congratulations to Microlllusion: it has ruined a subject that cannot be ruined.

1990 SyksyThe year 1879, southern Africa: the British forces are up against a Zulu army fifty thousand men strong. The 137 men of an outpost by the name of Rorke's Drift have been surrounded by four thousand Zulus. The task: stay alive for the next twelve hours. That's how nerve-tingling the game's opening set-up is.

Rorke's Drift is an honest man-against-man strategy game. The theatre of war is the outpost, viewed obliquely from above, where tin-soldier-like Brits stand rigidly to attention awaiting the player's instructions. By clicking with the mouse the figures are roused to life and ordered to walk, run or charge to new positions. They don't need any extra prodding to get stuck into the hand-to-hand scuffles of close combat.

The Zulu attack and the close combat carry on by themselves, depicted in animation, until the player pauses the action to hand out new orders. At the same time you can take potshots with rifles at Zulu warriors who have strayed within sight. During the command pause you can move from place to place with the help of the map and check each soldier's individual attributes, such as state of health, amount of ammunition and shooting accuracy.

RD is a good attempt at a strategy game that runs in real time and uses the visual means of an action game. If only it worked in practice. There's no sense whatsoever in the way the little men are moved around. The slightest brush against a comrade-in-arms' flypaper coat and you're stuck. Scrolling the battlefield during combat is tragicomic, since at worst it advances a millimetre a week. The logic limps too. For example, if you move a man in between, his weapon always has to be reloaded. And if you shoot the Zulu in front of a private who is engrossed in close combat, the fellow carries on flailing away for who knows how long.

Thanks to its neat graphics and good ideas, the game might have made it into the top ranks of featherweight strategy games. Unfortunately it is so unpolished and clumsy to play that the whole thing slips badly into the red.

1990 SyksyNew and wondrous programming techniques always have a charm of their own, even if the game happens to be a Space invaders clone. Rotox at least isn't one of those, but it is a straightforward shoot-'em-up all the same. What's new is the rotating playfield.

The landscape, seen from above, is built from polygons that spin around the hero standing at the bottom of the screen. The commando roaming the polygon jungle, meanwhile, has its gaze locked straight on the top edge of the playfield. The effect really does make your head spin.

Rotox's game idea is simple. The levels are divided into nine sections, which at first you can't move between. New routes open up as fast as you manage to clear the blocks of bogeymen. By collecting canisters you can bolt more hardware onto the cyborg's athletic frame, such as missile and fragmentation bomb launchers. The important equipment also includes jetpack fuel, since the protagonist can't jump and easily loses its footing and slips into the void waiting below.

The unusual technical execution, combined with mysteriously growling sounds, creates a peculiar, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Scouring the ten unreal game environments, you can't help forgetting that this is, when all's said and done, a thoroughly ordinary action game. A couple of brutal basic weaknesses force you back down to earth. You lose all your hard-won weapons from a single misstep, and those are superhumanly hard to avoid. The most deflating piece of illogic is that moving and rotating platforms don't carry the little guy along with them; instead they slide out from underfoot in an instant.

The filled polygon graphics spin around the screen quite smoothly. So it's rather odd that even a small rabble of run-of-the-mill wrigglers slows the game down considerably, though seldom to the point of being a nuisance. When it comes to extra lives the game is pleasantly generous. Death gets to come calling a good many times before game over turns up to collect you.

The novelty value that is Rotox's trump card may wear off fairly quickly, but even then what's left is a clearly better-than-average shoot-'em-up that will keep your spirits up for a long time.

1989 KevätThe number Uno favourite of football fans, or football hooligans, is Roy Race, manager of the Melchester Rovers team. Roy is no real footballer, though, but the hero of the Buster comic.

The football club's bingo isn't really managing to bring in the money, and so the Rovers' home ground is under threat of becoming a shopping centre. Roy has, however, organised a fundraising match so as to pay off the team's debts, but at the last moment everything is about to hit the post. Someone has kidnapped four of the team's players and Roy has only a couple of hours to rescue them from the kidnappers' clutches. The problem is the punks and football hooligans who have arrived in town and are trying to stop Roy.

The game is split into two parts. First you wander around the town's streets looking for the players by talking to passers-by and flashing a Pepsodent smile. When the time limit runs out, the game moves to the football pitch, where the decisive match is played.

This part is ordinary football, with the difference that Roy's team only has as many players as he has managed to find.

In terms of playability Roy of the Rovers is nothing much to speak of. The adventure game in the first part is fairly run-of-the-mill, and the football itself is the most awful version I have played on the C-64. In larger doses the game's music causes chronic brain atrophy, and the graphics are of that nothing-special-but-it-works style too. In a way this cassette gets you two games for the price of one, but then even together they aren't worth one full price. Don't let the name fool you...

1989 Syksy"If you want to see action sports, this is the place to be", announces the digitised voice of the TV presenter on the Amiga. This is a licence of that big-league style of sporting hokum in which yuppies play with their techno-toys. By all indications, Ocean has found a more rewarding subject than usual for a licensed game.

Jet skis, speedboats and whatnot churn up the waves on a vertically scrolling pond, which has to be lapped following the route map shown on screen. Sand, meanwhile, gets kicked up on a track that scrolls in every direction, where the aerodynamics of all manner of four- and six-wheeled buggies are put to the test. Both the land and the water elements are torn up by mines, which send the contraptions spinning and hurtling off hell for leather. The obstacle course again uses vertical scrolling, and the body's surplus stock of adrenaline is burned off by hopping over logs, wading through mudholes and clambering over rope obstacles. On top of the usual joystick torture, the event demands precise timing and quick changes of rhythm. A splendid insight from the makers: you can't run in water. Go on, try it.

There are nine events in all, and slightly fewer different courses (strangely enough, the C-64 turned out to have more of them than the Amiga). Each vehicle has its own characteristic speed and handling, so there's plenty to learn. For the most twitchy gizmos I recommend a stiff joystick, and for the obstacle course a three-month bodybuilding regime. To stave off boredom, the contests are divided into three TV programmes, whose content is drawn at random.

Pacing you there are always two computer-controlled opponents, at least one of whom you'd better beat. It would add hugely to the fun if you could run the others off into the undergrowth, but they don't bat an eyelid at collisions. The poor player, on the other hand, gets battered by the others every now and then. An irritating feature, but without it the game would be too easy.

The C-64 version holds up surprisingly well next to the Amiga. Its only flaw is the missing route map, which makes the water events awkward. Then again, for whatever reason the Amiga has had one event left out entirely (the six-wheeled 'supercats'). The graphics are neat and functional in both versions. The Amiga's sound effects and short snatches of crackly music are run-of-the-mill, whereas the C-64 spits out of its sound chip a combination of effects and pleasant background music. The sturdily kicking digitised drums of the title music in particular are a joy to the ears.

Both versions have oodles of pull thanks to their good execution and variety. Well done Ocean, investing in quality pays off.

1989 SyksyThe Running Man is a TV show of the future in which a few criminals are egged on to gawp at one another and their surroundings in a fenced-off area covered by TV cameras. After giving them a brief head start, heavily armed hunters follow on their heels and slaughter the criminals while the nation drools in front of its television sets. Not one criminal has ever made it out alive, but as the advert says, Schwarzenegger hasn't tried his hand yet.

Grandslam's The Running Man is based on the film of the same name, which is probably doing the rounds right now to houses somewhat less than packed all over Finland. The film in turn is VERY loosely based on Stephen King's novella of the same name. In fact the similarity is limited to the names of the main characters and the title of the novella; everything else has been changed. The book is a million times better, believe you me. Anyway, Arnie-boy plays Ben Richards, then, and in the game the joystick-waggler controls Ben Richards.

Having read the book and gagged my way through the film, I eagerly loaded the game. You can make a truly brilliant game out of a theme like this...(game starts...a moment of play)...or else a truly miserable botch-job. The designers have once again taken the easy way out. Instead of hearty violence and mayhem, what appears on screen is a sideways-scrolling Rolling Thunder clone. A lump that looks a bit like Ben Richards sways from left to right, booting dogs, jumping over obstacles and booting whoever comes his way.

Graphically the game isn't all that dreadful; the multi-layer scrolling works nicely. The sound side is nothing much to write home about: the C-64 does what it can and the Amiga plays digitised music and effects every now and then. Playability, then, is the criterion that sets the machines apart. The C-64 wipes the floor with the Amiga, you see, and it certainly isn't the first or the last time that happens. On the Amiga our hero sticks and scrabbles about the screen any old how, but on the Commodore 64 the pixel man at least does what he's told. In a nutshell: a slightly below-average game of a bad film.

1989 KevätAnd there I was thinking that no one could make an Eastern Front strategy game better than Kampfgruppe... SSG, the Australian challenger to SSI, has once again shown that a lot can be got out of even subjects gnawed to the bone, as long as the work is done carefully.

Russia contains several different battles, the largest of which covers the entire war on the Eastern Front, all the way from Operation Barbarossa to the end of the war. Granted, the game leaves out the whole Western Front with its Brits and Yanks, but the effects of the battles over there show up as a gradual decline in the reinforcements the Germans receive after the Normandy landings.

The battles of Finland's Continuation War are missing too. The explanation offered in the manual is the scant action on the northern front and the 1200 bytes of memory saved that way. Pshaw.

The game can have eight players in all, two of whom act as commanders-in-chief and three on each side as commanders of the various army corps. Each of these roles can also be handled by the computer using its own AI routines, so if you want a quick game you can take on just the commander-in-chief role, or, when time allows, take command of the corps as well.

Otherwise the same comments apply to Russia as to SSG's other new games - the menu control used is easy to pick up, the manual and maps are excellent, the game is truly multifaceted. In short, I sincerely recommend it to all friends of strategy games. Russia is not, however, suitable as anyone's first strategy game, since it is practically the most multifaceted/convoluted SSG strategy game I have played.

1989 SyksyThe crown for best motorbike game on the 16-bit machines is under threat when a company like MicroProse swings into action. The former king's fear is justified, too, since RVF Honda beats Super Hang-On hands down.

So the idea is motorcycling, and the aim is to get to race against the world's best on famous circuits. The player starts at regional level, competing against other no-hoper riders, and you have to finish the season sitting on the top step of the podium if you want promotion to the next class. By winning that one too, the player gets into the championship series, where a rider's skills are put to the test.

What makes things tricky is that the track has annoying puddles of oil and water, which do no good at all to the bodily being of a rider hurtling into the slop at two hundred and something, not to mention the being of the bike. Depending on how violent the crash is, the bike can lose its instruments, one of its gears or even the whole engine. On top of that, all the riders start from the same line, meaning the whole gang has nearly identical bikes, with the exception that the human player's bike falls behind on the straights (whoopee, just try winning when the others leave you standing on the straights...).

The game is presented in practically the same way as Super Hang-On, i.e. from behind and just a tiny bit from above. The scenery isn't quite as pretty and varied as in SH-O, but the speed of the game makes up for the shortcomings of the graphics. For a change, there's nothing bad to say about the ST's sound - quite the opposite. A seemingly endless digitised piece of music plays at the start of the game, and during the game the roar of the engine is digitised too. A nice little detail is the way the sound changes around the peak of the power band.

Automatic saving of progress, thirty-odd tracks, the option for several guys to race each other and a superb implementation all together make RVF Honda a real treat that won't leave anyone cold.