1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1991 KevätLast Christmas Domark put a lot into Hard Drivin'; this Christmas the mantle passes to S.T.U.N.Runner. The idea is to speed along the tracks on a rocket sled, collect stars, reach the next section within the time limit and of course shoot at the oncoming traffic.

The sled does a brisk 500 miles an hour, provided you can take the bends hanging on the outer wall. And you'd better, since even on the very first easy junk track you have one second of leeway. So if the meter drops below this magic 500 miles, goodbye to going any further.

The Amiga graphics are Jurgen Friedrich's vectors, whose biggest flaw is completely inadequate speed. The sense of speed is like riding a moped into a headwind. Some sort of sense of speed only arises when the sled scrapes into a boost pad. The slow graphics are quite a wonder in themselves, since considerably more complex vectors have spun considerably faster on the Amiga.

In principle - a wonder in itself - the Amiga S.T.U.N.Runner would be an interesting game, if only the time limit had been designed for human beings.

The Commodore 64 S.T.U.N.Runner looks quite splendid on the surface: the graphics are fine in their simplicity. The enemies flying at you are recognisably distinct, and the game's sounds sound quite reasonable too, but because of the slowness the playability lags badly behind its other merits.

The 64 S.T.U.N.Runner is a slightly depressing experience, as the thought creeps in that the game's slowness has more to do with the old C64 than with the programming.

1987Saboteur confirms my belief that making a good game doesn't necessarily require a top-of-the-range machine. People have always sniggered at the Spectrum's graphics and sound generator when comparing it with, say, the Commodore 64, but just try this one! Saboteur's graphics and sound will leave even the harshest critic speechless for a while.

The task of the player character, a ninja hired as a saboteur, is to find a disk containing a dangerous program and escape in a helicopter that is somewhere in the building. If you manage to plant the time bomb found in the building in the computer centre, or find the disk in question and take it with you, you get an extra bonus. You can also escape without the disk or without setting the bomb, but then you go without a bonus.

Standing in your way are armed guards and dogs, which hang around your ankles and sap your strength until you finally die. The guards can kick and punch, but they can't kill with a single blow the way you can. You can also throw knives, lengths of pipe, stones and other such objects you find at the guards and dogs - anything except the time bomb and the disk.

In my opinion Saboteur is a terrific game for anyone who likes fast-paced adventure games, though it should be played with a joystick rather than the keyboard. Since there are nine different difficulty levels, the game will keep you entertained for a long time.

1988In its day Saboteur I, in which you had to break into a central control room, became a sales hit in Finland too. Now the player takes on the role of the ninja's beautiful sister, who sets out to rescue her wounded brother, left behind in that very building. At the same time you're supposed to find a computer tape split into many pieces, which holds important data controlling the dictator's missiles.

At the start of the game you can pick the difficulty level you want. The difficulty is governed by, among other things, the number of pieces of computer tape, more tasks and a time limit. That does away with the excessive easiness of Saboteur I.

To get into the dictator's building you first have to fly a hang glider, let go at the right moment and drop into the building. While searching for items around the building you have to avoid guards, pumas and deadly bats. Then again, killing them earns you bonus points. Once you've got everything you need together, you have to find a motorbike and escape.

Saboteur II has improved a lot since the first version. The whole building complex contains over 700 screens and the graphics are clear. The sound effects are limited to just a few punches; there's no music at all.

You can play the game either as a fighting-and-bashing game or as a full-blooded adventure game. Whichever of these two game types you prefer, Saboteur II offers a good way to pass the time as the autumn evenings draw in.

1987In this jungle maze your task is to find the four lost pieces of an amulet and then find your way out of the jungle. The game has over 250 screens, so this is another game you won't be finishing any time soon.

The player controls a brave jungle adventurer with either the keyboard or a joystick. The man moves in four directions, following the paths. When you reach the edge of the screen you move on to the next one, and so on. Just strolling around the leafy labyrinth would be nice, but unfortunately you don't get off that easily.

All sorts of jungle creatures appear on the paths, and they can make short work of one of your adventurer's lives (of which there are four to begin with). Monkeys, hippos, natives, snakes, spiders and many other creatures come popping up in front of you, and the player has to fight to get anywhere.

For this you can use a sword, with which the jungle man nimbly hacks the way clear. The critters vanish with a pop, but soon more of them turn up again.

Every now and then orchids of different colours burst into bloom near you. Each one affects the player in its own way. One paralyses you for a little while, while another makes you invulnerable for a moment. Then you can scurry past all the beasts.

Along the way you can also collect plenty of treasures, which earn you points. Rings, money bags and so on turn up on your path every so often. The most valuable, however, is a small red statue, which gives you an extra life when you find it. The graphics in Sabre Wulf are undeniably fine. Both the plant-lined paths and the various creatures are drawn clearly and colourfully.

Play Sabre Wulf for a long time and mild boredom may start to threaten, but thanks to its excellent playability, probably not too soon.

Among labyrinth adventures, Sabre Wulf is in my opinion right up at the top.

1987Like most Spectrum games, Sai Combat can be controlled from the keyboard or with various types of joystick. The joystick is clearly the best option, since in this game too the keyboard reading has been done a bit sloppily: after a tight bit of fighting, several keypresses can be left stored in the keyboard buffer to mess up your play later on.

There are no difficulty levels in the game, but you can start from where you left off in your previous game. You can also beat up your mate if you own a joystick - that way you needn't resort to real violence...

Of the karate games I've seen, Sai Combat is the first to explain even the background of the martial art in question, and not just how to control the moves from the keyboard. The plot is pretty run-of-the-mill: fight successfully and earn higher belt grades. Only the scenery and the calibre of opponent change, though at the higher belt grades there are a few little surprises too... The instructions hardly go into the 18 different moves, five of which are for moving around - they just about tell you which joystick position corresponds to which move. The Way of the Exploding Fist, for example, presents its moves properly, with pictures.

Sai Combat pays commendable attention to movement and to the authenticity of the blows. The characters move relatively smoothly. Whenever a character is hit, it reacts according to the force of the blow and where it lands, even collapsing to the ground for a moment. So different blows have different effects - just like in real life. Most of the techniques are genuine too, though the kicks, among others, are a bit stiff.

1989 KevätOver the years I've seen so many different sideways-scrolling shoot-em-ups that only a rare few of us can be bothered to stay interested for more than a moment. So when I saw this new addition to the "collect the whole arsenal" games, I expected nothing more than "quite nice" from this descendant of Nemesis.

Golly, this child of man was wrong yet again. Instead of the standard mush, Salamander is a game that once again pushes back the phantom limits of Commodore 64 games. In fact, Salamander may well be the best shoot'em-up I have seen, on any machine.

I was sold rather quickly. Who could resist a spaceship that, inside half a minute, can boast three support craft and a whole bundle of punchy weapons? The gross destructive output is unbelievable. Just as unbelievable is the surreal background graphics, which offer such wonders as tentacles reaching out from the walls, teeth, jets of flame, walls that grow out at you, and myriads of other unbelievable enemies. The graphics are, after all, the work of Bob Stevenson himself. Nor does the playability knock down the bar set by the graphics, as the whole game seems to have been designed for the player's delight. Salamander's only weak point is the multiload, because when game over comes around you're annoyingly stuck waiting a minute or two.

Both as a game and as a feat of programming, Salamander is simply so good a game that it's hard to believe anyone could top it. Hopefully someone will at least try.

1987English celebrity beauty Samantha Fox has digitised her charms for posterity and for skilled poker players. Samantha's naked bits can be admired by playing seven-card poker, and winning. If Samantha doesn't tempt you, the same game can be played, using the program on the other side of the tape, against three opponents who each play in a different way.

Samantha's pictures had been left fairly small (about ¼ of the screen) to save memory, so in spite of the digital technology they were a bit fuzzy.

Samantha's poker skills have been talked up no end in foreign magazines. So the disappointment was great - or then again maybe not - when Samantha ran out of money and clothes after only about an hour's play.

More than Samantha's eagerness to cast her clothes aside, though, what bothered me was the game's sluggish pace. After every hand, you see, you have to wind through all the pictures of Samantha that the player is entitled to see. The game also had a few delays placed in baffling spots, which keep the player waiting with a finger poised above the keyboard for permission to make the next choice.

The raises to the pot are a fixed amount each round, so the player has to make do with the raises the computer picks. All the choices (pass, fold, raise, see) are made from the keyboard. So leisurely admiring while sprawled in an armchair is not possible (no joystick option).

What was odd was that there were no English instructions. There were instructions in Danish, French, German and Spanish, mind you.

Taken as a whole, the game is best suited to passionate admirers of naked bits. Keen poker players can ask the girl next door to play instead of Samantha.

1987Yippee! Another flail-'em-up, for a change. It's been quite a while since I last saw one of these - what, three days already? Now it's Gremlin Graphics' turn to try its wings in this rewarding field. It looks as though the constant complaining about these games has caught the attention of the software houses, because Samurai Trilogy tries to breathe new life into an old idea. But there's no point trying to revive the dead.

The new ideas amount to squeezing three games on the same idea onto one cassette. On disk that's no problem, but on cassette...

The loading system will have the keen player tearing their hair out. There's been an attempt to give the game some depth by adding practice and training options. You can also choose your opponent and read up on their fighting tactics.

First on the tape is an ordinary karate game. The only difference is that it's below average. The graphics are crude and the action is pretty chaotic. Next up is Kendo, where the only differences are the backgrounds and the fact that the guys have had sticks shoved into their hands. Last comes Samurai, where at last you get to flail away with proper swords. What all the parts have in common is a reasonably neat background, but chaotic action and poor sprites.

Gremlin's venture into this field is a real flop. Three games, granted, but every one of them is bad.

1988It's hard to believe anyone could wring even one more game out of the beat'em-up theme, but you have to believe it when you see it.

The game is based on Stan Sakai's cult comic Usagi Yojimbo, whose hero is a samurai hare. And it's such a fierce-looking rodent that even the bravest backwoodsman will think twice before heading out into the wild to blast away at bunny rabbits.

Samurai Warrior tells of Usagi's adventure trying to free an old friend, Lord Nuriyaki, from the power of the evil Lord Hiriki. And along the way, of course, the katana gets a taste of enemy blood.

You're not meant to fight everyone you meet, however, so it pays to keep your sword in its scabbard. Besides fighting, you have to follow etiquette carefully, which means bowing at the very least to all your superiors and preferably to your equals as well. The nobility may demand satisfaction in blood if a ronin (a masterless samurai) fails to show courtesy. A hare walking around sword in hand is also automatically regarded as an enemy. A noble samurai must also give alms to the peasants. Courtesy and generosity are rewarded with hints and proverbs. Killing enemies, courtesy and compassion raise Usagi's karma. High karma means that when the Reaper comes calling, you don't have to start the game over from the beginning. If you attack priests, peasants and innocent animals, your karma may tumble to zero. Then Yojimbo cannot live under the weight of shame and commits harakiri instead.

Another good innovation is the crossroads, where you can of course choose a different route towards your goal. Along the way there are also inns where you can build your strength back up and put your ryo (the game's currency) out to breed with a little gambling. So all in all the game is remarkably varied.

Fighting is a bit awkward at first, since the sword stroke is chosen according to how long you hold the fire button down. The game also has a practice option in which Usagi can battle against bales of hay.

The graphics and animation are well done, and a jazzy oriental tune spices up the game. The sound effects do include the swish of the katana, but the HAI! shouts have been left out. Pity.

Samurai Warrior combines a beat'em-up with an arcade adventure and seasons it with Japanese philosophy. The resulting stew is one of the year's best Commodore 64 games. Buy it or commit harakiri.

1987Time to put the Finlandia hymn on the record player, because the first Finnish game has conquered the world. The game in question is Sanxion, and the blue-cross flag of Finland is surely already flying from Thalamus's flagpole, because Sanxion was a hit from the moment it was born. Maybe now Finland will become known for something besides the Chernobyl fallout that came down on it.

Sanxion's plot feels very contrived, but the game itself is an honest killing game with no grand philosophies to speak of.

The outer-space aliens threatening Earth must be beaten back, and in the spirit of the Winter War they are beaten back. The screen is divided into two parts, the upper one serving as an early-warning screen that shows the approaching enemy armadas. The lower one is, naturally, where the actual slaughtering gets done. Between each attack wave there's a kind of training ground, where you also shoot, crash into things and pick up bonuses.

Graphically Sanxion is the best-looking shoot-'em-up I have seen in all my born days. Even Uridium has to settle for silver, and it's not because my eyes are clouded by national pride. The technical execution is top class. The three-dimensional, so-called parallax scrolling is fast and completely jerk-free, and the ship obeys the joystick in exemplary fashion. The sound is excellent, both David Whittaker's effects and Rob Hubbard's tunes, though at least one of those tunes should still have been Porilaisten marssi. The playability is tremendous, so it's probably safe to say a new classic has been born. Well done, Stavros Fasoulas, the Paavo Nurmi of computer games.

1987Saracen is a pretty unique game. Unique in the sense that once you've loaded it, you find yourself in the year 1983. The game's sound, graphics and playability are all badly dated, and nowadays make no impression whatsoever on gruff, seen-it-all professionals.

The title screen says the game is from 1986, but everything else says something quite different. Except the idea. Saracen is at heart a Gauntlet imitation, with all sorts of little extras slapped on top as camouflage. Next to Gauntlet, Saracen is a completely hopeless copy.

The actual plot throws the player back even further than 1983, namely to the Holy Crusades. During them, brave young warriors travelled to the Holy Land to fight the conquerors. You set off on the journey armed with nothing but a bow, with a Saracen chieftain as your target. The graphics are really blocky, the sprites are little more than symbols and the backgrounds are a simple brick pattern. The title music is pathetic, and the sound effects don't even bear talking about.

Datasoft has distinguished itself with a couple of passable role-playing games, but with Saracen they really fell flat on their faces. I don't recommend it to anyone.

1990 SyksyDinamic has never been one of my favourite teams, since their games have always been typical middling rubbish. Satan, swaggeringly titled with a swear word - in Finnish, Saatana - is a typical Dinamic product, recognisable by its nerve-shredding difficulty, dark colours and stiff controls. Still, the team's touch has improved somewhat lately.

In the first stage of the two-part battle, Conan's little brother is thrown into hellish caverns where imps of every shape and form try to gobble the hero up as a bedtime snack. Clearing the intermediate stages is of course celebrated with a bout against a bigger denizen of the underworld. Progress is the typical leaping and clambering about on ledges, which brings to mind quite a few console games in the same vein (and Capcom's Black Tiger-NN), except that the scrolling is a feeble jerking of the kind that apparently can only be produced on a sixteen-bit machine. The macho dude, equipped at first with a slingshot, or at any rate something with the firepower of one, can be brought into sharper fighting trim by collecting a whole series of bonus items, one of which doesn't in the slightest resemble a mutilation weapon befitting a barbarian but rather calls to mind R-Type's chargeable laser.

After the cave section the hero, worn down into a grey and bearded wizard, gets to meet Satan in person, who turns out to be a truly devilish fellow. You see, once you've pounded on it for a while, it splits into two winged Cyphers, which in turn chip off a couple of Damiens. You try to scurry after the winged ones and catch them on a wide and tall level before they manage to carry six prisoners off to the slaughter.

The game's Commodore 64 version is a pleasant surprise: you can even be bothered to play it for a while. I wonder whether Dynamic has changed coders, or has somebody finally taught the coder how to program?

Otherwise Satan would be a perfectly passable conveyor-belt product destined to drown in the crowd, but to make it tempting it would need a notch more playability.

1989 KevätMy no-good friend the evil wizard does borrow my things without asking, but a line has to be drawn somewhere: now he has borrowed the princess I love! That's a bit thick: not even a proper payment! Since I am a massive giant of muscle myself, it can presumably be assumed that the rescue operation will end happily, even if a violent attitude is called for.

I charge through the wizard's castle, bashing and smashing all those gaudy sprites with my axe. The more powerful but short-lived turbo weapons found along the way swell my accruing corpse account. Once the guardian monster has been well and truly destroyed, I load for a moment and zoom three-dimensionally through the Valley of Death, dodging totems and shooting everything that moves. Hang on! I've been played for a massive fool: the little rosebud is still a prisoner in the castle. The gate is shut: in I cannot get, I cannot. I load another chunk and turn into a noble eagle. Once I've made it through the cruel maze alive, I get my beloved back where she belongs: between my big fist and my modern kitchen stove.

Savage's hero is a he-maniacal, bigger-than-usual sprite, which represents the only new idea in this multi-part game built on age-old ideas. Beyond that, the game's whole reason for existing seems to be the big graphics in every section and the admittedly good animation, on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga alike. The basic flaw, however, is that Savage's packaging and adverts ooze over-the-top violence that never actually filters through to the game itself.

The intro of the Commodore 64 Savage has been sampled to produce beautiful music, if that interests anyone. Each and every one of you should still test Savage for yourselves, since many magazines have liked it. I didn't, and that is why I'm stuffing the game in the bin and leaving it there for all eternity.

1987This slot-car racing game is one of the best of its kind in terms of execution and playability. There are one- and two-player options and numerous different race tracks to choose from.

If none of the ready-made tracks appeals, you can design your own track from scratch. It's put together from pieces, just like an electric slot-car set (cf. the name!). You can choose from various bends, straights, crossings, narrow sections etc. The only difficulty in building may come at the final stage, joining the pieces up, when the little devils just won't fit together. Then it's simply a case of taking the previous piece out and putting a different one in its place, in the hope of getting the track 'finished' that way...

You can save your own tracks to disk, which is a fine thing. Building a track takes long enough, though, that you can't be bothered to go through it all over again every time.

The driving is extremely well done. The cars behave quite consistently, and a little nudge doesn't immediately lead to a horrendous explosion. If the difference in speed between the cars is large when they collide, the one that ran into the back of the other is destroyed and that's the end of the race for that driver. So there are no 'miraculous recoveries' in the game. This in turn calls for restrained and sensible driving from the players, and makes the game interesting.

The sound is nothing much, but who needs it... Graphically the game is average, and the cars move smoothly around the track.

1988How would you feel if you'd been shipwrecked on an island and met the loveliest babe in the world?

But just when you thought you'd have to sacrifice your computer for the sake of your love (where are all the female computer hobbyists??), the monster doctor Graves kidnaps her. At the same time you discover that the island is full of all kinds of oddities, from Frankenstein all the way down to part-time flour-sack ghosts.

As a fearless hero (or almost, anyway...) you set off to search for your "dishwasher" in the numerous buildings on the island. Every building has to be explored carefully, since they contain weapons that are essential for solving the game.

Therein lies one of the game's drawbacks, since it's a little too big, if anything. In the long run, all that wandering around and shooting gets boring.

The control feel is rather vague, since your character jumps about oddly and when you run into an enemy you start bouncing all over the place. On the other hand, you can shoot in all eight directions.

Scary Monsters is a middling experience in the vast selection of shoot-'em-ups. The graphics are run-of-the-mill, although the differences between the game's various sections are big. The music is perky, but unfortunately it doesn't play while you're playing. Despite the half-finished execution, the idea is good.

1990 SyksyIt was bound to happen! With rumours doing the rounds about who knows what kind of Larry merchandise, all the way up to a Larry movie, it was only a matter of time before some rival of Sierra's made a Larry clone. A move like this I could have seen coming, but certainly not from a software house like Accolade.

So one day an idea flashed into the mind of some Accolade bigwig: a Larry-style game that would sell like hot cakes. A couple of phone calls later, the man behind Little Computer People and the Pitfalls, David Cartwright, was already hammering out code at full tilt. Starring in the game is a long, lanky slimeball called Les Manley (pronounced, say, Less Manly, in other words 'less of a man'), a copy of Larry down to the last pixel.

The plot cobbled together for the game is the following watery affair: the last-ditch gamble of a miserably failing cable TV company is to announce a viewer competition to find the new Elvis. After a rather stylish intro animation, the company's maintenance man Les decides to track down the new King and pocket the prize pot. This, however, is much easier said than done, since on top of the game's puzzles the player's efforts are fought every step of the way by a lousy parser and user interface.

Fans of Sierra and Larry will feel right at home straight away. The mouse control and the commands typed in from the keyboard have been bastardised straight from Sierra's games. With regrettably poor results, since after twenty-odd minutes of huffing and puffing you will happily switch the machine off. The thing is, in this game you get nowhere and get nothing done. The parser is as dumb as a hen and doesn't really understand much of anything, except for nearly every rude word in the English language. Those it does answer with admirable bluntness and rudeness, which you'd think would get america's flowery-hatted busybodies in a flap.

The second plus is the game's two colour palettes. After installation the game asks about your sound cards (CMS/AdLib/Roland support is there) and your graphics card. If your machine has a VGA card, the game by no means gives you 256 colours, merely a slightly nicer-looking palette than on EGA machines.

And those, for the most part, were the game's plusses. So the playability is seriously bad and the music never gets anywhere near Sierra's games, but the graphics at their best are better than in Larry. The animation isn't shabby either, quite the opposite. In a nutshell: a promising game drowns under miserable playability.

1989 SyksyOnce again the brawny world of boxing is trying to find its form on a home micro's screen. The romping of fist-fighting heroes has been presented from the front and from the side in countless games, but Seconds Out has found a new camera angle on the subject: the boxers are shown from behind the figure the player controls. The problem has been neatly solved by showing the upper body of the pugilist in the foreground as a mere transparent wireframe. Sounds like a good idea, but for some strange reason the character's head is ordinary graphics. It has a nasty habit of censoring the view just as you ram your opponent on the bridge of the nose.

The game has five opponents of varying ability, whose looks and animation have been stuffed with forced humour. When did you last see a boxer with a beard and glasses? There's nothing wrong with a bit of wit, but I'd much rather see brawny bundles of muscle on the screen than this clown parade assembled from shifty-looking weeds.

The repertoire of punches consists only of a right and left straight plus a right-hand knockout punch, which you can use once you've managed to pump the KO meter full. A little variety is on offer during the break between rounds, when you can revive your fighter by waggling the joystick. Mind you, you'd rather rest your hand during it, since playing is numbingly monotonous pounding, especially as your character moves sideways as though it had glue on the soles of its shoes.

The popularity of boxing and karate games rests on the fact that pals can wallop each other in all friendliness by way of pixel figures bouncing about the screen. Unfortunately this game can only be played against the computer, which is why you get fed up with it faster than the referee can count to ten.

1991 KevätWith Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones and Loom behind it, you have good reason to expect something fine from Lucasfilm's next game. The Secret of Monkey Island, a pirate adventure set a few centuries back, lives up to every expectation.

Guybrush Threepwood, a young lad, burns with the desire to become a pirate. In the local boozer he meets three pirates who, in between swilling grog, manage to tell him what the boy has to do to graduate as a cursing, stinking pirate. The grog, by the way, contains just about everything imaginable from battery acid to axle grease, as the pirates readily explain. The muck has to be drunk fast, because it eats through the bottom of the mug in no time flat.

To graduate, the young whippersnapper must first defeat the Sword Master who lives on the island. Then he has to steal an idol from the governor's mansion, and finally find the legendary treasure of Melee Island. With those tasks done, the boy still has to get hold of money from somewhere, buy a ship and round up a crew for it.

Deep inside Apinasaari (Monkey Island), which lies somewhere unknown, something treacherous is brewing, however. The ghost of the famous pirate LeChuck has driven all the pirates in the nearby waters into port and is collecting all the plunder himself. The ghost fears the boy will mess up his plans, and decides to take him out of the picture.

While LeChuck hatches his schemes, the player gets on with his tasks. The fencing teacher explains that the secret of swordfighting lies not in skill with the sword but in skilful needling. And so the game's swordfighting scenes are handled in such a way that whoever manages to fling the better cut at their opponent gains the upper hand. After a few sharp quips the winner is clear, assuming the opponent hasn't managed to turn the situation on its head by firing back an even wittier retort. Amusing thought: Hussein might have pulled out of Kuwait if Bush had used a similar verbal blade instead of appealing to logic.

TSOMI is loaded with humour, without forgetting serious and even violent scenes (where did the Teittinen boy see any violence, huh? ed. note). In atmosphere the game very much resembles Loom, and indeed it contains plenty of in-jokes for fans of that game. For example, a sailor who normally answers questions with a single word gets carried away reeling off long litanies about Loom and how excellent the game is, and finishes by urging you to rush to the shop right now and buy Loom. Afterwards he apologises for getting a bit too carried away about certain subjects. You'll laugh even without any Loom experience, since TSOMI is perhaps Lucasfilm's funniest game to date, and the humour won't leave a single person who knows the language cold.

The SCUMM game system has been partly reprogrammed and includes a few welcome improvements. For example, when you move the pointer over an object, the bottom of the screen immediately shows which commands you can use to fiddle about with it. The user interface beats Sierra's equivalent in other ways too, since in TSOMI you don't have to type a single thing; everything is done conveniently with the mouse. Another tangible plus is that Lucasfilm's games don't demand a top-speed machine.

Graphically TSOMI doesn't lag behind any of Sierra's 16-colour games. Like Sierra, Lucasfilm too is moving over to 256-colour graphics, and Indiana Jones, Loom and TSOMI each exist in a separately sold VGA version. The pictures, redrawn entirely from scratch, do eat up a tremendous amount of disk space, though.

On the sound side Lucasfilm has nothing to brag about. The music consists of simple tootlings that sound almost as good through the PC speaker as through a sound card. The sound effects are simple thumps and clinks. The excellent playability and the game's appeal steal the show, though, and you don't even notice the absence of massive, atmosphere-building music. The Secret f Monkey Island is without doubt among the very best adventure games. Best of all, a Finnish version should be on its way/already out!

1991 SyksyBandits at ten o'clock! I swing my heavy .50 calibre machine guns round the right way, but what the heck? What were those? Two bat-like contraptions zip past before I can even squeeze the trigger, and alongside us Lieutenant Knightlore's B-17 is torn to shreds. On the next pass the second wonder-machine is ripped apart in the middle of a lead storm from five bombers, but the captain reports that number four engine is kaput, the right main tank is leaking and the tail gunner is dead. Still, the Enterprise has no choice but to press on towards Berlin, because a lone bomber is a dead bomber.

At last! Every Battle Of Britain veteran has been waiting for Secret Weapons, trembling with excitement, and SWOTL delivers on its promises.

Wonders of Ameriikka

Of the American aircraft you get to fly the P-47 Thunderbolt (C and D versions) and P-51 Mustang (B, C and D versions) fighters, plus the B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber (F and G).

The B-17 is in fact the only real bomber in this game, since the Germans didn't do an awful lot of bombing in the final stages of the war. The B-17 is armed with ten or so heavy .50 calibre machine guns in eight positions. Each position has its own graphics, by the way. When the bombers fly in a tight formation of at least three aircraft, it's great fun flying a German fighter straight into the firestorm. Those who ploughed up potato fields in BOB will surely be delighted by the B-17's Norden bombsight, which puts the bombs pretty well where they belong, even from a height of 23 thousand metres.

The Americans' missions consist mainly of low-level attacks, escort jobs and bombing runs.

Germany's Secrets

As the name says, the real spice of the game is the German aircraft. The Me-109G and FW-190 prop planes will probably be familiar; the jet and rocket planes less so.

The Me-163 Komet is a tiny rocket plane whose peculiarities include a droppable undercarriage and a measly 4 - 8 minutes of fuel, after which the plane is a glider. The Me-262, on the other hand, was deadly effective and could have affected the end of the war had it been brought into service earlier, and if Hitler had kept his bright ideas to himself. The Gotha Go-229 fighter-bomber never flew a combat mission. This flying wing would, incidentally, have been the world's first stealth aircraft.

The main problem with the German aircraft is their speed. The reaction time for pumping lead into a bomber is on the order of a couple of seconds, and secondly, the jets break down really easily. In real life, among other things, one Me-163 pilot literally melted into his seat when the fuel lines burst and sprayed the fluids over him.

The German aircraft carry some rather interesting armament, such as rockets, air-to-air bombs and a truly incredible upward-firing rocket that is set off by a bomber's shadow. The German pilots do make low-level attacks, but mostly they try to bring down bombers.

A Dream Come True

Technically, Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe is real manna from heaven. Graphically, the improvements consist of more detailed terrain and superbly exploited 256-colour VGA graphics (though EGA is quite OK too). I could swear the artificial intelligence has been beefed up considerably, because for someone who downed 12 planes with a shot-up 110, my SWOTL kill lists are much shorter, and you have to work hard for those too. The bomber's automatic gunners even manage to shoot down enemy planes instead of just wasting ammo. Hardcore flyboys will probably be pleased by the advanced flight mode, in which the rudder is controlled separately and the aircraft's characteristics, such as maximum dive speed, are realistic.

In Battle Of Britain, damage to your aircraft only cost you poorer flight characteristics. Now life is harsher. An engine that's taken a hit may start spraying oil, and when the oil runs out the motor starts smoking. Flying blind in the middle of Germany is an interesting, if often fatal, experience.

Damage to the bomber's engines, or thrashing them too hard, takes its revenge in overheating, smoking and catching fire. In theory the B-17 can fly on just one engine (it has four), but coaxing a damaged aircraft home takes skill and keeping a beady eye on the gauges. Unfortunately, Lucasfilm has left a spit-on-the-engines button out of its controls.

The fuel tanks, too, rise to become stars of the survival show. To increase their range the Yank planes had to have extra tanks bolted on, but since a hit on an extra tank sets off a proper fireworks display, you should of course drop them as soon as the German aircraft come into view. And then you may well run out of juice. Nastier still is a hit on the main fuel tank, because that one can't be dropped, and guess what happens when a tracer round hits the petrol...

Secret Weapons has an incredible atmosphere. The battles are really intense, and the sprite-based, incredibly lively graphics support it beautifully. Seen from a B-17's gun turret, a German attack into the middle of the formation is like something out of a movie, and when nine bombers each drop six bombs right in the middle of the target, the sight could be spliced straight into a documentary film.

The AdLib sound side is rather nice. The machine guns sound a bit feeble, but the engine rumbles and howls are good, the flak bursts are nicely muffled, and there are nice little touches like the whine of the hydraulics when you fiddle with the undercarriage and flaps. The PC beeper is the PC beeper.

Extras

As is customary, SWOTL has a mission builder with which you can put together your own customised missions. New is the Tour Of Duty option, in which you have to survive a set number of missions alive.

The campaign game is of course included. The Americans must crush the Luftwaffe and German industry, while Germany must develop secret weapons and thwart the Allies' plans. BOB's simple campaigning has grown into an almost full-scale strategy game.

The video recorder has been improved with a few new options and the ability to record, if you wish, an entire mission. This does take some fiddling with the camera cache, but it can be done.

The manual is thicker than before and full of information that is both interesting and essential. You can get airborne by reading the thin supplement.

Nothing Comes Free

As you might guess, the demands on your games machine are considerable. If you don't have extra memory, SWOTL requires 581K of free base memory and then loads the other graphics, such as the side and rear views, from disk. SWOTL will gratefully take 560K of expanded memory, into which it sucks the graphics for instant loading, plus added graphical detail. At worst it eats 3.6 megabytes of hard disk space.

The machine has to be at least a 286, and preferably a nippy one. In fact, I chose to fly on a 25 megahertz 386 at the second-lowest detail level, at which everything ran smoothly.

Crying won't help; the unfortunate fact is that in the States a 386/VGA can be had for pocket money, so the share of heavy megagames a la King Quest V-Wing Commander-SWOTL is going to grow steadily. And if the standard stays at this level, then welcome!

Simply put, Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe is the best and most versatile flight simulator of the moment. Other manufacturers could learn a thing or two.

1990 SyksyLicensed from Capcom, Section-Z is in every respect a typical shoot-'em-up, surprisingly few of which have been released for the Nintendo, though. This time the formula has been ripped straight out of Side Arms; in other words, the hero is a space-suited figure who floats through the colourful techno-landscapes of horizontally scrolling corridors, sowing destruction ahead and behind, depending on which of the controller's buttons you're pressing.

The numbing mashing of monsters into mush has been given some variety by putting two alternative teleports at the end of the levels. The player can pick the long route or the short one, and in some places you can even go back a couple of stages. The idea is apparently that by choosing the more demanding route you can find better gear for the cruel robot creature waiting at the end. And so the game is far too stingy about handing out extra weapons.

On top of the standard cap gun you've got missiles, but the more powerful super weapons, such as a fan-shaped spray of shots, have to be rooted out from under every rock and stump, with meagre results. And so the game leaves you with that nasty feeling: am I, poor wretch, being tormented yet again with an anaemic shoot-'em-up like this, the kind they've been making for the Commodore 64 since the Middle Ages?

In playability, graphics and sound, Section-Z is a successful product. A little nipper cranking away at their first action game is guaranteed to whoop with joy while playing it, but the reaction of a player with even slightly more experience is a feeling of boredom.

1987This review is dedicated to my good friend Lasse Boelius, Sentinel's first but certainly not last victim. The only sound this poor man still makes is "Sentinel this and Sentinel that and now I'm on level 2352", and after this dreary monologue the Sentinel-playing starts all over again. Sentinel is like a religion to him.

And no wonder, really. I very nearly got caught in the same spiral myself, but Elite saved me. Sentinel is without question one of the five best games ever made for the Commodore 64. Why? Because this is one of those regrettably few games that grab the player by the throat and force them to become part of the world behind the screen.

In Sentinel you become a Synthoid, a strange robot-like being. The Synthoid can only move by creating a new copy of itself and transferring its consciousness into it. The Synthoid can absorb energy from its surroundings and create trees, boulders and Synthoids out of it. The Sentinel, meanwhile, stands on the highest point of the landscape and absorbs all energy greater than a tree, turning it into trees which appear at random around the landscape. The Synthoid has to get high enough for the little rascal to be able to absorb the Sentinel's energy. A boulder is two trees and a Synthoid is three trees. Unclear (even though not a word has been said about Sentries and Meanies)? It all becomes clear in the game.

Sentinel owes nothing to any other game; instead it is a hymn in praise of originality. As a game classic it is fully in the same class as chess, but not as tediously slow-paced. The programming is ingenious.

10,000 levels in memory at once, so if 100 sentinels make one metrinel, the game has a hundred metrinels of levels (1.2 penni per level).

The graphics are truly superb. They create a sense of being "somewhere else". Time and place are forgotten. The couple of seconds' pause each time you change position is a bit of a nuisance, admittedly, but you can get used to anything. The sound is conspicuous by its absence, apart from a few effects. Finnish-language instructions are included, which will get any teacher of Finnish out in no time. Out of the window.

Sentinel puts your ability to make quick decisions under pressure to the test. All in all, Sentinel ought in principle to belong in the collection of every self-respecting gamer. It can't be recommended as a must-buy, though, as it may turn out to be either the beginning of a beautiful friendship or an expensive disappointment. Ideal for people who think computer games are childish.

1989 KevätWhen Sentinel Worlds I first appeared in my field of vision, some inner instinct told me straight away that if you boot that one up, you're dead meat. But then again, I've lived long enough already.

Future Magic belongs in our series of BIG role-playing games. Not that there's anything wrong with the playing area being the infinity of space, but the surface of every planet turns out to be packed with crowds like Stockmann's Christmas sale - and every single one of them has something to tell you. On top of that, the places seem to be teeming with assorted creatures who reckon you'd make a nice change to their monotonous diet.

The game's opening situation, in brief, is this: the freighters carrying supplies to the Federation's new colonies of Rouyn and Mistassini have been attacked more and more often. Who is behind the attacks - and why, that nobody knows.

The player commands the five-strong crew of one of the fighters sent to guard the convoys. They have several different courses of action to choose from. They can start blasting enemies in space and capturing their ships in the hope of loot. On the other hand, to find out where the attackers come from you also have to visit bases and planets, and that's when things start getting really interesting.

The makers of the program have done a really meticulous job. Conversations with characters flow naturally through menus, the graphics are unique for a PC game, and the window layout shows all the necessary information at once - in other words, technically a real treat. The radar image projected onto the helmet visor in the middle of the perspective view is a good example of how the game really has managed to capture that genuine science fiction 'sense of wonder'.

The box cover describes the game as a science-fiction role-playing mystery. I have to admit that rarely has an advertising line been more on the mark. Besides being a role-playing game that works and a science fiction game of the very top rank, Sentinel Worlds has a plot as deep as a black hole. If the Ultimas fill a notebook with notes, this one fills a book. That's because all sorts of local squabbles are tied up with the main mission. Sometimes you have to broker peace between the cattle ranchers and the farmers, sometimes flatten the temple of some nasty alien-ish creatures.

Something of the game's depth is perhaps shown by the fact that, with no flagging of interest, it took three hours from the start of the game to reach the first man-to-man fight. Let's hope EOA converts this one to the Amiga and the ST as well, just as it did with good old Starflight.

1990 KevätThe lot of a travelling salesman in the Caldorre system is a hard one. Pirate ships appearing out of nowhere are making the convoys' lives hell. Nobody pushes the Federation around, and a squadron of Interceptor-class ships arrives to even the score. If the cockpit held seasoned veterans, the outlook would be bright, but what it holds instead is five hapless cadets, much to the traders' dismay.

Sentinel Worlds I earned its spurs a year or a year and a half ago as a PC version and aroused a lot of interest. Since then it has achieved State of the Art status among sci-fi role-playing games. No wonder, since while many earlier attempts feel dated, SW I manages not only to steer clear of the cliché jungle but also to convey a genuine hi-tech atmosphere.

Rather than embracing the outer limits of the universe, SW I confines itself to a single solar system, which boasts a record-breaking three planets. This time, though, the saying "small is beautiful" holds true, since more stuff has been crammed into three planets than lesser men manage to squeeze into a whole galaxy. While the player works out what on earth they are actually supposed to be doing, the time passes pleasantly in space battles and in scouring planet surfaces.

On planet surfaces you get about either in an armoured vehicle seen from a bird's-eye view or, inside buildings, by putting one little foot in front of the other. There the atmosphere comes from the helmet's radar display being projected over the "what the eye sees" view. And if the eye sees something to kill, a real-time fight kicks off, with a perfectly decent combat system. The kit needed for this noble sport is there in sufficient quantity, but not too much.

The space section is less impressive. Here too the ship is seen from a bird's-eye view, with the battles running in real time, but of course you can communicate by means other than lasers too. If you feel like it, you can even pop over for a little visit to an enemy ship. Every ship has a pretty picture of its own, although on the tactical display every ship looks like the same wooden lump of a sprite.

The graphics, converted from EGA to the C-64, have come off nicely, and the sound surely beats the PC hollow. The price of the small memory, though, is disk-flipping that at times gets annoyingly frequent, but I suppose that is necessary. Sentinel Worlds is welcome all the same.

1989 KevätNow it has happened: the sceptre of best tennis game on the C-64 has hereby passed to Accolade's Serve and Volley. Accolade, who kept busy in the run-up to Christmas, have brilliantly managed to carry the strategic side and general character of tennis over to the computer. Tennis as a game is presumably familiar to everyone, so there's probably no point going into the rules.

OK, so what if Accolade's best artists and animators have moved on to other companies? What does it matter if Serve and Volley's graphics are downright poor? Who cares if the players move around the court like tortoises in mud? Not me, at any rate, because the playability has been honed just right.

Even the control box in the top corner of the screen, chaotic and confusing at first glance, turns out after a little getting used to to be an incredibly effective brainwave. With a couple of glances and a quick twist of the joystick you can make your man do exactly what you want, be it a sharp backspin forehand deep to the back of the court or a soft drop shot just over the net to the other side.

SAV is one of those rare games that keep your interest up for a long time despite a rough exterior. There isn't a single tennis game on any other machine that interests me even a fraction as much as SAV. SAV is a great game against the computer (especially as the computer doesn't play like Boris Becker on top form) and enormous fun against a friend.

1987From America, that land of modest games, comes Seven Cities of Gold, whose aim is nothing less than to create a realistic picture of the discovery of the American continent. And the era is, of course, the jolly 1700s.

To keep the playing going for good, Seven Cities has a world generator that lets you create a new continent once the old one has been conquered. And the result isn't some random blob - every rule of geology is taken into account. Small wonder the disk drive may whirr away for as much as an hour at a stretch. Rumour has it that the original plan was to create an entirely new world, but since that would have taken seven days, the project was abandoned.

Bit-Columbuses can sail across a hemisphere thousands of screens wide until the coast of America comes into view. Then it's men ashore and off on an expedition. You can found forts and towns, and murder, enslave and establish diplomatic relations with the natives. Every now and then there's a little regatta back to Spain to fetch more men and money and to listen to the king's comments. The main goal, however, is to find the legendary Seven Cities made of solid gold. The execution has come off nicely. The graphics are decent and the playability level is high. All actions are selected with the joystick, and naturally the game can be saved. But to do that you have to travel to Spain.

The scope is massive, but unfortunately, as a game, Seven Cities doesn't quite have the strength to carry it. Mostly the player just trudges or sails around America, and hardly anything need happen at all. Now and then, at least, an Inca village or a city turns up that you can "communicate" with.

On arriving at a village or the like, the screen zooms in on it and shows the happy children of nature dashing hither and thither. The idea in the native settlements would be to find the village Big Boss, which is impossible, at least on a two-colour monitor. And when a couple of collisions with the natives are enough for a full-on Defcon 1, you no longer have to wonder about the bloody conquests of the Spaniards of old.

Seven Cities will surely appeal to some types of player, but those craving plenty of sensory stimulation would do well to try it out before buying. Still, it's good that some games try to be different.

1988Evil forces have imprisoned your friends in the depths of a mysterious castle. Your sacred duty, in the name of friendship etc., is to rescue this sorry bunch before a fate worse than death befalls them. The castle has a few hundred floors, each of them with several pals in chains. By the rules of mathematics that comes to somewhere around a thousand friends. Throwing parties could get expensive.

Shackled is, as you can probably tell from the picture, one of those Gauntlet/Alien Syndrome clones. A rescued friend nets you better weapons, and you can also collect various amulets and keys. It's game over when your life force drops to zero.

I started getting acquainted with it on the Commodore 64 version. Very quickly I was wishing I'd burned the whole cursed cassette. The graphics are dreadful. The sprites are incomprehensibly badly animated, nauseatingly bad lumps, and nobody can make out what they're supposed to be. The bad background scrolls worse than anything ever seen before, and the 'action' slows down as the number of sprites grows. A botched tune croaks away in the background.

With low expectations I loaded the ST version into the machine. After the brilliant Gauntlet II conversion, the ST Shackled felt exactly as miserable as the C-64 version. At least you could make out the graphics; nothing else positive comes to mind.

It's beyond comprehension that U.S. Gold can be bothered to release rubbish like this at full price. Steer well clear.

1991 Syksy"Take your mountain wolf somewhere else, this is an international airport!" says the gruff voice of the flight attendant. "This really isn't a wolf, it's a dog, and I'm not the Phantom either," says the stranger, then yanks off the cloak and reveals a ninja outfit underneath.

Shadow Dancer, master ninja Joe Mushashi, is back to avenge the natural death of his apprentice Kato. While he's at it, he also means to foil the wicked Sauros's plan to blow up a second space shuttle.

The place is crawling with enemies. Armed with nothing but his hands and feet, Joe settles his score with the terrorists. Luckily that's not quite how it is: his coat turns out to hold an unlimited supply of shuriken throwing stars, a shinobi sword and a helping of ninja magic. On top of that there's a faithful albino prairie dog to help out, which can be set on packs of opponents.

Shadow Dancer has 15 levels, seven of which have a different backdrop, ranging from the city centre to caves. At every location a gang of saboteurs has planted a different number of time bombs, which have to be defused. The bombs are always guarded by a heavily armed cluster of enemies, and at the end of every big level there's a boss.

The ninja clears his way through by jumping, running and crawling, with the dog obediently tagging along. The movement sequences look pretty, hoovered straight out of the coin-op version. Throwing stars, using magic and sending in the dog work exactly the same as in the arcade game.

There are shortcomings, though, because the sprite programming hasn't been done quite right. Even bullets can hit the ninja when they're clearly flying past a metre wide. There are a few other, smaller bugs as well.

The graphics are gripping, but the sound is a letdown, at least on the Amiga. The machine sings the same old hymn for the whole game, and the game doesn't have all the little noises of the arcade machine.

The game's idea has been used many times over, but the dog at least adds something to it. Shadow Dancer won't hold anyone's interest for long except ninja game players. I recommend the game to the latter; I'm not one of them.

1991 KevätHaving made it out of the beast's shadow in the first instalment and back into the human form he pined for, the hero is not yet allowed to retire to his pension days. An unusually stylish cinematic intro reveals that the beast lord's revenge is to snatch the hero's sister away for some beastly treatment.

Like its predecessor, Beast Two has been slapped full of seals of quality. A single glance is enough to send smoke rising from your hairline, as the fantastic teamwork of graphics and sound burns a short circuit into your optic and auditory nerves. SOTB2 isn't just the first game with new graphics, as the game system has been improved in a more versatile direction. On top of more sprawling terrain, climbing ropes and other natural additions, the game has more of an adventurous touch. The low-browed hero can even rig up a stub of a conversation with the folk he meets.

The basic ingredients are the usual sledgehammer pounding, axe flinging and other everyday chores as laid down by the science of survival. In the variety of its enemies the second Beast squashes the first, but unfortunately the same goes for their nastiness too. The difficulty level has at least doubled, at least if you measure it in inches advanced per hour.

Flailing at a creature huffing behind a stone slab with a one-pixel margin of error doesn't raise many smiles, especially when success after a dozen attempts is rewarded by a boulder weighing a ton clonking you on the head a couple of steps further on. In my opinion this sort of carry-on is more stressful than relaxing, and surely that isn't what a game is for.

If we forget the frowning, hair's-breadth-tight view of gameplay and other matters of taste, the second Beast is a collector's item worth the money and every bit the equal of its predecessor. Parallax landscapes scrolling at fifty hertz wring visual power out of the Amiga's hardware befitting the lady's station, and once again the ultra-sized box comes with a trendy T-shirt as a bribe.

Beast Two, Unreal and the like would be better suited to a museum of contemporary art, since people only buy them anyway so they can show them off to their mates, and then they sit back and wait for the magazines to publish sneaky tricks for getting through them.

1990 KevätWe've grown used to expecting high-class graphics from Psygnosis, but The Shadow of the Beast surpasses all its previous achievements. The visual impact is of such a magnitude that you end up scraping your brains off the back wall of the room with a teaspoon.

You notice right away that this game certainly wasn't programmed on an ST: the beastly hero jogs through a landscape with so many layers scrolling smoothly at different speeds that the effect is almost three-dimensional. On top of that, at best the screen shows as many as 128 colour shades, and with David Whittaker's atmospheric music, with its exceptionally high-quality samples, playing in the background as well, there's nothing to do but sink into your chair and savour it.

The plot of the game, in all its pithiness, is as follows: an evil wizard has sacrificed the hero's parents in murky cult rites and, while he was at it, turned the hero into an inhuman monster. The beast's memory, however, comes back in bits and pieces, and so it's time to apply the age-old 'eye for an eye' philosophy.

Beast brings up distant associations with Barbarian and Obliterator, but thankfully there's not a trace of clunky icon control in it. The beast begins his onslaught on the surface, at the edge of an idyllic forest. The adventure continues in underground vaults and a stone fortress, whose backgrounds use the Amiga's characteristic dual playfield technique, in other words two layers of graphics scrolling one on top of the other. Most of the monsters toddling your way can be dealt with by a single blow or kick, but when the road is blocked by a horror that fills nearly the whole screen, you need a bit of magic or weaponry to help out.

In many respects Beast resembles a genuine coin-op. Besides the lush graphics and music, it has the typical 'steep learning curve', in other words your performance has to be almost flawless all the time. Top-class reflexes help, but at times the beast gets so thoroughly surrounded that you feel like throwing yourself on the ground and playing dead.

What gives Beast away as something made on a home computer is the Amiga's sprites, which at worst have only three colours. The effect is a bit like gluing paper dolls onto a photograph.

The most worrying thing about the game is its high price, but then again you also get more than usual for your money: the double-size box contains a stylish T-shirt drawn by Roger Dean and two disks crammed with 2.2 megabytes of graphics and nearly 900K of gorgeous Whittaker music. Beast's simple basic idea won't necessarily please everyone, and it is damned hard, but I for one was overjoyed to see an action game that wrings everything out of the Amiga.

1987Shadow of the Unicorn is the first program to make use of Microgen's Mikro Plus expansion, which comes with the game. The expansion contains a 16-kilobyte ROM block that replaces the Spectrum's own operating system, leaving a full 64 KB of room for program code. The ROM block contains a tape turbo loader, a memory test, a tape head alignment program and a backup program. The expansion also includes an Atari-type joystick port.

The tape turbo, together with the larger memory, works as excellent protection against illegal copying. The program in the expansion lets you copy the game to cassette or microdrive, but loading is only possible using the (same?) Mikro Plus expansion.

Given the larger memory usage, it's no wonder that Shadow of the Unicorn is a big adventure game with plenty of graphics. The task in the game is to defeat the evil forces that have taken over the kingdoms of Oronfal and Falforn.

The game package comes with a 100-page English-language booklet that tells the story of the game and gives hints.

Shadow of the Unicorn feels like a combination of many games. You control several characters at the same time, as in Lords of Midnight. The characters bring to mind the game Everyone's a Wally. As in Tir Na Nog, you can look towards all four points of the compass.

At the start of the game you can search for objects and friends with three characters. Characters met along the way can be persuaded to join your side in various ways, and at best you can fight with a force of ten characters.

On first impression the game was a slight disappointment. The graphics did not live up to expectations; in places the backgrounds even felt primitive. The movement didn't reach the standard of a typical new release either. Although the adventure is large, it is not one bit larger than Lords of Midnight.

That being so, the extra memory must have been used to add to the game's logic and variety. At first sight, however, the game didn't stir up any strong feelings of delight.

For some reason the tape head alignment program didn't work, and getting the head adjusted back to where it had been took some time.

1990 SyksyYou can find almost anything in a Yankee metropolis, so let's go and find out, for example, what's causing those HIIAA yells from round the corner. And what do I see: the street is full of fists, feet and sweaty bodies, and in the middle of clouds of black smoke a lithe shadow warrior is showing off Ninjitsu techniques. Could this scene be headed for Renny's new film?

Compared with the typical pointless, unplayable scrambles, Shadow Warriors at least has some kind of idea to it. For once, a beat-'em-up without a hard-to-master repertoire of moves: just a couple of jumps and a few punches and kicks, dished out with the fire button in random order. What matters more is making tactical use of the street scenery. The ninja warrior can, for example, climb onto a trash can and leap from there behind an opponent's back to kick them in the back of the head. Obstacles and walls can also be used to cover your back, leaving you free to pummel in peace any creeps who venture within arm's length. On top of that, you can search the surroundings for single-use ninja swords and other pick-me-ups. In practice this is done in the style of shoving a hundred-kilo mountain of muscle through a phone booth.

In honour of the traditions of the arcades' beat-'em-up machines the game is outrageously difficult, but to ease the pain a second ninja controlled by a friend comes charging in, and with it the fun doubles too. On the outside the game is splendid; in fact the graphics are supposed to be better than in the coin-op version, but for some reason only half of the screen is used vertically and the background doesn't even scroll. Even so, a mere couple of gangs of crooks flailing away on screen slow the game down considerably.

Censors or no censors, the action could have been given more ferocity, say, so that when you shove a hooligan in front of a car on the second level's street section, the thug's upper body would splatter across the bonnet. But maybe that would be too artistic. They could at least have put a password system in the game.

SW floats a couple of metres above the average masses, but even so it can only be recommended to beat'em up specialists, if such people even exist.

C-64: The backgrounds are polished, as are the moving characters, whose animation is smooth. Kicking the baddies has been made pleasantly easy: you just pick the direction of attack, press the fire button, and bones snap. Not everyone will like how few moves there are to choose from, but this way the atmosphere has been boosted considerably. The playability is truly first-class and you pick up the tricks quickly, without the game being too easy. To my regret I have to report that the game offers no answer to the eternal question of where all the dead criminals in games end up, since they usually just vanish from the screen to make the body count harder to keep. Maybe they just change clothes and turn up in another game? Shadow Warrior is good unarmed assault and battery all the same.

1987Shao-Lin's Road is based on Konami's arcade game, which must be about the millionth kung-fu game by now. SLR is supposed to be the sequel to Yie Ar Kung Fu. The first thing that jumps out at you is the question of why The Edge has been allowed to do this one, when Konami these days does its own conversions.

The reason will probably become clear once you play it. Maybe Konami didn't want to take responsibility for this "game". Shao-Lin's Road is just about the worst karate botch-up I have seen in all my born days. A harsh claim, which I had probably better back up.

First of all, SLR is a straight copy of Data-East's Kung-Fu Master. Only Kung-Fu Master was fast-moving and had varied enemies, so it did nicely as brainless entertainment. In Edge's creation, the pace would lose a race to a snail.

The hero moves by shoving himself forward with his back leg. The bad guys move in a Bernsteinian manner ("what matters is the movement, not the goal") without seeming to care one jot about the hero. If the master of Kung-Fu doesn't get round to using his mighty repertoire of moves (one kick), the villain nicks the keeper of Oriental wisdom in passing. Three run-ins and the game is done.

Once per level the hero gets a bonus weapon, which frankly isn't powerful enough even to kill time. If the hero clears the level, he starts flexing his muscles and a little speech bubble announces "Guts!".

The graphics are run-of-the-mill. The backgrounds are pretty enough, but the animation stutters. The monotonous music will drive you mad unless you turn the sound off.

1991 KevätBilliards games are very thin on the ground for the PC; for the Amiga and C-64 there are all the more of them. In fact Sharkey's 3D Pool came out on both machines a while ago, but the Americans in their great wisdom came up with the idea of giving the PC version a different name.

The lone 360K floppy in the box doesn't lead you to expect a top-notch game. So the surprise is a happy one when, after installing, a highly playable billiards simulation pops up on the screen. The game is done in vector graphics, which enjoy such enormous popularity these days, so that everything is shown from the player's point of view. Owners of the slowest PCs can, if they like, dump the 3D vector graphics and settle for a table seen from directly above, which stays put without playing up.

The game is best played with the mouse. You aim by moving the mouse with the right mouse button held down, and the left mouse button sends the ball on its way. Before the shot you can adjust the spin and the strength of the shot on the gauges along the top edge of the screen.

Zooming in and out from the table can't be done with the mouse; instead you have to do it by clicking the symbols found along the top edge of the screen. You can't get enough precision when setting the direction of a shot, owing to the game's resolution (320*200). The game makes up for the shortcoming by making it easier to pot the balls. It's enough to hit the ball roughly in the direction of the pocket, and in it goes. This isn't terribly realistic, as anyone who has ever played billiards knows.

The player can play a practice match, enter a tournament or practise spin shots loaded separately from the disk. At the start of the game you can create a character with a set amount of money. Bets are placed on the outcome of each game, and the game ends at the same time as the money does. The disk holds ten or so computer-controlled players, each with their own personality and playing style. Naturally, Sharkey's 3D Pool is at its most fun when two mates play against each other.

The best display mode the game supports is EGA, which, being 16-colour, doesn't need a very powerful machine. The resolution could have been pushed higher, but you can't have everything. I suppose the same goes for sound card support, which isn't there either. As it stands, Sharkey's 3D Pool is a jolly and simple enough game for a few weeks, especially for those interested in billiards.

1987Sherlock is an adventure game from Melbourne House in which the player tries to solve a mysterious double murder.

The game is set in the foggy London of the 1800s. The player, Sherlock Holmes, reads in the morning paper about an incident that has baffled even the detectives of Scotland Yard: two women have been found murdered, and the only clue is a letter found at the scene of the crime, which is not much help to the police. Naturally, Sherlock Holmes is asked to help with this tricky task.

There are plenty of suspects at the scene of the crime, all of whom protest their innocence and none of whom seems guilty. But one mustn't forget Sherlock Holmes's friend Dr Watson, who has been a great help to Sherlock in many cases. In the game Watson is a quiet tagalong who doesn't babble much, but the more you talk with Watson, the more useful he becomes.

In Sherlock you can get from place to place by the big city's many means of transport: by cab, by underground or by train. This adds a good deal of excitement to the game: will you make the underground or the train in time?

In the game you can converse with all the suspects and ask them questions, so that you can draw conclusions about who the guilty party is. Conversation already works much better than in The Hobbit, since Sherlock's vocabulary has been expanded by about three hundred words. All in all the vocabulary comprises 800 different English words.

Even as adventure games develop, they still have a few poor details that annoy the player quite a lot. In Sherlock especially you quickly get fed up with opening doors, since the game mostly takes place inside all sorts of houses. Once you've played for a little while, the screen starts filling up with door commentary: "- open door - which door? - plain door - plain door is already open". And so on and so forth.

Nevertheless, Sherlock represents the absolute peak of the Spectrum's range of adventure games. For complete beginners the game is too hard; solving it may take several months. But if you want a real nut to crack, Sherlock guarantees gaming pleasure for a long time to come.

1990 SyksyThe beautiful French countryside, sunlight filtering through the trees, birdsong... Ah, how I would enjoy all of this, were my guts not spread all over the walls of my wrecked Sherman after a German Tiger punched a hole in the tank.

From the beaches of Normandy to the forests of the Ardennes and the Sahara desert stretches the story of the Allies' workhorse, the M4 Sherman. The player commands four Shermans and two jeeps in each section's five missions. The jeeps are good for reconnaissance, but the Shermans can be driven either by the player or by the computer. A computer-controlled Sherman can be ordered to go to a particular spot, whereupon it sails towards the objective at half speed, stopping to fight if it runs into the enemy. The tank the player drives personally is, by the way, the nimblest beast in the forest. Even when damaged it can zoom past any other tank.

The views from the tanks are limited to the map, the damage screen, a wide head-out-of-the-turret view and the driver's view. There's a hefty dose of shoot-'em-up flavour in the fact that if the target is roughly in line with the barrel and within range, you hit it.

Slick 3D graphics and good sound cover up for a while the fact that even the Ardennes are flat as a pancake. Only the trees provide any cover from view, but hills are sorely missed, and lots of them. The ST and Amiga versions differ only in their colours and in the Amiga's naturally better sound, though even the ST sound is good.

If Sherman had had more missions and more realistic terrain, then crikey! As it is, though, it ends up as more or less a poor man's Tank Platoon. On the other hand, it would be hypocritical to give the impression that M4 is a wretched botch, because the truth is I played it with great enthusiasm.

1988The American Civil War has got yet another new simulation, Shiloh. In the first of the great battles on the war's western front, the Southern states came close to crushing the Union troops. Now you have the chance to face history eye to eye, and see whether you would have been better at leading the troops, at winning on the side of the Confederacy. Or the other way round.

Shiloh uses the same system as the legendary Gettysburg, but it has been developed to an even higher level. Likewise the playability has gone up a notch, though not significantly. Even so, Shiloh is a knockout.

As usual, the opening menu offers an awful lot of options. You can set almost everything. And when you finally make it into the game itself, all you can do is marvel. There are a huge number of commands. At first you may have doubts about whether you'll ever learn them, but there's no difficulty in that. Especially if you've mastered Gettysburg. There's no point going into describing them, though; that would only be a waste of time. Suffice it to say that the units' actions are 100% realistic, and there is nothing about them you can't influence (except headlong flight).

A special feature of the game is that on the easiest difficulty level you can use the joystick as the controller. Seasoned pros won't touch such a thing, because the game goes quicker with the keys, but for beginners the option is really useful, since it spares them from constantly trying to remember the keys. You still have to read the manual, mind you, and if your grasp of English is on shaky ground, you'll either have to forget the game (in which case there's no point reading this any further either) or get help.

The graphics have been improved considerably since the days of Gettysburg. There, of course, they were still relatively simple, but in Shiloh the graphics are impressive. Perhaps even too impressive. On the sound side, however, everything is much the same as it has always been. Meagre.

Shiloh is mind-blowing. Even though the play isn't particularly fast, Shiloh sweeps you along. Or maybe precisely because of that. Just like in Gettysburg. Once you've started playing, you can't break free until every possible tactic and scenario (2) has been ground through. These days nearly all my free time goes on Shiloh.

1990 KevätShinobi is Virgin Games' version of the original coin-op. According to the story, the evil ninja Bwah Foo is after gold from the ninja school and, to that end, has kidnapped the ninja school's pupils. The school, however, is dirt poor, and the only solution is to send the school's best teacher to free the little dears.

The game is divided into several missions, each with three levels. The task is to make your way through assorted terrain while dodging enemy fire, kill the villains and rescue the brats by touching them, whereupon ninja magic whisks them home to daddykins and mumsy.

Shinobi's difficulty level is middle-of-the-road. You breeze through the first levels off the hip, by way of a warm-up, but later on the enemies have learned to watch their step a bit. The game has three lives and three credits, so you get as many lives as your average cat.

The execution, bearing in mind what the Amiga can do: the graphics are out-and-out block graphics. The big letters, for example, are made by blowing up small letters, and the result is indescribably ugly. The backgrounds and enemies have also been done in a great rush. The use of colour is shaky and the animation mostly herky-jerky.

The Amiga Shinobi apparently belongs to the "ST conversions" series, as is given away by the screen scrolling, which no one could praise as smooth. The title music doesn't thrill, and the sound effects could be a lot better.

Despite the poor execution, though, Shinobi is something you enjoy playing. The playability is fairly good, and there's action plus blasting aplenty. Interest is kept up by the numerous levels, which get suitably harder.

1991 KevätAntisocial elements are handily got out of sight by setting up a penal colony on the Moon. There they can then potter about doing whatever they please, but unfortunately they cobble together a mighty space fleet to win themselves more living space from Earth. Your mission for today, should you choose to accept it, is to bring the rebels to heel. (And this review will self-destruct in five seconds, will it? - ed.)

Shockwave is a typical 3D shoot-'em-up with a few tactical elements shoved in. The terrain is divided into four sectors, each with its own job in keeping the defences supplied. The sea area is reserved for oil rigs, the desert has factories, the mountains mines and the forests army units. When you have enough money, you can for instance set up more factories, which speed up the development of new weapons. Likewise, armies slow the enemy down, and so on. You mustn't let more than half of any sector fall into enemy hands, or they start capturing installations.

The action section proper uses an afterburner-like 3D effect, complete with the craft banking. The graphics break up into blocks a little, but at speed you hardly notice. The speed is at an acceptable level, but the smoothness could be improved, as the landscape rushes at your eyes at a slightly too hurried pace.

A reasonable idea has almost been made into a good game. The flying sections are packed far too densely with terrain obstacles, which make it hard to get a proper killing spree going. The player has to adopt a needlessly over-cautious attitude, since new shields are handed out ridiculously sparingly, even when you have factories and money by the bucketload. Instead of building to a climax, the game has a tendency to dry up and shrivel away bit by bit, which really doesn't make you bounce with enthusiasm.

1987Oh well... it takes all sorts, games as well as us people, but...

The idea of Shockway Rider is certainly original, but at the same time lousy. The player is a gang kid of the future who has to prove himself by doing a full lap - in other words, going all the way round the city on a three-speed conveyor-belt pavement. Trouble comes from other pedestrians, members of the rival gang, road signs and other obstacles. You can clear your path by hurling objects picked up from the roadside, such as bottles.

The execution, on the other hand, is just plain lousy. The only good idea is the animation at the start of the game, put together from digitised pictures of hoodlums. Rob Hubbard has knocked out the music, but even that is certainly not one of Mr. Gamemusicmaker's best tunes. This game leaves a rather modest impression.

1989 SyksyInfocom has strayed a long way from its old-style text adventures. They no longer run on text alone, and don't necessarily even run on text (like Journey, which is played with the mouse). Shogun is fresh proof that Infocom has decided to move on and develop. For it includes graphics (murmuring from the crowd and cries of astonishment).

From the name most people will guess what to expect. Power struggles, samurai and tea. Except... not quite yet. Infocom's Shogun starts at the very beginning: first you have to try to make it to Japan alive at all, what with the ship being in the grip of a bit of a storm. From there on, too, the game slavishly follows the events of James Clavell's book.

Shogun is at least up to the standard you would expect from Infocom. No problem can be solved with a single command; instead, all in all, everything requires communicating with others and thinking about things on several levels. An interesting new touch, however, is the inclusion of hints in the game itself. You no longer need to order hint books from Infocom. The use of graphics is a step forward, and in other ways too the look of Infocom's games has changed greatly for the better lately (Arthur).

Nothing more needs saying: Shogun is the familiar, sturdy Infocom quality.

1989 SyksySince the shooting game is often extremely stripped down in its concept, it lends itself superbly as raw material for a game generator. The Shoot Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK), marketed by Palace Software, gives the ordinary player the means to build, relatively easily, working blasters of their own that would have been big hits a few years ago. An exceptionally gifted and laterally calculating game tinkerer might even come up with something completely new by using these tools creatively.

SEUCK lets the game tinkerer populate their micro's screen with creatures that look however they want. Each object is drawn with the help of a simple grid, in which small squares of different colours are switched on and off to create the image. Animation comes from using image sequences in which the individual frames change into one another in the desired order after a preset delay. Besides your own fighting unit, the enemies and the various projectiles, you also have to create the game's background. The setting for the action is produced by drawing, combining and copying various elements.

Since this is no silent movie, SEUCK comes with a bundle of sound effects that can be attached to the events seen on screen. The effects can be run at different speeds and their volume can be adjusted. If your skills and technical equipment allow, you can also produce more sound effects under your own steam.

If making a game of your own feels overwhelming at first, you can spend your time getting to know the three blasters that come with SEUCK. You can examine the techniques used in making them just as if you were editing a finished game of your own. You can make whatever changes you like to them and see the effects of those changes by test-playing.

A game made with SEUCK, once saved to disk, is a self-contained, independently running whole, which you can give to a friend to test or try to sell to software houses for distribution. The only restrictions are that SEUCK's name must appear in the end product and that no parts of the demo games supplied with the program have been copied into your own game.

SEUCK is surely the most educational way to get acquainted with shoot-'em-ups and the tools used to create them. On top of that, it gives you an informed critical eye for reviewing Shoot-em-ups.

1988The Sensible Software boys strike again. With the good Parallax and the brilliant Wizball behind them, there was every reason to look forward to the lads' next offering to a world sick with game-cloning. And when SEUCK finally loaded into a C-64 fairly bulging with excitement, it turned out the wait really hadn't been in vain.

For shoot-'em-up fans, SEUCK is the best manna since Space Invaders. Now the moaning about how bad shoot-'em-ups are can stop, because everyone can make a game exactly to their own liking. And let the doubting Thomases be told straight away that SEUCK makes it possible to create games on the level of Uridium, provided the designer has what it takes.

The whole thing is based on a large number of menus, with which the user draws the sprites and backgrounds, designs the animation and new lettering, tweaks the sound effects and picks the colours.

The cassette includes four ready-made games, which load into memory at the same time as SEUCK. By playing, examining and modifying them you learn the basics of SEUCK really quickly. All the tips and tricks, you only learn by starting from scratch without any examples whatsoever.

The first game on the cassette, Slap 'N' Tickle, is a convincing example of what SEUCK can do in skilled hands. It beats most destruction games of its kind hands down.

SEUCK consists of ten main menus, all of which branch into several submenus. The sprite editor is, naturally, the utility for designing all of the game's sprites. The title screen editor is used to give the lettering a complete makeover, draw a logo for the game and write the intro text. The background editor is for drawing the game's backgrounds, and the object editor breathes life into the sprites by setting their positions, colours and animations. The level editor defines each level's type, speed and duration. The sound editor lets you modify the effects, and the enemy editor is for drawing the opponents' flight paths. On top of these, the remaining three menus cover setting your own ship's movement, colour and speed, testing the game, and saving. Once saved, the finished game runs as a standalone game without SEUCK.

You can try out your own game at any stage, even with nothing but sprites, or without sprites using only scrolling backgrounds.

Since all this and a lot more has been crammed into SEUCK, it's obvious that the C-64's memory is full down to the very last bit. The program has been made and polished with exemplary care. Every little detail betrays the programmers' aim of making the program so simple and easy to grasp that anyone can use it. Quite simply, SEUCK is a must-buy for everyone with even the slightest interest in shoot-'em-ups.

After all this praise, in the name of fairness I have to say that there are shortcomings too. Firstly, SEUCK can't draw a loading screen for your game. Secondly, the C-64's memory left no room to include a music-making program, so the games have no music. But I can say from experience that these shortcomings don't matter in the slightest. After you've spent several hours polishing your mega-game, you notice that the lack of music or a loading screen doesn't bother you one bit.

Since SEUCK isn't really a game, it's extremely difficult to give it any kind of scores in the traditional way. So new rating criteria had to be invented, as you can see below. Buy SEUCK, you won't regret it.

1988Just picture the situation: you've booked tickets to the Band Aid concert for yourself and your girlfriend, but some filthy swine has stolen your motorbike and scattered the parts all over town. You start out with 50 dollars and have until 7:30 pm. If you haven't turned up with the tickets and the bike by then, your girlfriend takes off with John. Yikes!

The execution is rather unusual. The game seems to use the C-64's hi-res graphics, so colours are not exactly plentiful. That in turn makes the screen pretty smudgy and unclear. At first even the control system seems to be doing its level best to make the game go as badly as possible. With the good old trial-and-error method, though, steering the guy starts to go smoothly.

Then the trouble starts. A pack of local punks leaps out in front of you from somewhere, so it's time to get swinging with your arms and legs. There aren't many moves, which is actually a good thing. In the long run the fights get monotonous, because you can beat everyone up with the same routine. The game isn't easy, though, and there's plenty of staggering around town to be done. The sound side is so blandly average that there's nothing to say about it one way or the other. Try it before you buy.

1987"Convoy on the horizon, Captain, sir!" The U.S.S. Seawolf glides quietly beneath the surface. "Torpedoes away!" Apart from the periscope, the only thing breaking the surface is the bubble trail of three metal fish. The next candidate for a spot below sea level is a 3000-ton freighter - or is my steel pike next, since the destroyers are turning and soon there will be a diving race with the depth charges.

Everyone has played Battleships at some point in Swedish class, but now you can try it for real. Microprose, the leading software house in the United States, has once again hit the market with a brilliant simulator that goes deeper than the surface into the fascinating world of submarines. Command a submarine in the Pacific, sink Japanese ships and try not to sink yourself when the Japanese pay back the torpedoes with depth charges.

All of this has the taste of authenticity, as Silent Service has been made with unprecedented realism. Apart from claustrophobia and bad air, everything there is in a submarine and everything you can do with one is included. Everything shows that the subject has been researched right down to the bottom.

The game's execution is top class. The graphics are not only clear and fast but good-looking too. The sound effects, though not all that amazing, underline the action nicely. The sonars, the hull creaking in the grip of the pressure, the sounds of the Japanese ships, the keel hitting the bottom - it's all there.

The instructions deserve special praise, because once you've read them through you know more about submarines than many a submarine does. For those without the language skills, the key points have been translated into Finnish. All in all, unless your brain is located inside a joystick, Silent Service is an excellent buy. Dive in and keep your periscope up!

1989 SyksyUnlike most arcade games, a good text game never gets old. Good proof of that is the already almost classic Silicon Dreams - a collection of three ancient Level 9 text adventures. The copyrights on all of them point towards 1986, but no one can claim they are bad.

The adventures in Silicon Dreams are Snowball, Return to Eden and The Worm in Paradise. Those better versed in the background are already wheezing; for everyone else's information: Sci-fi! Sadly the Enterprise doesn't come clattering around any corners, and only in Snowball do you adventure aboard a spaceship, but sci-fi is always sci-fi.

Snowball: something is wrong aboard a colonisation ship. The lives of two million settlers depend on you, your life depends on your own deftness, and somewhere along the way you have to find out what is actually going on.

Return to Eden is a sequel to the previous one. You saved the ship, but the cameras claim you are the ship's saboteur, and your thanks for that is a death sentence. You nevertheless manage to escape to the planet Eden, but you'll have to hurry if you intend to stay alive for long. Nor is that the only problem...

Worm in Paradise: the planet is a perfect paradise, but someone isn't happy. Once you manage to get out of paradise in the first place, there's some undermining to be done.

All the text adventures have been made with the same technique: slow graphics drawing whose end result isn't great either. The drawing routine does let you type while the picture is being developed, though, so it doesn't slow down play. The parser is nothing much, but it works. Level 9's own speciality is the Ram Save/Ram Load and Oops options, which let you save your position to RAM and use oops to step back one notch.

All the parts are nonetheless excellent, even if they can't hold their own against Infocom.

1989 SyksyThe motley ranks of barking, er, shooting games have once again been joined by a newcomer. Amiga owners have reason to frolic for joy, since they needn't agonise over any lack of choice.

In Silkkimato, the vehicle on offer is a helicopter or a jeep. In two-player mode their power combines into a destructive duet. As the genre demands, the contraption is steered from left to right while you let the guns moo, er, bark. Extra weapons are earned by destroying the "goosenecks" (a kind of chopper) that appear at random and assemble themselves in mid-air. The extras are an idiosyncratic selection that includes boosted firepower, more kick for the engines and some mysterious shields. Temporary invulnerability is gained by picking up force fields that look like a swarm of gnats. At the end of each level, the entertainment is provided by a mega-class chopper or tank.

Silkkimato represents the latest trend in shoot-'em-ups, characterised by utterly unrestrained chaos in the action. At times there's such a commotion on screen that even the most hardened flying ace gets tangled up in the joystick lead. Despite this, the difficulty felt quite appropriate, especially as the game has the option, familiar from the arcades, of continuing by putting a coin in the machine (pretend, that is).

Apart from a bit of stuttering, the game's implementation is flawless. For anyone looking for quality basic blasting, Silkkimato isn't a bad buy, but for my taste it's far too unimaginative and visually dull. A couple of years ago this would still have been a big deal. How time flies.

A brief comment on the Commodore 64 version: in its own class it fully matches the Amiga version, except that the option to continue the game is missing.

1989 SyksyTo anyone used to Sierra's adventure games, Silpheed is a strange apparition. Some time ago Sierra released Thexder, a robot game designed by two Japanese rascals, which achieved enormous popularity around the world even though the game wasn't exactly showered with praise in MikroBITTI. Silpheed is the Japanese twosome's latest, and it is a completely honest and straightforward shoot-'em-up. That in itself is something new, since the PC has not been overly blessed with games of destruction. This is presumably partly because a sideways- or vertically-scrolling shooting game is, given the PC's hardware, a tough nut to crack.

So the designers have reworked the whole basic idea in such a way that implementing the game isn't too difficult even on the PC. The background doesn't scroll anywhere; only the ships zip from one edge to the other. So that this idea wouldn't collapse into the old cliches, the playing area has, as it were, been tilted in three dimensions. Enemy ships grow as they come towards the bottom of the screen, and correspondingly the player's own ship shrinks as it climbs towards the top.

Apart from these new innovations, Silpheed is a fairly ordinary shooting game. Destroying enemies lets you collect capsules containing bonus points, extra weapons, extra shield fields and other such things. Some levels have an animated planet surface as their backdrop instead of the usual starscape. The graphics are an odd mix of vector graphics and sprite graphics. The doodads moving about the screen flit briskly from place to place just like sprites, but appear to be made of vectors. The main thing is that it works.

Once again the PC's single-voice sound chip fails to make anyone jump, but, as is typical for Siera, the game supports some music cards, and then the aural pleasure is in a completely different league from that ear-rending beeping. Silpheed plays fast and pleasantly, and is easily the best blasting game on the PC. That's saying a lot, that is.

1990 KevätI have hardly ever heard of a city whose residents were satisfied with the people running it. Thoughts often tread the path of "(swear word) (descriptive adjective and noun), the affairs of this city too have gone to (swear word) again. Even I could run them better." Talk is cheap, but in Maxis Software's SimCity you can put your utopias to the test.

SimCity is a town-planning simulator, which as a concept falls into the same excitement bracket as hymn-singing contests. In practice it's another matter: this is one of those games that fill the night with red eyes.

The bit-mayor has two choices: either load a ready-made scenario or build their own little city from scratch.

The difference is mainly that the ready-made scenarios deal with a big city that has fallen into the clutches of a disaster, and the player usually has five years to get it back on its feet. Having survived the realistic "Tokyo in the clutches of Godzilla", you might try, say, the utopian "San Francisco earthquake". For reasons I'd rather not go into, after one attempt I haven't dared try "Boston's nuclear reactor going pop".

The other option is to build your city from scratch all by yourself. The idea is to bring about a growing, expanding city whose budget stays in the black and whose residents stay more or less content.

In the Amiga version, running the city is handily done with the mouse, with the building blocks hanging at the edge of the screen. The bottom edge takes you to the second screen, i.e. the statistics department. The PC also has mouse control, but you get along quite nicely with the keyboard too. On the C-64 the menus get selected with the joystick.

The city's main building blocks are residential, commercial and industrial plots, with which the player zones the map. If all goes well, hypothetical people start building on them. Housing types range from, say, slums to posh neighbourhoods, with the same principle applied to commerce and industry as well.

For power generation you have to build a power station, running either on coal or on atoms. Then you run the cables so the power distribution works. You also have to build the road and rail network yourself. On the C-64 the railways have been replaced with water pipes.

Other things to build are the seaports and airports that commerce and industry demand, police stations to stamp out crime and fire stations to keep fires under control. And people usually start whining for a football stadium just when the budget is showing rather small sums.

SimCity revolves around the budget. Taxes have to be set high enough for money to flow into the city coffers, but not so high that people start evacuating to cheaper cities. Maintaining the transport routes and the police and fire departments costs money, which is worth bearing in mind while you're waving the mouse about. At the end of each year you get the figures on taxes collected, residents who have moved and other matters of interest.

Information on pollution, crime, traffic and whatnot is nicely available in graphical form. You can even commission a Gallup poll to find out what the hoi polloi are grumbling about.

As the city grows, you have to battle such strange monsters as crime, traffic jams and pollution. But a thriving city also has a whole bunch of proper disasters in store for it. The earth may tremble, the nuclear reactor may go kablooey, fires may break out here and there, a tornado or else a flood may strike, or Godzilla himself may even be born as the child of excessive pollution. Usually, though, the worst that happens is a ship crashing into a bridge or a plane dropping onto the city, and proper disasters are hardly ever seen in a normal game.

As such, there isn't much difference between the disasters. They all destroy buildings, start fires and mess up the power distribution, but an earthquake, for one, doesn't leave any cracks in the ground behind it. Their duration also causes mild puzzlement. A fire, for example, can rage for years of game time, and the same goes for the others.

SimCity claims to use genuine, real formulas when calculating the city's development, which adds to the game's charm. The most unrealistic thing about SimCity is the enormous interest in developing, growing and improving one's own city. That's by no means how it is in real life.

No rose without a thorn. There could have been twice as many building blocks. Waterworks, sewers, metros, proper highways - there's the start of the list. More generally, the player should have a more precise way of influencing things, say by breaking up traffic jams with road signs on the streets. And as always, at some point the game turns tedious when nothing much seems to be happening.

In its technical execution SimCity lurches from one extreme to the other. On the one hand the graphics have nice little tricks, such as microscopic footballers romping about the stadium and car parks filling up during the football season; on the other, strangely flickering, stiffly animated sprites and slowish scrolling. Despite its blemishes, though, the graphics work, as does the mouse-controlled play.

Bad points notwithstanding, SimCity is a truly excellent and original game that brings on a hefty dose of the familiar addiction phenomenon. Playing SimCity ought to be compulsory for many a clown politician. Hopefully a PC version will come out too, so the PCs in Parliament would get some useful work to do.

1991 SyksyIn the beginning the monitor was without form, and void, and the spirit of the player hovered over the floppy disks. Then the player said, "Let SimEarth load!" And SimEarth loaded.

With the help of information technology, creating a world no longer means fiddling about for an amateurish seven days. From the city-centred thinking of SimCity, SimEarth expands into building, controlling and maintaining an entire planet.

Chapter 1: And in the beginning was the menu

1. And so god beheld the opening menu. Earth in the 1990s? Continents for a water planet? Colonising Mars? A shuttle to Venus? But god settled on creating a home-made planet.

2. Quoth the lord: "Every deed requires omega points. Which are the equivalent of SimCity's money. Fortunately in experimental mode there's an infinite supply of them." But god settled on a starting stock of 5000 omega points. For the challenge.

3. And at first the game advanced millions of years per second. The continents took shape, broke apart and moved. And god could not really do anything but look on for the next 200 billion years. And play with volcanoes. And the geosphere controls.

4. So god decided to wiggle the mouse, and behold, the mouse wiggled. Having admired the globe projection, god moved on to the map and switched on the temperature map. God could also have chosen the terrain, the distribution of life, the vegetation map, the ocean currents, etc.

5. But the temperature map it was, then.

Chapter 2: Adam Amoeba

1. And behold! The planet began to settle down and the passage of time shifted to a smaller scale. And god moved on to the editing screen, where the work of creation takes place. And god said, "Let there be dinosaurs." And the dinosaurs came. And went. Then god said, "Oh, let's start with single-celled organisms then, dammit!"

2. Life evolved at a breakneck pace, and the sea teemed with trilobites. Which nearly died out as the seas boiled, until god adjusted the cloud albedo and the temperature dropped. Vegetation filled the earth and life rose onto dry land. And god said, "Now for those blasted dinosaurs!" And so it came to pass.

3. And life survived, even though god toyed with ice ages and massive volcanic eruptions, raised the land into 20-kilometre mountains, and the protozoa even found themselves in the middle of a nuclear blast.

4. And then the lizards developed intelligence. "Eeek," said the reptophobic god, and removed the intelligent lizards with a well-aimed meteor. But while god was off having a bite to eat, the birds developed intelligence. God considered a wave of plague, but then relented and tilted the culture towards the non-philosophical, putting everything into science. Wars raged. And god sped up development with unbridled mutation, breeding rates and a black monolith

5. a la 2001: Space Odyssey.

Chapter 3: The revenge of a stern god

1. And the development level of the pigeon population matched that of the last hundred years. So time now ran just a month at a time. And the birds covered the earth. Literally.

2. Then spake Lord Nirvi: "Now we take on the pigeons." And used up the entire disaster arsenal. But the omega points ran out. And the pigeons multiplied. So with the last remaining points the lord cranked the sun's radiation up to full.

3. And the pigeons roasted. And the whole planet roasted. And the lord said, "Now, was that fun?"

SimEarth has one bad flaw: as an educational program it's first-class, and every school ought to put it on its shopping list. But as a game it just doesn't really work. So the overall score is a kind of average, just so you know.

A large part of the time goes on twiddling your thumbs, waiting either for the frantic early upheaval to end or else for omega points to pile up. The far too massive scale means you look at your planet as an outsider, without really identifying with it. This gets worse once intelligent life has evolved: cities rise, wars break out, plagues rage, but the player just doesn't care.

Warfare lacks one blindingly obvious option: nuclear war. The tools do include a nuclear explosion, but the simulation has no global nuclear annihilation with all its environmental effects. Bad miss!

Just out of interest, SimEarth ought to also allow several parallel life forms to exist at the same time, and to shed enough of its racism that sea creatures, whales in particular, could develop a civilisation (even if you can't exactly tap away at a computer with fins).

The most interesting thing about SimEarth is the thoughts that playing it gives rise to. First of all, man's number-one position on the knee of God the Father, high above the other life forms and lord over them. It's pure chance that this very text isn't being typed by a lizard walking on two legs, with a stupid but faithful human pet loafing around its home.

Secondly, intelligent life (is there any on this planet?), reflected on the surface of the monitor, gives a rather interesting picture of itself. Before civilisation an abundance of species reigns, and the dinosaur and the shrew roam the verdant meadows paw in paw. And then Zap! Kapow! - civilisation is born.

Pretty soon the planet's surface is buried under "intelligent" biomass. In the time it takes the household god to brew a cup of hot ersatz coffee and carve a slab of pork fat with the edge of a knife to top a slice of rye bread, non-intelligent life vanishes from the face of the planet. Natural resources run out, the vegetation is destroyed and even the intelligent life form itself lives in misery.

So now we have a depiction of planet Earth at roughly about now, give or take 100 years. On a cosmic scale you wouldn't even notice it.

Let us first try cherishing intelligent life. "Toss a tenner to development aid", i.e. cranking food production and medicine up to the max, does to the planet what lying in an icy puddle on the Siberian tundra during the autumn storms does to someone with a cold.

With SimEarth I managed to come up with two solution models. The one I christened the "Star Trek" model is based on emphasising science in the hope that humanity manages to move into space before it dies of its own stupidity.

You can combine this with, or use on its own, the "Terminator" model, in which the population is kept tolerable with ice ages, worldwide plague epidemics, meteors and other such handy tools.

But no cause for alarm, SimEarth is only a game after all! In real life everything is going fine, man is the crown of creation, and if an eco-catastrophe or a population explosion comes along, you can always go and hide in Daddy's and Mummy's skirts, they'll think of something.

PS. The version tested is from the States; Europe is handled by Ocean. That shouldn't affect the game.

1991 KevätThe cyber-techno-bullshit intro, all about viruses that have nested in a combat simulator steered by cortex chips implanted in the brain, suggests a puzzle game along the lines of Interphase, but if you had to look for a model, the ones that come to mind first are Virus and Conqueror.

In other words, this 3D blaster worked up by Graftgold belongs to the subgroup in which the craft you steer is shown from the outside. Compared with various muddled attempts, Simulcra has got the idea working tolerably: none of Virus's fixed viewing angle, nor Thunderstrike's camera trailing along behind, but a landscape that rotates smoothly in step with the craft.

The manual's waffling does its level best to hide the game's crystal-clear basic idea - no wonder, when the publisher is a branch office of Microprose. The simulated assault craft assaults its way across the platforms of a simulated battlefield floating on thin air, its primary targets being the generators that keep the energy walls up.

The secondary option is to scrap laser towers, mini-tanks and gliders, and to loot the modules they leave behind for reinforcements such as missiles and mapping devices. You don't have to sweep the mazes along the surface; you can also yank the craft up to glide on its wings. If, on the other hand, you want to improve your protection and prevent unintended take-offs, the wings can be folded right in.

The game has plenty of little technical niceties like these. Generally speaking, life has been made commendably easier; for example, you can tear around the platforms quite carelessly, since there's no fear of falling into the void.

The highly polished impression is underlined by how well the graphics work. Their speed clears, with the bar wobbling, the critical threshold at which the typically dawdling 3D chugging turns into action. A good achievement, considering that the objects have shading that softly follows the light source.

Amazingly, Graftgold has managed to restrain itself and keep the difficulty level in check - evidently under pressure from Microprose. The imaginary Grim Reaper spends most of his time having a siesta, so much so that Simulcra could even be faulted for being all too lax. My first session with the game stretched on endlessly, and in the end I had to switch the machine off before a single game over. Whether that is a good or a bad trait is a matter of taste, but at least you can conclude from it that the game absolutely should have had passwords.

Besides the compulsory starting from level one, Simulcra is gnawed at by the action game's original sin number two. Within the first minute you have seen everything worth seeing. When the surprises go missing, the players go numb. So that the truth doesn't get lost among the complaints: in the straightforward blasting class, Simulcra is definitely the second-best thing on the market at the moment - number one is Paradroid 90, so Graftgold holds a respectable one-two lead.

1989 SyksyGames have been made about many subjects, not least the Wild West. But has anyone other than SSI made a strategy game on the subject? Hardly. And would anyone else have pulled it off as well as SSI? Hardly...

Although the claim may sound dubious, SSI has managed to capture in its game the pulse of the West's fierce gunfights, albeit in a somewhat slower form, within a strategy game's turn system.

Unusually, the game system has been changed a little. It isn't divided, as is customary, into movement turns for each side; instead the characters are moved more or less in turn, depending on each character's own attributes. If a character is quick and nimble on their feet, you can move them more often than some slow lump. Wounds also have a considerable effect. Naturally, if one of your legs has been shot to a pulp, getting around doesn't go all that well.

The game's various scenarios include famous scenes from various films and from history. Among the films that made it in are The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Rio Bravo and El Siette Magnifico, while from history there are, for example, the downfall of the Daltons, Jesse James's attempted bank robbery and the siege of Billy The Kid. Typical historical scenes, on the other hand, are the Indian attack on a settlers' wagon train and the bandits' raid on a town. In all, you can test your skills in ten different scenarios.

Once you've got the hang of it, playing is fairly easy. All you have to do is move the guys around and shoot. What makes it harder is the different stances. Whether to stand, kneel or lie on the ground - each stance has its advantages and drawbacks, but generally speaking the lower you are, the harder you are to hit. Choice of weapon is a problem too: with a pistol you couldn't hit a barn from 10 paces, but a rifle has to be reloaded after every shot. Is it worth going up close to have a poke with a knife, or do you try to hit a target smaller than a barn? And most important of all: is your current position a good one, or would it be wiser to move to a new firing position?

There isn't much to say about the graphics. Walls, stone walls, bushes, chairs and tables + the characters and nothing else. Everything done fairly simply, the style suiting the game well. There are no sounds apart from the sound of the gunshots (unusually good), a beep that signals a hit and a rattle you hear when moving.

All in all, a superb game that you'll end up spending many an hour with. The instructions are excellent, but this time perhaps even needlessly detailed for this game. Play is fairly quick, and the computer doesn't ponder its moves for long, as it does in many other games. And above all - Six-Gun Shootout is really easy to learn. It suits even the most hopeless beginner just as well as the old hand.

1988Skateboarding never dies (but the people who do it certainly do). Gremlin's new offering seems to be bawling that out with every one of its bits... Skating, jumping and wiping out under the eyes of a demanding panel of judges...

Our friend Wallie has to win points from the judges by pulling off all sorts of stunts, each one wilder than the last. The stunting, in turn, takes place on various courses: first in a car park and on the roof of a building, later on a more demanding competition course. Every now and then you visit a small arena where you have to collect a set number of objects in a race against the clock.

In one sense Skate Crazy is a forgiving thing to play: death is not a guest who drops in every other moment. A failed jump is not rewarded with the loss of a life. Only if you don't manage to get between two gates quickly enough is doom at the door. But there's time aplenty...

The game is neat, almost good. You'll gladly play it for quite some time, although this one won't keep you happy forever either. It's just that at times the controls grate on your nerves rather heavily, especially when jumping over obstacles doesn't seem to come off. The jumping really could have been done better, but in other respects there's no great cause for complaint. This always beats some stupid shoot'em up, even if it can't be compared to Elite.

1990 KevätThe skateboarding craze has spawned a whole bunch of games in recent years, among them even a few interesting efforts. Take, for instance, 720 and Skate or Die from across the Atlantic, of which the latter in particular was ace and generally cool. Skate of the Art, on the other hand, hails from Switzerland, and its approach is irritatingly tame.

Product development is in the hands of the 1001 team, which is presumably the heir of the hacker crew known by the same name. The game's basic idea couldn't be simpler: the scenery scrolls and the skater skates, jumping over bumps, manhole covers and bricks. A couple of screenfuls later comes a slightly harder route, where you jump over bumps, manhole covers and bricks.

This could even be fun, except that the routes are designed so tightly that the fun is over in a few seconds and you don't even get time to kick the board up to a decent speed. Twenty-odd short tracks isn't a lot, but the game still has plenty of challenge. Namely, the third track already gives you cataracts, because you have to press your nose right up against the glass to make out at which pixel you're supposed to jab the joystick.

This is one of those sad cases where hardly anything is right. The graphics are neither here nor there, the music is irritating and, to top it all, the game has a truly filthy bug: your score always goes to the top of the high score table, wiping out the previous one in the process. In quality this really is no state of the art, even though the game's tasteless name tries to hint as much. Maybe some skateboarding fan can summon up the energy to get excited even about this.

1988Yippee! A new concoction from Electronic Arts! This time EOA has got stuck into skateboarding, already familiar from Epyx's California Games. There are other links as well: M. Kosaka, S. Landrum and D. Bunch, who are credited as the authors, have also had a hand in knocking together Epyx's Games titles. Skate or Die is in fact an expansion of the ramp skating in California Games; slalom, racing and a one-on-one duel on boards in a curved swimming pool have been added.

After loading the game for a good while, the C-64 slaps a neat title screen up and plays a snippet of digitised music. The drums, synth voice and other sounds have apparently been sampled into a string of bits and shoved into memory. It sounds a bit murky, but still rather interesting with its chords and rhythm backing ... after all, you can easily get fed up with what the Commodore 64's sound chip comes up with on its own, I speak from experience.

The menu is a picture of Rodney's skateboard shop, where the owner, who looks like an ageing punk, dishes out tips on the game and, depending on your choice, lets the eager board artist go and practise or compete. Moving from one event to the next is done by navigating from one part of town to another: the park has the slalom hill, the swimming pool has the duel and so on. Pleasant. Less nice is that each event is loaded separately from disk. Then again, events all crammed into memory at the same time would have suffered in quality.

On first impressions, the best and most spectacular of the events is the familiar freestyle, where by building up speed on the ramp and jumping you pull off ever more acrobatic feats (the most popular being the basic slip-up combined with an arcing fly-off and a full-body landing). The downhill race also looks fun; there you can annoy your opponent with karate kicks. Duller than these were the park slalom and the high jump. In the latter, for example, what seemed to matter most was joystick-rattling of the kind best suited to fever patients with the shakes - sports games will probably never be rid of that. The exotic pool duel didn't thrill me either, once the computer opponent had grabbed the initiative. Now, though, I finally found out what the phrase 'to be knocked off the board' - i.e. beaten hollow - really means.

On the whole the playability felt nice. You only need the keyboard to get the player's name into the computer's head; everything else is handled with the joystick, apart from flipping the disk over. The graphics were easy on the eye, the pictures and colours were neat. The sounds flowed smoothly along the ear canals, especially the intro music. The pool tournament could have been developed a little further, graphically as well as gameplay-wise, but it's a good package even as it is. Out of a nifty idea the makers have once again worked up a smooth-feeling product. The ball, the cube and the pyramid haven't lost their way. More of this, electric artists!!

1990 SyksySki Or Die is, believe it or not, the sequel to Skate Or Die. In keeping with the current trend, the game comes out first on the PC, then on the C-64 and, God willing, some day on the Amiga and the ST. In a nutshell, SOD (those who know English will probably snigger at the abbreviation) is a multi-event sports game set in a winter sports paradise somewhere around Switzerland. The player gets the chance first to practise the events and then to compete in them, either one at a time in whatever order they like or all the events back to back.

The events chosen are snowball throwing, a kind of downhill race, stunt jumps, sliding downhill on an inflated car tyre, and snowboarding down a bobsleigh chute. In snowball throwing the player defends their fort while enemies attack from every point of the compass. A well-aimed snowball sends the baddie off to the cafe to warm up. Bonuses come from all sorts of weirdos skiing past.

In the downhill the aim is to get from the top of the slope to the bottom as fast as possible while pulling off fancy jumps and stunts along the way. In the stunt jumps you first build up a brisk speed (oh no! waggling the joystick from side to side!) and then zing off the lip of the ramp towards the man in the moon. In the air you perform one stunt more stunning than the last, and finally you make a controlled landing. The winner is whoever collects the highest combined score from the judges over three jumps.

On the inflated car tyre you whoosh down the course in a race, avoiding all kinds of obstacles and sharp objects that puncture the tyre. Along the way you can get more air into the tyre by collecting the right items. In the last event you tear wildly along the bobsleigh chute on a snowboard that looks like a skateboard. The aim is to do as many fancy jumps and stunts as possible and rack up plenty of points.

The best of the events is definitely the stunt jumps. The event's brilliance is not dimmed one bit by the fact that I broke two (2) PC joysticks in a couple of hours building up speed for the jump. Anyone who has paid through the nose for one knows that PC joysticks aren't exactly the cheapest, nor even the sturdiest. The dullest event, then, is snowball throwing, which is next to impossible with a joystick and not exactly the height of ease on the keyboard either.

The peak of visual pleasure is reached already on an EGA display, since the game doesn't use the colour counts of beefier graphics cards. In practice, then, this is the 320*200 resolution with 16 colours familiar from the Atari ST. There's not much to complain about in the graphics; you won't find any glaring blunders even if you go looking. The pleasure of the ears is another matter altogether. The beeping is unbearable, even if it was made by the maestro in person, Rob Hubbard, who does all the audio for Electronic Arts' games. SOD supports the most common sound cards, and equipped with one, the PC at its best churns out unbelievably catchy, rocking music. Hubbard's guitar solos are a real treat to listen to.

All in all, Ski Or Die is a nice way to pass the time for joystick-wagglers who are fed up with Summer and Winter Games.

1989 SyksyOnce upon a time, in another universe, there was a race and people called the Skweeks. They lived in peace and harmony on their pink platform, until the evil brush-wielders came and painted the platform blue. Many years later, one of the little skweeks who had fled to the mountains decided to buy some red spray paint from the shop and give their people back all 99 levels of red platform.

Skweek is a cute yellow furball with lots of amusing expressions and gestures. Skweek's opponents are all sorts of different-looking monsters, which luckily can be shot with a charge of paint. The levels are made up of square blocks, of which there are several different kinds. Some blocks explode when you walk on them. Others have a slippery surface and Skweek can't stop on them. The rest of the blocks are the ones that actually turn red. Time keeps ticking away, and when it runs out, death comes for little Skweek.

Skweek has been put together with a sense of fun. On the game's title screen little Skweek walks across the screen and excitedly explains the aim of the game and the enemies. In the background, Amiga-demo style, copper bars and other paraphernalia roll by. On the title screen you can also select the usual one- or two-player games, the hiscore tables and the key maps.

There's nothing to fault in Skweek's graphics, but the music could have been done far more carefully. There's nothing wrong with the compositions as such, but the sounds are straight out of...

Skweek is a new edition built on a simple basic idea. Maybe a tiny bit too easy, since even I got through more than 20 levels in my first game. Still, Skweek is quite fun to steer, and thanks to the sheer number of levels the game is sure to stay challenging for a long time. More bonus points for the programmer come from the really well designed intro screens: you can skip past absolutely everything by pressing fire.

1987Sky Ranger is a helicopter simulator that doesn't strive for any great degree of realism. Your task is simply to patrol between the city's buildings and shoot the guards. The guards are police robots that have gone haywire. If you hit a building, cracks appear across your field of view, and after three hits the game is over. Flying between the three-dimensional buildings has been done rather impressively. Small wonder, then, that the game eats up the memory so completely that even the instrument panel graphics have to be loaded straight onto the screen.

Although the game's cover bears the year 1986, the game was already on sale a couple of years ago, albeit at a much higher price. Now, in the budget range, it may well find buyers among those chopper jockeys who can't afford DI's Tomahawk.

1989 KevätImageworks is a new independent software house founded by Mirrorsoft (Defender Of The Crown, Sinbad, Three Stooges and many others). Skychase is Imageworks' first attempt to win fame and glory in the gaming world. Unlike most new software houses, Imageworks is starting out with a relatively original game. Skychase's basic idea comes from ACE 2 and Top Gun, neither of which lived up to the expectations placed on them.

The idea is a modern-day duel in the air. There is a choice of many different aircraft models, from a MiG to a paper aeroplane. The players can influence plenty of other things too, for example the size of the play area, the pilots' tolerance to centrifugal force, the armament and whatever else. The screen is split into two equal halves, and both pilots have the usual fuel, altitude, speed and thrust gauges on their instrument panels. In addition, each of them has a score counter, a gauge showing the centrifugal force and gauges showing the number of weapons. In the middle of the screen is a kind of radar, which shows the position and heading of both planes.

If there aren't two people around who are interested in aerial combat, you can always play against the computer. Which, mind you, is not very advisable, since the computer is extremely skilful and boredom soon lays its numbing hand on the player's shoulder. What saves Skychase is precisely its two-player playability. It is much more glamorous to play against a human than against a machine, and it's usually a lot easier too. As a human-versus-human game Skychase does a satisfactory job; otherwise it doesn't amaze much.

1988Space, the last of the untrodden wildernesses. This is the game of the space fighter Skyfox, its mission of varying length: to blast the xenomorphs from one end of the galaxy to the other, and to be a sequel like no sequel has ever been before.

Back around 1985 came Skyfox, whose excellent graphics covered up a simple game. And unfortunately Skyfox II can't manage much better.

The Skyfox is equipped with all the basic kit, such as shields, a neutron disruptor, photon bombs, antimatter mines and radar. Less commonly seen novelties are the autopilot and a cloaking device that hides the fighter from the xenomorphs' radar.

Oddly, space contains only bases, asteroid fields and 'wormholes', which make faster-than-light travel possible. Such trifles as suns and planets have been forgotten.

As a game, Skyfox II resembles its predecessor far too much. Although there are ten different missions, in the end they all follow the same formula: flying about, dodging asteroids and destroying xenomorph ships (of which there is, once again, only one model) and bases.

The graphics are in part very well done. The asteroid fields feel and look very natural, but the sprite enemies and bases won't startle anyone with their realism. The sound is pretty feeble too.

Skyfox II is too simple to be a simulator, but too slow-paced to be a satisfying shoot-'em-up. Electronic Arts should have gone to a lot more trouble and made a game with more than an inch of depth.

1988Martech distinguished itself with Nemesis The Warlock, the only good game based on the heroes of the comic 2000AD, who have been seen in games many a time. Inspired by that success, Martech has now knocked out a game about a hero from the classier end of the same comic, namely Slaine.

Slaine is a Celtic warrior who, together with his sidekick, the dwarf Ukko, cuts folk down across the territory of Great Britain. As a special feature, Slaine has the warp spasm, in which the fighter turns into a killing machine that looks more or less like a demon.

Slaine draws heavily on Celtic mythology. This gives the strip its distinctive flavour, thanks to which, as a comic, it beats dime-a-dozen macho barbarians such as some Conan. Worth getting to know if you have the chance. But what's the game like?

At first glance Slaine looks tasty. The game uses an original reflex system: Slaine's thoughts drift across the screen and you have to grab hold of them with a joystick-controlled hand. The graphics are superbly spectacular and all the necessary information pops up in windows. Good music tinkles away in the background.

After just a couple of minutes of play the originality starts to flake off. Reflex is an irritating way of giving commands, and once you strip away the surface glitter, what's revealed underneath is an ordinary text adventure. And not even a particularly good one at that. The information in the info windows is hard to make out on a TV screen, and in general you get fed up with the whole game tremendously fast.

Personally I find text adventures too limited to have the energy to enjoy them (Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls excepted). And since Slaine is irritating on top of that, the final verdict reads: a pointless game on which a potentially splendid licence has been squandered. And that was putting it kindly. Text game buffs should probably check it out anyway, though.

1987We've got Delta, we've got Nemesis, and now the extra-weapons-from-icons shoot-'em-ups gain a new member in Slapfight.

Based on Taito's coin-op, Slapfight isn't a full-blown Nemesis clone, though, since it scrolls in the normal top-to-bottom style, as thousands of other shoot-'em-ups have done and millions more are yet to do. Nemesis, of course, scrolls from right to left, as thousands . . .

So in Slapfight you shoot critters, some of which leave a starfish behind. By collecting it you can fit your ship with extra oomph, better weapons, racing stripes and a stuffed rabbit. At the end of each wave you try to square up to the mothership, after which you shoot critters, some of which leave . . .

Slapfight does at least have one weapon that's out of the ordinary. At the press of a button, heat-seeking missiles launch at every target on the screen. What a sense of power and might!

Surely nobody seriously expects originality from games any more. Slapfight is at least a professionally made shoot-'em-up, and quite fun to play for a while, too. But the emphasis is on the words "for a while".

A slight slackening has been noticeable in Imagine's recent games. They have mostly been converted from fairly simple source material, and the results have turned out accordingly. Slapfight follows this line. It could be worse, but otherwise there's nothing new under the sun.

1990 KevätYour everyday morning routine is badly thrown off when a loose-headed Kobold on the run from imperial demons turns up at the door, hands over a jade-patterned bracelet and babbles something about the N'Gnir sleeper. The story stayed a bit murky, but apparently you're supposed to go and interrupt a mythical divine being's overlong afternoon nap, so that the eight kingdoms of Tesseria can be spared final chaos.

Tesseria is a three-dimensional world consisting of 94 sectors, realised with an exciting combination of vector graphics and game characters that change size according to their distance. Viewing the surrounding landscape and free-form hiking happen in real time, with a helping hand from mouse control.

The plains are teeming with assorted wanderers who have an irritating tendency to pelt the player with objects that hurt, but luckily such impudence can be answered in kind. Of course, the kingdoms also have friendly souls who give you more or less cryptic hints.

The course of the adventure is affected by a selection of objects that couldn't be simpler to use: all you need to do is walk over the object and then toddle off to the right place.

The technical innovations that dress up the game are interesting in themselves, but a couple of experimental programming tricks aren't enough to make a game, especially when the overall impression is desolate and a bit messy. In content SGL is the usual forced and mechanical adventure mush. The game's scope is only apparent, since most of the time goes on wandering about all at sea, hammering the yokels you meet with lead balls.

One could carry on hammering the game by noting that if the machine has no extra memory, then even with the external drive yanked out, after a while the program claims to have run out of memory. At that point you have no choice but to try to save your position and load the game again. Nnnnnngh! (A three-and-a-half-inch floppy makes nifty paper dolls, but it blunts your scissors.)

SGL is ambitiously programmed, but as a game it's only mildly interesting. It tries hard to push its way into the heavyweight division of games, but is left hanging from the edge of the ravine at the bottom of which the rubbish tip of forgotten mediocrities lies rotting.

1991 KevätWhen a computer game company signs a licensing deal with an arcade manufacturer, it apparently commits to converting other games besides the best ones. That's why we've been treated to some odd efforts. Sly Spy is one of them: there is simply nothing new in it.

More than a little Bond-ish, SS-SA consists of 9 levels. In the parachute jump you shoot at a huge flock of other jumpers, then comes a long series of horizontally scrolling sections where you advance sometimes on foot, sometimes in some vehicle.

Once again it puts me in a black mood. All the game sections repeat the same formula regardless of scroll direction or graphics. "Ingenious" programming makes sure that with Mr Sylvester "Sly" Spy's stiff movements you can't survive, for example, two grenade throwers letting rip at the same time as the gunmen.

Software Creations does a fine job of emulating Tiertex, producing slow, stiff, vertically stretched graphics with a weird palette. From Ocean, normally a high-class conversion cranker, Sly Spy is a total filler job.

1990 KevätThe ingredients of a successful comic strip according to Charles Schulz: take a gang of precocious brats and leave out the adults as superfluous. Add a dog as the real star, since the human powers of expression of human characters are limited. The result: Peanuts, one of the most popular and most worldwide comic strips there is. And if a subject sells as a comic strip, it'll sell as a computer game too.

Or so The Edge at least believes, having whipped this Snoopy game onto the market. The game is a typical action adventure: Linus has lost his blanket and Snoopy sets off to look for it, since the blessed trauma case won't even go to a psychiatrist. Our hero roams the landscapes far and wide, lugging around and using various objects. The scenery and characters are faithful to the original, and there are no lapses of style to be seen.

In this computer comic strip the sound side is limited to the title-screen tune. One joystick and the space bar are enough to steer the beagle, if only you knew/guessed what you're supposed to do. The movements could be a bit nippier. You can only carry one object at a time, and after a while you find yourself traipsing back and forth across the game's rather cramped area.

The game would surely be to the taste of younger fans of action adventure games, but let them too be warned about the game's illogicality and a few annoying bugs. Example 1: the objects you need can be dropped in places from which they can no longer be retrieved. Example 2: the typewriter in the game can be used for two purposes. First, for writing a letter. After that, for resetting the Amiga. Yuck.

In any case, the game shows that Edge's comic licences don't limp when it comes to graphical looks. Bugs out, a smidgen more playability, and for the next subject how about Calvin & Hobbes, my dear Edge.

1991 KevätSnowstrike is a different kind of flight simulator. Different in exactly the same way as all the others. Different, in other words. The difference, however, does not lie in leaning on historical facts, which has always partly plagued flight sims. This time war is declared on drugs, and the instrument of destruction chosen is the F14-LCB COSMOS fighter, codenamed Rapier.

The game starts promisingly with several menus in which you decide whom to destroy, where, with whom and in what kind of weather. The difficulty level can also be picked from four options, and the number of control keys won't scare you off either. Besides flying, the player also partly handles air traffic control from a control room, where all the necessary information on the mission at hand is available.

Once you take off, however, the game reveals its real character flaw - slowness. In flight sims devoted purely to civil aviation, slowness doesn't necessarily make a game unbearable, but in a combat sim it's a whole different story. If the player has time to nip off for a coffee while a missile homes in on its target, no tense atmosphere or burning excitement of any kind really develops. The drawing routine tries to handle coloured solids rather than vector graphics, and the result is hopelessly soporific.

On top of this, the reading of control inputs is slow/weak, and lining the plane up precisely in an attack situation is frustrating at first. Nor can you even vent your frustrations on your own control tower, as it turns out to be unusually resistant to its own fighters' shells.

So Snowstrike is different in the sense that it was produced by Epyx, and that you'll hardly find another sim of the same name. Since these aren't enough to lift the game above sameness, however, it can't be recommended to anyone interested in action, or even in simulations.

1989 KevätGraftgold, who used to slave away for Hewson, now nestles under the shelter of Firebird's wings. As proof that Graftgold is not the same thing as Andrew Braybrook, Firebird has published John Cummings's Soldier of Fortune.

"Fortune will return only once the power source of the Zodiac has been found" tells you pretty precisely what type of game this is. That's right, children, the formula is the good old familiar solution = jump + bounce + climb + shoot. Luckily a couple of new variables have been slipped into the old formula.

The aim is to collect pieces of the Zodiac, which are the key to a happy ending. There's plenty else to collect too, to the player's great delight. The shops sell not only better weapons and new shields but extra lives as well. But where's the money to come from? Money doesn't grow on trees, of course, but there's no point bothering with work, because the money lives in the monsters' tummies. When the host gives up the ghost, the money starts bouncing merrily about, with inflation nibbling away at it on every bounce. Another happy surprise is the sub-games found here and there, which break up the routine nicely.

Soldier of Fortune contains no unprecedentedly splendid graphics, but they won't offend even a more aesthetic eye. As for the sounds, it can be stated that yes, there are some.

In fact, Soldier of Fortune is quite a pleasant surprise. All the pieces add up to a balanced and enjoyable game that doesn't grate on your nerves with artificial pixel-perfect jumping. Graftgold's newcomer is a considerably better than average action adventure.

1989 KevätHere's a question: good Xain, your sacred mission is to free the galaxy from under the yoke of the Federation (this is the view of SOL's makers and does not reflect the reviewer's position on the Federation and Starfleet). They have infiltrated three planets in our system and only you, dear Xain, stand between us and destruction. The question is: what kind of game are we talking about?

Quite right, a shoot'em-up is what it was. And this time the kind where the hero bounces from platform to platform, shooting and collecting extra weapons, until somewhere along the way he runs into a monster that's bigger and tougher than normal. Seen many times before, as such.

But then games like this are fun, otherwise nobody would shove their money into them. And Soldier of Light meets the requirements of a good Amiga shoot'em-up: the graphics side is the work of professionals and you can't knock the sound either. Soldier of Light is quite pleasant to play, which is in fact the biggest compliment this game reviewer can be bothered to stretch to. What else could anyone be bothered to say about Soldier of Light?

1989 KevätUnited States history has been one of SSI's most beloved and most fruitful subjects. Several superb games have been made about the American Civil War, such as Gettysburg and Shiloh, and now the series is rounded out by Rebel Charge at Chickamauga, which depicts the South's last great offensive. Sons of Liberty, on the other hand, is set around the time of the founding of the USA and contains three battles between the British and the Yanks.

Both belong to the same game series and use the same game system. So those who have played Battle of Antietam, Gettysburg or Shiloh need do no more than glance at the manual, since the commands are nearly identical. The only practical differences between the various games in the series are in fact just the terrain and the new units.

The units at your disposal consist of cavalry, infantry and artillery. Using these, in each game you have to try to take possession of "objectives", i.e. particular spots on the terrain, which earn the player heaps of points.

In SSI style, the instructions are thorough. The box comes with sturdy colour maps and a thick manual, not to mention an even thicker volume of tables, into which they've also crammed a short story about the battle in question. If these don't give you a headache, then nothing will.

Play is fairly fast in both games. The disk drive does whirr away at pretty much every opportunity, admittedly, but the pauses are still of tolerable length. Patience is, after all, a necessity for a strategist.

Versatility is the trump card in this series of SSI games - most of the keyboard is in use, and colossal is the amount of information the player is supposed to keep inside their head. It isn't overwhelming, though, despite any suspicions to the contrary.

Both Sons of Liberty and Rebel Charge are superb and challenging strategy games, champions of their field, whose interest won't run out for a long time to come.

1991 SyksyLegends never die. Infocom died, but lives on in Mastertronic's budget range - up now is no. 9 in the 'Infocom from Mastertronic' series: Sorcerer.

The top Jehovah of the Guild of Enchanters, Belboz the Necromancer, has disappeared and is suspected of having fallen victim to the forces of evil. The future of the whole kingdom and of the Circle of Enchanters is at stake, and so you must acquire the powers and cunning of a true sorcerer to sort out the mess. 'Piece of cake,' thinks the player, and starts the game only to come face to face with a werewolf. Luckily there's a tree close by, and the player climbs up it. Lo and behold, a huge snake comes slithering down the trunk with a meal in mind. The world will be saved in no time.

Sorcerer belongs to the series 'nerve-shredding Infocom adventures that snot-nosed kids have no business with'. Requirements: preferably born/lived in an English-speaking country, though others will do if they've studied the language intensively for 10-100 years; an imagination more active than average; plenty of paper, pencils and erasers for map-making, plus a thick dictionary just in case. Those less well equipped may try it at their own risk.

The text games Infocom made back in the day are part of gaming legend - today they're out of fashion. Except for those into Olde Values, language geniuses and text adventure fans.

Sure, today's role-playing games are fine things, but the real adventure is born from grinding away at these. Adventuring with nothing but letters for graphics is an Experience, especially when the adventure is this carefully made and has a decent parser that doesn't grumble at every other word. The only ones it loses to in quality are Infocom's last adventure games, Arthur and Shogun.

1990 KevätBack in the day, Don Bluth used his animator's talents to knock out two games exploiting laserdisc technology for the gaming public to marvel at: Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. A little over a year ago the Canadian Readysoft took on the job of converting the games to home computers.

Dragon's Lair amazed, delighted and infuriated. Audiovisually the game was a very faithful copy of its coin-op original, but most of those who paid several hundred marks for it forgot that the game's charm in the arcades rested precisely on the pictures and animation loaded off laserdisc. Not even the Amiga can manage quite the same thing, so the burden came crashing down on the shoulders of content and playability. And there wasn't much of those to be found even in the coin-op, so in the end the Amiga Dragon's Lair was just a nice Amiga demo. Having played Space Ace in the arcade, I didn't bother expecting anything amazing while I waited for the Amiga version to load.

The slimy, sickly-sweet plot goes roughly like this: Ace, Earth's toughest hero, is tootling along with his fiancée Kimberly admiring the lovely scenery when the wicked Borf swoops down on the pair. That swine Borf kidnaps the gorgeous Kimberly and, in passing, tries to zap Ace off to the happy hunting grounds. Having failed at this, Borf scurries back to the drawing board and designs a massive superweapon, the Infanto ray, with which he intends to bring the whole world under the yoke of his tyranny. So much for Borf, but Ace begs to differ. The player's task, then, is to steer Ace with the joystick or keyboard through more than 40 screens, rescue the beautiful Kimberly and capture Borf.

Space Ace suffers from exactly the same ailment as its predecessor. Without the laser's crisp graphics, nothing holds the game together any more. This time, at least, the game ran on a half-meg machine too, and the number of disks has been squeezed down to four. Playability and appeal, however, are almost entirely missing. Space Ace is far too easy, and if your patience holds out you can play it through in under an hour using the trial-and-error method. The joystick and keyboard offer a whopping four functions: the basic compass directions and the fire button. A clear beep always announces that the game has registered the player's command, which removes any uncertainty over whether that joystick movement actually made it all the way to the computer or not.

As you have probably already guessed, Space Ace is no game at all; it is just a fancy demo you can run for prospective Amiga buyers. The price tag of over four hundred marks cannot be defended with anything other than the enormous amount of work its makers put in. The end result, however, is not the sum of its parts. You can easily save several hundred by asking to try the game first and zipping through it to the end on the spot.

1987Space Harrier is the computer version of Sega's video game of the same name. In it you shoot one-eyed mammoths and other dreadful creatures while trying to dodge all sorts of obstacles, such as trees, bushes and posts, among other things.

The game's hero moves along the ground on a unicycle or flies through the air. The task is to destroy the hideous monsters, and you certainly have your work cut out doing it.

The graphics are a real feast for the eyes, and so is the three-dimensional effect. The colours are perhaps a little garish in places, but they don't get in the way too badly.

At first it takes some getting used to keeping up with the fast scrolling, but practice helps here too.

Once far enough into the first level, the hero gets a trial of strength against a two-headed dragon or a robot blasting away with an ion cannon.

The next level then has even fiercer creatures in store.

Thanks to its brilliant execution, interest in Space Harrier should hold up for a long time, even though the game's basic idea is fairly run-of-the-mill.

1990 KevätThe basic idea of Space Harrier is simple: a sturdy space commando runs towards the horizon, either shooting at or dodging the mass of monsters and objects advancing in the opposite direction. You can't adjust the speed, but the height you travel at, that you can.

For some reason there's Space Harrier for the sixteen-bitters by the bucketload. Elite has already made one, although it only had half the levels, with the rest arriving on a data disk. Space Harrier II is already on its way from Grandslam or Tynesoft, and now Elite is releasing a new Space Harrier I.

Technically the latest attempt is pretty convincing. The two floppies reportedly hold the whole of Space Harrier, and on the Amiga the game uses the full screen. The objects update in convincing 3D, and the playability is spot on. The sound side could have been a bit beefier.

Space Harrier's worst side, however, is the game's monotony, which in the coin-op was made up for by a seat swung about by hydraulics. Without a hinged office chair and a helpful circle of friends, this is hardly likely to work out at home.

1990 SyksyWhen the original Space Harrier coin-op came out some years ago, its hydraulic seat that tossed the player about and its superb three-dimensional graphics hurtling towards you were fresh ideas and caused something of a sensation. But how does a revamped version of the idea bite in the 90s without the extra hardware?

There's no particular difference from the first incarnation: a figure decked out in a red tracksuit hurtles wildly towards the horizon, destroying everything in its path with an underarm cannon. Now and then you dodge a few rows of pillars, and at the end of the levels you square off against giant monsters of just the right size.

The scenery is the familiar chequered floor scrolling in three dimensions, but the sense of perspective has been improved with sideways scrolling and by shifting the viewing angle vertically as well. The movements and in-and-out zooming of even the biggest creatures are smooth, but as in all sprite-based 3D efforts, the effect isn't entirely convincing, though it's better than average.

Thanks to the mouse control you can fling the character from one side to the other with a little flick of the wrist, so the flailing about has been given some playability too. Instead of the flat music playing in the background, you'd wish for at least some sound effects, to give a better feel to the shooting and especially to the hitting.

The game's strongest point is its neurotically unreal atmosphere, but the content is so dismal that within a few minutes you've seen everything worth seeing. Even the challenge of making progress is missing, since you get to choose from all twelve levels right at the start, and beyond those the game has no extras apart from a couple of bonus stages.

Game development has roared right past Space Harrier, since this second instalment, knocked together for Sega's 16-bit Megadrive, is not much more than a computer test card any more. Yet the execution is so professional and the idea so simple that SH2 makes handy filler for the short dead moments of your free time.

1988Sierra's King's Quest from a while back was, together with its sequels, such a great success that it has been decided to apply the same game technique to Sierra's latest adventure, Space Quest, as well.

The player character moves around the game area from room to room just as in the very best action adventure. When something interesting comes up, though, the situation changes, i.e. commands are typed in from the keyboard the way they are in adventure games. This crossbreed works surprisingly well, because the world of the adventure is large enough, the pictures depicting it detailed enough, and the parser that interprets the commands powerful enough to make sense of even complicated instructions.

The plot of the adventure is as follows:

The sun of the Earnon star system is going out. Earnon's best scientists gather aboard the spaceship Arcadia to develop a new sun generator, with which one of Earnon's lifeless planets could be turned into a new sun.

The experiments succeed, but space crooks banished from Earnon get wind of it and hijack the Arcadia to blackmail Earnon, since the sun generator could also be used on Earnon's inhabited planets. During the hijacking the Arcadia's entire crew is killed, except for the janitor dozing in the broom cupboard, who then gets landed with the job of player character. Something oughta be done, but what - ay, that is the question.

1991 SyksyIf anyone imagined after Space Quest III that the Two Guys from Andromeda could never, no way, no how, ever make a more deranged, crazier, funnier and visually more beautiful Space Quest, they were, fortunately, badly mistaken. For SQ4 is everything we've come to expect from Space Quests - and much, much more. Or as it says on the back of the box holding this golden nugget: May the farce be with You!

On technical grounds alone SQ4 is of such calibre that there's no point even trying to play it on some pointless micro. The graphics card has to be VGA level at the very least. Even the owner of an ordinary 286 compatible can't properly get into the game until switching their 256-colour game to the 16-colour one, which a 286 CPU can still just about cope with honourably. The hard disk had also better be both roomy and fast, so that all your time isn't spent waiting for the scenery to load.

The first thing that really leaps out at you is SQ4's incredible graphics, largely digitised straight from hand-made paintings (what was it Wallu wrote about the future of computer graphics as the usurper of hand-made art...). Especially in the early stages of the game, its beautiful scenery and animation smoother than anything seen before in Sierra's games are a caress for the player's eyes. As the game goes on the scenery gets a little simpler, since the prospective buyer trying the game out in the shop won't see it until several evenings later, with the shillings already lolling about in the game dealer's pocket...

The game begins as Roger Wilco heads home for a well-earned holiday. In the middle of the journey and the merciless self-praise, an armed-to-the-teeth time patrol of the Sequel Police turns up, having decided to spare the universe from the eternal continuation of brain-softeners like Space Quest. Unfortunately the rebels of Space Quest XII have got wind of this plot, originally hatched in Vohaul's (gasp!) head, and have sent (will send) their own time patrol to protect Wilco.

Not everything goes quite according to plan, though, since right away Wilco ends up (ended up, has ended up, will end up) on the surface of planet Xenon in civil-war-ravaged Space Quest XII - alone, without any equipment or any clue what to do. Luckily the place is full of friendly cyborgs, killer robots, drummer bunnies and other such folk you can ask for advice.

After a few very simple (and deadly) incidents, Roger Wilco finally ends up at the controls of a time machine. Even though the Space Piston magazine that comes with the game happens to have that very model on test, neither Wilco nor, least of all, the player has the foggiest idea how to, say, get the contraption started. For starters, though, it's worth jotting down the time code shown on the selector's screen, so you can also get back some day. Another code worth trying comes from pressing the bottom-row buttons in order from left to right and finally the right-hand button of the middle row. Latex babes are always a fun acquaintance...

So, as you may have guessed from all the praise above, Space Quest IV is a divine game that will sap productivity at every workplace that has made the mistake of putting sufficiently powerful micros on its employees' desks. If the Two Guys from Andromeda can sink below even this bar, the basic fabric of the universe cannot help but tear - absolute truth, evil or screwballery are always dangerous things.

(The scores are the famous subjective Kasvi points, so don't swallow them whole - ed. note)

1990 KevätOrigin, familiar from the Ultimas, decided for a change to put swords and magic in mothballs and leap into the Far Arm star cluster, whose everyday life includes princesses, Imperial star cruisers, the Merchants' Guild and strange civilisations threatening humankind.

The Far Arm cluster comprises eight solar systems, with all sorts of sights to see. How about the nebulae of Arcturus, the antimatter fields of Narsee or the twin stars of Bassrut?

In between the travelling it's nice to pop into the stations, shown from a top-down perspective, to get acquainted with the locals and wet your whistle at the bar. The crumbs of information gleaned from conversations are important, since from them the great task awaiting the hero begins to take shape, one involving political skulduggery and dark forces in the Star Wars style. In the bars you can also play Hive. It's an arcade game that shows off humanity's innate hatred of the ant-like Manchi.

Interstellar travel is handled by a light Sunracer-class patrol ship, which its previous owner christened the Jolly Roger. Navigation within solar systems takes place on a two-dimensional navigation screen, but if you come under attack or mean to dock at a station, the game switches to a three-dimensional view which is, believe it or not, drawn in filled vector graphics. The speed of the graphics is at a perfectly acceptable level, which is an incredible achievement for the C-64.

Warp drives haven't been invented yet, even though this is the 2300s, so to get to another solar system you have to use the wormholes left behind by the ancient Malir civilisation. In this, the dullest section of the game, you simply fly through circles.

You can't get by without money, since the ship needs maintenance and better equipment. The ways of fattening your bank account are familiar from Elite: besides honest trading, you can take up pirate hunting and plundering merchant ships. The goods on offer vary from one solar system to the next: mining centres may have cheap dilithium (Star Trek strikes again) and space stations sell supercomputers and other refined products. Hauling freight isn't risk-free, since organic cargo spoils easily, ionising storms can wreak havoc in the hold and some stations have a nasty habit of confiscating dubious goods.

The Jolly Roger's armament consists of a feeble garnet laser, plasma torpedoes and two types of missile, the more powerful of which are fitted with nuclear warheads. The laser can be swapped for a better one, but the most powerful weapon is the particle cannon, which breezes straight through enemy shields. The missiles seem terribly clumsy at first, since you can only hit the enemy with them at close range. The trick is that later on you can fit the lasers with automatic control, which makes it more comfortable to lie in wait for the right moment to fire.

The ship's gunsight is more cleverly done than usual. You can lock it onto the target of your choice, whereupon arrows at the edges of the screen let you work out the enemy's position even when it isn't visible on screen. Another smart solution is the control panel's tactical display, which shows the enemy ship's type, distance, manoeuvres and the extent of its damage.

Space is sailed by a selection of different kinds of ship, whose behaviour and attitude towards the player vary greatly and may also change as the game goes on. Pirates and the alien race of the Manchi are a pest from the very start, but the freighters belonging to the Merchants' Guild are content to send friendly greetings. The Imperial cruisers leave the player alone too, but their curt "stay clear civilian" warnings are worth taking seriously, because a Titan-class cruiser is a frightening opponent. So it's a truly heartwarming experience when, in the middle of a pirate ship's furious attack, a couple of Imperial cruisers turn up on the scene. Even the most hardened pirate is then in a hurry to tiptoe off to other parts.

If you turn pirate yourself, you inevitably end up on bad terms with the Guild. It's not worth making trouble before you've got better equipment, since a player with a bad reputation gets shady bounty hunters on their tail from pretty much every direction.

Space Rogue's plot isn't especially complicated, but unravelling it gives even an experienced player plenty of work. Then again, you may be left with the aftertaste that once you finally get to grips with the plot, the ending comes along too quickly. Another thing that kept bothering me was that the space battles aren't very tightly tied to the twists of the plot. A couple of hefty search-and-destroy missions certainly wouldn't have made the game any worse.

The game's worst weakness lies in the playability, since every last scrap of text is loaded separately, and switching to the navigation screen means waiting about half a minute. What gets your brain steaming most of all is the game's tendency to start up properly only on every second or third attempt on average. That wouldn't matter otherwise, except that the same torment awaits every time the player gets destroyed.

Laborious play is depressingly typical of Origin's products, but they usually turn out to be worth the trouble. Let the shortcomings be forgiven this time, for Space Rogue is such a unique game that its programmer ought to be awarded a Star Fleet decoration.

1988Prism Leisure is a software house which, judging by its output, concentrates on making reasonably priced, insanely bad versions of old ideas. Not that there's anything wrong with using old ideas. The world would still have room for games like an ST Choplifter or an Amiga Centipede, but they would have to be made with style and with respect for tradition. Space Station hasn't a trace of either.

Put briefly, Space Station is a platform game set on a space station (surprise!), whose graphics and smoothness of action are on a par mainly with the very first Basic games on the VIC...

1989 KevätAfter a long, far too long, break, the English programming team Bitmap Brothers makes good on the promises of Xenon with Speedball. The gang's first game was, after all, pure manna for fans of shooting games. The superb, metallic-sheened graphics and clever sound effects left no one cold, least of all the game reviewers, who praised the game to the skies.

The same touch shows in the brand-new game too. The first thing to catch the eye is naturally the extremely metallic graphics and the effective animation. On the sound side, David Whittaker's music has come on considerably since his first 16-bit efforts. Then a little about the idea of the game: Speedball is set in the far future, when humanity's amusements have been reduced mainly to going to work, eating sausage (artificial, of course) and watching a game called Speedball on the telly. In Speedball two five-man teams play a game related to handball on a rectangular pitch. There's a goal at each end of the pitch and the aim is simply to get the ball (metallic, naturally) into the goal. Any means are allowed.

And in this game the old phrase "by any means necessary" is taken literally. Since the spirit of the game is winning, it doesn't matter all that terribly much if an opponent happens to lose their life. So there's enough violence to share out among a hundred other games. You don't see any blood, mind you (pity!), but the players hit, slide-tackle, batter, pummel and otherwise communicate in a most commendably civilised manner.

Every now and then some sort of coins and letters also appear on the pitch. By collecting enough coins you can, after the match, bribe the referees and timekeepers, get yourself more strength and speed, and cause the opposition a spot of bother. Collecting letters brings about all sorts of nice effects mid-match, such as reversing the opposing player's joystick controls (which naturally causes immense amusement). There's other fun stuff too, from energy balls to extra power and freezing the opponent.

Can the game be anything other than brilliant, when on top of all the above you add excellent playability? Even a nearly perfect game has room for a little minus: I couldn't install it on my own cute little hard disk, which I love more than my stamp collection.

1991 SyksyIn 2095 the nearly hundred-year-old people's game called Speedball had become so corrupt and violent that the SPA (Speedball Players Association) decided to reorganise the game - and Speedball II was born. The new game got a new rulebook, the game mafia and its bribable referees had to make way, and the new president elected to the SB association was former player Bim Tap (hohoho!)

The game became an international draw and every match was broadcast live around the world. The weak no longer stood a chance once the money men, the teams' sponsors, came up with a player transfer market. By the year 2100 Speedball II had been split into two divisions, the pitch had been doubled and new teams had been born: the game could begin.

The classic of Amiga classics has got a sequel, but let's go over a couple of basic concepts for new Speedball players. Speedball is played by throwing and scooping up an iron ball on a pitch measuring 160 x 90 feet, with a goal at either end. You can also collect various bonuses during the game, which give you extra abilities.

And this is only where Speedball Two gets going. The game brings in all the best clichés of the previous instalment while adding to the game's smooth speed. The pitch really has been enlarged: the first one's three screenfuls have swollen to twelve. Goalkeepers can now properly move about, instead of just shuffling sideways in the goal. Stuff has appeared along the sides too: a spiral tunnel that doubles goals, pinball-style stars that add points, and various bonus icons.

Playability has improved, since the players really do obey the joystick as they pilot the iron ball into the opponent's half. Likewise, the player nearest the ball sets off without faltering to take possession of it. Optimally good throws with the fire button and a little mild roughing-up make things flow better.

The system of course has a dash of violence. The nicely animated players shove, maul and tackle their neighbours. Players can take a certain number of wallopings; once that's exceeded, robot sawbones rush in to cart the wounded off so they're not cluttering up the pitch. Strength, tactics and speed are based on a few basic attributes, which can be inspected on various panels during breaks in play.

The buying and selling market is based on the basic attributes too. At the start, the Brutal Deluxe team you control is by no means in world-championship shape; you have to recruit fresh troops for the battlefield as far as your money and judgement allow. The combinations of different attributes bring endless life to the game. In the Gym panel, training (it costs credits) lets you boost various attributes such as attacking ability, throwing, game aggression, tactical sense etc. You can also buy extra armour for the players.

Polishing and programming the game itself has cost the Bitmap brotherhood plenty of sleepless nights, because the end result W-O-R-K-S. The animation and pitch scrolling are commendable, and the sound, from the opening tune to the in-game effects, is beyond reproach. The game system, too, with its new additions and gimmicks, adds something playable to the first instalment. Like the first one, this one is at its best when two competent SB players square off against each other.

1990 KevätThe 3D shoot-'em-up craze started by Road Blasters just keeps on going. This time the idea has been leeched from Live and Let Die and Offshore Warrior, i.e. the car has been swapped for a spicy speedboat.

Speedboat Assassins has been darned together from three little bits. Before the actual blasting part you slalom along a lane lined with mines. After this, weaponry is rushed in by air in true Road Blasters style and you set about shredding an assortment of naval hardware. At the end of the level waits a hefty gunboat, to be turned into an underwater wreck for the delight of future archaeologists.

SA's 3D scrolling flows along nice and smoothly, but the sense of perspective has once again been ruined by some Mongolian sliding projection. The controls feel satisfactorily responsive and the engines have some horsepower in them too. The trappings are cute, but the content is all the more barren, since the only way you notice the level changing is the different background graphics.

The maritime graphics, on the other hand, keep taking it into their heads to change level. Every so often, you see, both the enemies and the dots that create the sense of speed start going guru, i.e. levitating above the waves. I found other amusing bugs too, such as the gunboat's mysterious vanishing trick.

SA belongs to Mastertronic's new 16-Blitz series, which peddles games at a drastically slashed price of five pounds, so small shortcomings could be forgiven. But on the other hand, there's a pretty marginal difference between a game being complete rubbish and cheap rubbish.

1988In Speedrumbler (known as Rush & Crash in the arcades) there's a gang of terrorists terrorising small towns. Those swine have taken your family prisoner, and you have to fight your way through the various levels in your buggy to rescue them. As in the coin-op version, along the way there are houses that give you extra equipment. When you're feeding it coins, little men come out of them, and you get the extras by running them over. In the conversion, on the other hand, you have to drive over the houses twice.

As nearly always, this arcade conversion is on the weak side too, though still better than many others. The scrolling is a bit jerky, but otherwise there isn't much to complain about. The biggest differences are the weaker graphics, the little men not turning up, and the missing demo. The sound isn't much to cheer about either.

Speedrumbler is a middling game. Personally I couldn't get worked up about it; probably down to my hardened mind, which only bothers to catch fire for really good games.

1991 KevätThe elf brothers Sortice and Cerorapp are in a foul mood, because just as their mentor Poinat was about to tell them how to get money, friends, influence and a cat, in other words how to become a real wizard, the wretch went and let himself be kidnapped to the underworld. Someone will have to go and fetch him, alone or in pairs.

Apart from the two-player mode and the breezy background story, Spellbound doesn't manage to stand out from the average hop-and-collect games. In a landscape limited to horizontal scrolling you shuttle from level to level by lift, open chests with keys, gather magic from scrolls and hoard useful gear. The rather dull horde of enemies gets stoned to death, set smouldering and so forth.

In principle there's a decent amount of content, but the game mechanics are Spellbound's biggest weakness. Progress is a limp shuffle, when a game of this kind would demand speed and zip. Movement is too tied to the lifts, which you can't even jump off. There ought to be more proper bouncing arcs, climbing and other poking about in every nook, instead of scurrying back and forth along monotonous ledges.

Using magic adds only a notch or two of interest, because apart from levitation the spells mostly just affect the quality of your ammunition. It's also rather odd that if you try a particular spell with insufficient power, the hero gets punished, even though the meter readings the spells require aren't given anywhere.

The most successful part of the game is the background art, but in places it's too busy for the small game characters to stand out properly. The effects and music side has small problems too, which you can hear as the sounds being muffled and distorted.

As a one-player game Spellbound is on the dull side. Even the manual recommends that the game is at its best when both elf brothers head for the underworld as a harmonious team.

1987Many people know the arcade game Marble Madness. Spindizzy takes after Marble Madness in its graphics. The idea of the game, however, is completely different. In Marble Madness the aim is to get through a level as quickly as possible, after which you move on to the next one. In Spindizzy, on the other hand, you have to explore the whole terrain; there is no actual final solution.

In my opinion the game idea is fascinating. It can't be solved in a moment. The ever-dwindling playing time can be topped up by collecting diamonds, but you lose time whenever your craft is destroyed. The large playing area guarantees that the game won't be solved on the first day after you buy it.

Spindizzy is a kind of adventure game. Solving it takes skill. On some screens you have to make use of jumps, while on others you have to bounce your way forward on trampolines. The game has lifts and bridges that first have to be switched on. Sometimes two switches are needed to make a single device work.

Spindizzy's graphics follow Marble Madness in their main features. An annoying feature is the lack of smooth scrolling. You move around the playing area one screen at a time. A good feature is the option of viewing the level from different compass directions. That way you don't have to guess the route if some object happens to get between the craft and the player. At the start of the game the player's craft looks like a pyramid balanced on its point. With the I key, though, you can change its shape into either a ball or a spinning top.

Spindizzy feels great right from the start. There's not much sound to speak of, but the neat graphics make up for the shortcoming. The game is guaranteed to hold your interest for a good while longer than just until the first solution. There are always new tricks and ways of solving things to discover.

In my opinion Spindizzy is one of the best games in this price range.

1991 KevätThe original Commodore 64 Spindizzy was one of those games you ended up slogging away at more than was healthy. That top-rolling game, based on Marble Madness, took the original idea about as far as it can possibly go. So it's interesting to see how successfully the idea has been teleported into the Amiga age.

Apart from the smooth scrolling, Spindizzy Worlds has surprisingly little in the way of a new look. The good old rides along ramps and troughs, the clicking of switches, the lifts and the trampolines have all been carried over just as they were. Nor have they forgotten the map, or the option to study the three-dimensional terrain from four compass directions. As far as I'm concerned they could have forgotten the time limit and its substitutes. The alarmingly dwindling fuel and the stopwatch ticking tightly on some levels are nothing but pointless torment.

The biggest difference from the original is in the game's structure. Originally there were four routes to choose from, and the whole game was one big entity. SW, on the other hand, has a whole cluster of worlds that you can play in a fairly free order. There's also a training universe made up of a few planets.

The worlds, each consisting of at most fifteen levels chained one after another, usually have a particular theme, such as pyramid, archipelago or ice. By far the most fun is tearing around the levels built on hills, jumps and chutes. Unfortunately many of them are fiddly precision work, which may be too much for those with weaker nerves. Steering the top, which moves at the slightest touch and is hard to stop, calls for joystick handling honed to perfection, if you want to avoid tenosynovitis brought on by catatonic muscle cramp.

Roughly half of the levels can be cleared somehow; the rest have been designed with the market on Sirius in mind. Fortunately the game does at least have a save option, thanks to which you can grind your way even through the fiendishly hard levels, if your patience holds out.

In the category of skill games of the purest kind, Spindizzy's unique magic is in a class of its own, but I stress: butterfingers need not bother.

1991 SyksyThese are the last days of King Arthur. The fateful battle between Mordred and Arthur has just been fought, and the kingdom of England is falling to pieces. The royal castle of Camelot is without a ruler. Fortunately the realm has one brave man: the blue-blooded Sir Constantine of York, who rides off south towards the crown. Fortunately for us, this seeker of power is mouse-controlled.

England (not Great Britain, mind you) is shown on the main map, which doesn't fit on the screen all at once but scrolls as needed. We can command the forces under our control - at first, of course, only Sir Constantine. By zooming in we can take a look at the villages and towns along the way, and we do end up settling a couple of village skirmishes. The idea is to gain companions and also as many friendly towns as possible.

Battles are fought with the mouse, controlling either the knights from a side view or, when a bigger force is involved, from further off at an angle from above. The usual terms, with parries and charges, are in use. Special items or spells can also be used to advantage in battle.

The game is basically a combination of role-playing game and strategy game. In individual situations the knights can explore, pick up items and talk, the way they would in a normal action adventure. Once in Camelot, Sir Constantine becomes King Constantine and the actual game begins: ruling the kingdom. You can send envoys, detachments of troops and even yourself to look after the kingdom's interests. You can always get down to the lowest level of command, too, to give orders to individual characters.

The game isn't quite something you'll sort out in a single evening. You can save the game and carry on expanding your sovereignty later, whenever it suits the king. Constant loading at some points deflates the atmosphere, since the normal Amiga version comes on three disks. One extra magic box in the machine helps matters. I also got to test the game as the CDTV version, where no loading problems cropped up at all.

Beautiful landscape pictures of England of old flit across the screen. The artistry pleases the eye in other respects too. The map graphics mostly bring to mind the slightly older War In Middle Earth. On the sound side there are melodious medieval instruments seasoned with a pleasant melody, and the clash of swords and thump of footsteps add their own edge to the game.

I don't recommend the game as a nice little snack, since chewing through this one takes its time.

1987Sport 4 is a sports compilation made up of a bunch of familiar budget games: ice hockey, golf, rally and a few boating events. Of these, the first two are the most interesting. Not that there's much to praise in those either.

Ice hockey (the old Slap Shot) is the best event. It can be played either alone or by two players, and it also comes with trips and penalties, plus speech synthesis that sounds like a vague crackle, shouting "He scored!" and "Penalty!". Of all the games in the compilation, Slap Shot is the one you can stand playing the longest.

Sadly, you tire of the other events almost immediately. Better versions by other developers have unfortunately spoiled yours truly, at least, so rotten that I can do nothing but urge the makers of Sport 4 to take a lesson from the big boys. For rally, from Epyx (Pitstop II); for golf, from Access (Leaderboard Golf); and for the boating events, once again from Epyx (Summer Games II).

1987The idea of Spy Hunter is very simple: you have to drive a car or a boat as far as possible. You manage this with the help of the weaponry on board the car. Spy Hunter's car comes with machine guns as standard. By driving into the weapons van you can get missiles and oil, which you can release onto the road. You can even let off smoke clouds in front of the enemies. In addition, Spy Hunter can fight back by shoving enemies onto the shore or off the road. Now and then Spy Hunter comes up against broken bridges, and the road can suddenly split down the middle into two. Some of Spy Hunter's enemies push Spy Hunter off the road, and some shoot or drop mines into the water. At a later stage helicopters and torpedo boats turn up as well.

Spy Hunter's colour choices haven't hit the mark in every respect, but the cars and boats are quite colourful enough.

The game's music is sparse. Spy Hunter's sound effects are sparse too.

What kills interest in the game is its sameness and the repetitive scenery. Playing is made awkward by the need for two fire buttons. You either have to connect two joysticks the way the instructions tell you, or put the second joystick on the floor and work its button with your foot.

Spy Hunter is a good choice for those who like shoot-'em-ups. More seasoned players can forget about Spy Hunter.

1987The agents from the Mad Magazine comic strips, black and white, have now lent wings to the thoughts of game programmers too. The result is the Spy vs. Spy game, in which two agents have broken into a foreign country's embassy at the same time. The winner is the one who first makes it to the airport and back to their home country.

Before a player can go to the airport, they have to find the briefcase and collect into it the passport, money, secret documents and a key. Naturally each player tries to stop the other from leaving, because only one plane is departing.

In the duels the agents hit each other with clubs. If either player takes enough hits, they die, but can carry on with the game after a while.

Very good music plays in the background, and apart from that there are hardly any other sounds. There can be one or two players. In a one-player game the computer controls the other agent. It was hard to find any bad sides to the game. It certainly interested this tester a great deal, and it didn't start to get boring right away. The manual could do with a Finnish translation, since you need it because of the game's scope and difficulty.

1987The familiar agents "Black" and "White" carry on their unfinished fight on a deserted jungle island. The agents' aim is to build a bomb and leave the island by submarine. The loser is left behind on the island and blows up.

The desert island has sticks the squabblers can fight with. If need be, you can grab a rope and climb a tree. You can even play with the bomb. You have to be careful with it, though, since you might blow yourself up while you're at it. There's also a map to help you, which comes in very handy for a lost agent. When swimming, it's best not to carry anything more than the bomb.

Each agent has an energy meter of their own, shown at the bottom of the screen. Swimming and fighting use up energy. If the meter is nearing the red, don't waste any energy, because you die if it runs out. Your colleague can then admire your grave and get on with things in peace.

Spy vs. Spy II can feel really confusing at first. The controls are on the tricky side, because you have to jiggle the joystick about in vague situations, but luckily you get used to it quickly. The early fights at least can leave the player baffled. The game also includes a couple of little tricks, such as climbing trees.

The game is really well made from start to finish. The graphics and colours are among the best ever seen in Commodore 64 games. The game is largely the same as its predecessor, although the colours and sounds have improved. The music also closely resembles its predecessor's tune.

The game can be played either solo or by two players at the same time.

1987The spies familiar from MAD are back yet again, this time in their third concoction already. Now the rascally mine-builders are chasing an interplanetary missile at the North Pole. To be precise, the task is "to find and launch the underground, intergalactic rocket before the worst possible thing happens", as the instructions so aptly put it. Before the launch you need three items: a time card, a gyroscope and a uranium fuel canister.

One can only ask what a device as advanced as an interplanetary rocket needs a gyroscope for. Apparently that's none of our business, so who cares? The game has options to spare. Having fumbled your way through the opening choices, you find yourself wrestling with the joystick. However much you peek at the instructions and spell your way through them, the little spy refuses to obey properly. The thing is, the instructions assume you'll pick up the controls quicker than you can say "urgh", and dive straight into explaining the actions.

And there are plenty of those, everything from sawing holes in the ice to making the ice slippery. Instead of swords, the dudes roll up balls of snow and hurl them about. This in turn lowers your body temperature, and the result is death by freezing. You can pop into the igloos to warm up if you get chilly. A real pair of ice picks is also a must if you happen to drop through a hole in the ice.

The graphics are tolerable, and the background scrolls a bit jerkily, but that doesn't bother the player grunting away at the joystick. The music is nasty whining, and the effects hardly amaze either. The weird control system takes all the interest out of the game, and the game positively reeks of the cash-in idea being milked to the absolute limit. A pointless sequel to an idea that was worn out anyway.

1988Hey! My old favourite Protector on the ST. Good old ideas are all too often considered so old that they aren't worth programming for new machines... But alas, good old ideas are all too often exploited by bad new programmers who can't do anything except ruin everything.

ST Protector would hardly even make it onto MikroBITTI's type-in listing pages, nothing to be done about it. This kind of abuse of the ST's capabilities should be outlawed! I don't suppose anything more needs saying.

1990 KevätArc is an Atari games house. So the first thing that springs to mind is that a conversion made for the rival machine must be bad. The first impression, at least, is depressing: Amiga on its back and the extra memory out, then rip out the second disk drive.

When the game finally deigns to load itself, it turns out to be an embarrassing Defender clone, with a 1983-model peashooter and a screen update in the same class as C-64 vector graphics (i.e. pretty slow).

Total catastrophe has been avoided mainly because there's more to do in the game than pulverising space invaders over a horizontally scrolling mountain landscape. Park your ship and step into the turbolift, and you get to clean the invasion forces out of underground stations. The game's standard rises remarkably, but then that takes nothing more than a little guy who more or less obeys the controls and a non-scrolling background. In this section you whizz from room to room on a glider, pulverise more space gunk and buy top-ups for your equipment by fiddling with terminals.

Let it be stated as a personal opinion that I loathe games where you constantly have to get hold of fuel for moving, ammo for shooting and energy for staying alive. Pointlessly tormenting the player may have been fashionable before 1985, but these days a shoot-'em-up has to have (a certain pair of anatomical items and a big exclamation mark).

Thick manuals are in fashion. Star Breaker's has been cranked out by first rambling on about everything under the sun and then explaining that cranking the joystick up moves the ship up the screen. The only useful crumbs of information you then have to dig and dig for.

Going by the graphics of the flying section, you could mistake the game for a billion identical ones, but at least there's been an attempt at parallax judder in the background. Indoors a couple of juicy critters lie in wait, such as a killer oyster and a green man in a glass bubble. The sound effects are just barely up to C-64 level.

The game's logic limps slightly, since once a station has been cleared of enemies you have to switch on the self-destruct mechanism. What's the point of defending the whole planet in the first place, if the aim is to blow up all the stations anyway? The hero is seized by a deep existentialist crisis, travels back to Earth as a result and takes up playing the kantele.

1989 KevätSSI, best known for its strategy and fantasy role-playing games, has decided to get into the science fiction role-playing market too. Not that Star Command differs all that remarkably from ordinary fantasy games; its frame of reference is just a bit different, that's all. On top of that, they've also thrown in some shooting between spaceships.

The idea of Star Command is a classic one: humanity is settling a region known as "the Triangle", which, as the game begins, is under attack from space crooks and insectoids alike. Because of the space fleet's poor finances, new recruits can be given only a little starting capital with which to equip a small eight-person ship. With this ship you're then supposed to clean up the galaxy and, on the side, earn enough money to buy bigger ships and more powerful weapons for both the ship and the crew.

In terms of its tables and its universe, Star Command is the absolute top of the field. For one of the prerequisites of staying alive is choosing the right equipment. But how do you choose even the right weapon out of more than 50 tabulated options, all of which fall into different categories not only in the training they require but also in firepower, rate of fire, magazine size, weight, range, damage, ammunition weight, ammunition price, accuracy, price and area of destruction? Other tabulated equipment includes armour, ship shields, ship defence systems, spaceships, ship weapon systems, guidance countermeasure systems, hand weapons, targeting systems and "other junk".

The game's problems are the quirks of the menu system it uses, such as the fact that when you sell personal items, every item belonging to the whole party is printed on screen. Likewise the ship's crew are treated as near-total idiots. I mean, what kind of space warrior doesn't swap an empty magazine for a new one between boarding battles, or lugs the toolkit needed to repair his ship around with him on the planet's surface?

The game also has some surprising balancing. For example, the elite troops of the space pirates, the first enemies the player comes up against, are almost impossible to hit with the weapons you can get hold of in the early stages of the game. On the other hand, the crews of the insectoid patrol ships that turn up next are ridiculously easy to wipe out in close combat.

Despite everything said above, the game is by no means bad. There's humour in it too. What do you say to a secret passage with a gaming machine placed in front of it, which will readily tell the players why it's there, if only they have the wits to ask? The problem-solving methods are realistic too. You see, the handiest way past said gaming machine is to shove the barrel of your laser into the coin slot and pull the trigger.

SSI also deserves special thanks for shipping the PC version on both 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks. Backing up works too, as the copy protection is based on questions asked when you save the game, which need the manual to answer.

1991 SyksyThe Ur-Quaans' massive battlecruiser closes in on Earth's cruiser, which is desperately loosing off homing nuclear missiles. The Ur-Quaan launches a swarm of fighters, but alas! A surplus SDI point-defence system sweeps the lot into history in one go. Still, the battlecruiser has made it within range, and a plasma charge all but destroys the pride of Earth.

With sheer insane luck, the captain of the Earth ship uses the gravity field of a nearby planet for a slingshot effect and manages to blast the overwhelmingly superior opponent with a missile. A collision with a meteor nudges the Ur-Quaan just enough that the slingshot stays a pipe dream and the ship crashes into the planet. Before the engines can bite, the Ur-Quuan has smashed itself to scrap. And gamblers all over the universe are wondering where they'll be sleeping tonight, now that all their money's gone.

In principle Star Control is a remake of the old Space Battle, in which two ships fight it out in two-dimensional space with a planet in the middle, gravity effects and all. What rescues Star Control from the swamp of the simple shoot-'em-up, though, is its imaginative ships. The Hierarchy and the Alliance each have eight different ships, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Every ship has a main weapon plus a special ability/secondary weapon, and some of these are pretty creative solutions, such as energy-eating dogs or a siren song that lures the crew out through the airlock into space. Naturally the standard stuff is there too, like the Cloaking Device pinched from Star Trek, shields, hyperjump and so on. As a rule, massive armament is offset by sluggish handling and vice versa, but in any case a butterfingers has roughly an even chance against a joystick virtuoso.

There are three kinds of game. Practice is pure combat between two completely freely chosen ships, which is extremely useful, like, from a learning point of view. In Melee, the fleets of the Hierarchy and the Alliance clash, the winning ship staying on the field until one side or the other runs out of hardware.

The real core is the full game, in which you fight for possession of a star cluster. There are three kinds of planet: mineral planets for mining, habitable planets for colonies and dead planets just because. At colonies you can tank up on crew replacements, and mines produce money for building new ships (if the scenario allows a starbase). Planets can be fortified, in which case the enemy at the very least has to stop at them. Opponents parking in orbit around the same planet triggers a battle. If the ready-made scenarios don't appeal, an easy-to-use editor is included.

Star Control is carefully made in other respects too, as the control options alone testify. Either side can of course be handed over entirely to the computer or to a biological unit. Strategy-action crossbreeds usually come to grief because the human player's skills aren't up to the action sequences: if your expensive Chenjesu battlecruiser gets beaten up by every two-bit tin-pot fighter, Star Control goes flying into the corner. But this has been avoided: you can get the computer to handle the battles. You can get it to handle the strategy as well, but I wouldn't recommend it: the machine's genius is not of a high order.

There's no difference worth mentioning between the Amiga and PC versions; the Amiga's sound effects are naturally better.

At a quick glance Star Control looks like a pretty simple space blaster, and as a matter of fact that's exactly what it is. But the main thing, of course, is that it's an insanely FUN simple space blaster, and there's always a gap in the market for those. The two-player option just piles on the joy.

1988Being a truly staunch Star Trek fan, I've always been annoyed that nobody has managed to make a gripping game out of it. So I was more than interested when I bumped into Star Fleet on the street. Could I finally find out whether I'm cut from the same cloth as Admiral James T. Kirk?

For licensing reasons, none of the names familiar from Trek appear in Star Fleet. The aim is to stop the Kling...Krellan invasion and to destroy Romul..Zalron patrol ships along the way. You can pick your own cruiser from a long list (no Enterprise, but that's what disk editors were invented for), but there are no differences between them. With phasers and photon torpedoes you show the invaders what's what in space. Enemy ships can also be captured or taken in tow. Trouble comes from, among other things, saboteurs who sneak aboard your own ship.

The thick manuals further reinforce the impression that all is well. But the very first game reveals the brutal truth. Star Fleet is a further-developed version of Star Trek, a mainframe classic made back in the 70s, but the additions bring nothing new to the game. Time has passed this old-timer by.

Not that SF is actually bad, but Star Trek exists as a PD program for any machine you care to name, and if you can't find it, David Ahl's book Basic Computer Games has a listing. Even a mediocre Basic hacker will quickly knock it into something to suit their own taste. Star Trek is the best thing seen on television in years; Star Fleet isn't. Hopefully the next Star Fleet will live up to its promise, since Interstel's other games have shown there's reason to expect it.

1987When I curse, even the angels in heaven weep. And mighty has been the storm these last few days. The reason for my improper and uncivilised language is Star Raiders II.

Why so? The box says, after all, that SR II is the best thing since Judge Dredd, the ST pictures looked excellent, and Computer & Video Games magazine praised the 8-bit Atari version to the skies. Expectations were high, but they accelerated from top marks to a fail in under half a minute. A three-dimensional shoot'em-down, wonderful! So I jumped at the controls of the Liberty Star, went and looked up a target on the map and went and destroyed some fighters. Then I went and destroyed some cruisers. If I'd survived those I'd have got to shoot motherships, but luckily I died a make-believe death by laser before a genuine death by boredom had time to strike.

The ghosts of the past haunt the graphics. The sprites are mostly single-coloured and crude. Not for one moment do you get the illusion of being in the cockpit of a spaceship, as the joystick seems to affect only the enemies' movements.

The whole thing is finally sunk by its incredible unplayability. There's no pull. The weaponry is miserable, the strategy got left somewhere along the way, and the thread holding the whole thing together has snapped. The ingredients of Star Raiders make a cocktail called Monotonic. Electric Dreams ought to start thinking about changing its name to Electric Nightmare, or else improve its quality.

1990 KevätThere seem to be a bunch of Star Trek games for the Amiga on PD disks. I've seen a couple of Yankee contraptions that use several disks, are full of samples and digitised pictures, and in which you won't find a game for love nor money. Amiga owners once again have the good fortune and bliss of feeding their machines a new Star Trek game which not only costs nothing but also ranks among the very best of the Trek games.

The idea of the game is to fly the Enterprise (the Enterprise-class NCC-1701-A) from one system to another, picking up and dropping off cargo. The flights are livened up by Romulan and Klingon attacks and asteroid swarms. Once the starship has been hauled into standard orbit around the destination planet, you can transfer the cargo either by transporter or, in an emergency, by shuttle. A badly damaged ship can be made spaceworthy again at the nearest Starbase.

Graphically the game is fully up to commercial standard. The screens, apparently digitised and touched up by hand, are second to none, and the sound effects aren't half bad either. The star map, for example, has all the Federation's systems in their proper places. The action is presented, quite workably, as a cross between sprites and vector graphics.

The worst flaw is still the lack of an actual game. The combat sections, although they beat Firebird's equivalents, aren't interesting enough to carry the game, and neither is threading your way into orbit or pottering about in the shuttle. The ergonomics bungle about here and there too. All in all the game leaves an unduly shallow taste, and the German idea of the English language raises a smile.

Even with its shortcomings, Star Trek - The Shareware is at the very least worth its price, and it's worth sending Tobias some money, preferably with some criticism attached, to fire up enthusiasm for developing the game further.

1990 KevätAh, and alas! Star Trek! As EVERYONE surely knows by now, I am a trekkie, and that's never going to change. Which is exactly why it's extremely hard to approach a Star Trek game matter-of-factly, setting aside all the preconceptions lurking deep down.

After the environmental-political statement (Star Trek IV) my expectations were high. My first quick glimpses of the game in England and missing the film's preview screening by a whisker were hard blows even for a hardened fan. The game, you see, didn't look particularly marvellous at all. Now that I've seen the film I can say that this may partly be down to the film not being up to much either.

It's a fact that Captain James T. Kirk, a man who would rather blow up his ship than surrender it to a foreign power, behaves completely illogically in this fifth, but hopefully not last, Star Trek film. Without much in the way of resistance he hands command of his ship over to Spock's half-brother, Sybok, who sets a course for the Great Barrier located at the centre of the galaxy (which is supposed to surround the Milky Way). According to Sybok's prophetic dreams, beyond the Great Barrier lies the legendary planet Sha Ka Ree, better known to us humans of Earth as paradise, Eden, where God dwells.

The game skips the first hour of the film and starts at the point where Sybok has ordered Kirk to head for the Great Barrier. This way Mindscape has got to make the first proper Enterprise simulator, in which the player, as Captain Kirk, hands out orders to his subordinates.

First, the navigator is given the command to set a course for the Great Barrier and Sha Ka Ree. After a short warp a new course is calculated and you jump again. After ten minutes this starts to get seriously stale, and it's high time for a little variety. With the dilithium crystals almost exhausted, the warp engines go out of balance and a rupture opens up in space-time, which is called a wormhole.

And so we come to the game's first action section. Steering from the keyboard, the player moves the sights onto a meteorite whooshing towards the ship and blasts it to kingdom come with photon torpedoes. According to the game, dilithium crystals also float about in the wormhole, and by this stage they are sorely needed. The player moves the sights over a crystal and activates the tractor beam. And that's the energy banks charged up again. (Personally, I've certainly never heard of dilithium crystals being found in wormholes...)

Combat against the Klingons works in roughly the same way. You just make sure the shield power doesn't drop too low and let them have it with a full broadside.

After a boring journey you arrive at Sha Ka Ree, where the player takes on Klaa (the film's "bad" Klingon) in a boxing match. Then you drop in for a daft natter with God, who turns out to be the devil. Escaping from Old Nick is then the game's final action bit, after which the game has been played through.

If you look at Star Trek V - The Final Frontier objectively as a game, you're not left holding much. A rather dull game in every respect, with a manual that's one of the worst I have ever leafed through. Graphically the game is really fine on VGA machines, but then nice pictures have never made a game before. A few sampled effects from the film liven up the game's overall feel wonderfully, but on the minus side it must be said that the game has no appreciation of the finer things, i.e. it doesn't understand diddly-squat about sound cards.

The ordinary citizen who sees nothing special in Star Trek won't like this game either. Trekkies, on the other hand, will positively devour the game, photocopy logos from the manual and slap them up on their bedroom walls. If you're the former, forget the whole thing; if the latter, buy the game and go and see the film when it comes to Finland.

1988When I was little, my grandfather told me his own grandfather had told him that Firebird was going to release a true megagame called Star Trek.

Now that this wonder has finally arrived after countless delays and false alarms, is it any wonder I expect a lot from the game? But how does it turn out? Will the faithful Trekkie once again have to swallow a pint of bitter disappointment?

Reviewer's log, stardate 1988: The Enterprise has been ordered to the Quarantine Zone, where it has five years to crush a rebellion. The moment the Enterprise arrives in the zone, it is sealed off by the Klein Sphere, which no force can break. If the Enterprise fails, it will remain a prisoner of the Klein Sphere for all eternity, along with hundreds of planets.

Star Trek's technical execution is admirable. The graphics are superb (for the most part), the game system is easy to use and pleasant, and the digitised comments taken from Star Trek add to the game's charm. 'Beam me up, Scotty' was, however, conspicuous by its absence.

The Enterprise can visit hundreds of planets, and to some of them you can send a landing party, which has to face all sorts of little puzzles. Every now and then you clash with Klingons and Romulans as well as Federation ships that have turned rebel.

Everything you need, and a bit more besides, is explained in the manual, without which you won't really get anywhere with the game.

But but: Star Trek doesn't have the makings of a megagame. The player hasn't been left enough room for self-expression. Some of the puzzles met on planet surfaces are solved by trial and error, and that isn't much fun. In combat the player's entertainment consists of picking a target and firing at the right moment. Star Trek does still have its good sides, but it would have paid to study something like Elite closely before making this game. Now there's a megagame for all eternity.

I fear the worst: the upcoming home micro versions won't turn out even as well as this ST version. And ST owners would do well to try the game before buying. Good but not mega. Nirk out.

1988At long last, after all these years, patient waiting is rewarded and the greatest arcade game of all time comes to home computers.

Just kidding - there have already been no fewer than two official versions of Star Wars and one unofficial one. I haven't seen the Parker Brothers' game, Atari's own official version thank the Lord never made it to the shops, and Realtime's 3D Starstrike was good. But what is the version from Domark, famed for such brilliant games as Friday The 13th and A View To A Kill, like?

To build up the suspense I won't give the answer straight away, but will first run through the idea of the game for anyone unfamiliar with Star Wars: in this beautiful vector-graphics game you first battle the Empire's TIE fighters in space, then fly along the surface of the Death Star shooting laser towers, and finally run the gauntlet down a narrow, obstacle-packed trench, at the end of which you let fly with your photon torpedoes into the exhaust port. The result of all this effort is that the Death Star explodes. This loop is repeated for as long as your shields hold out. Simple but spellbinding action.

The moment of truth: I really do have to forgive Domark its old sins. The game resembles the original as closely as the C-64's resources allow. Vector graphics games are a bit of a problem for the C-64 because of its slow processor, but Domark's programmers have done rather nicely, since even though it doesn't reach the smoothness of the original, the speed is still tolerable. The sound effects are fairly standard, and a well-arranged Star Wars theme plays in the background. A very well made conversion from Domark, although a joystick doesn't really suit this type of game.

Having fed billions of marks into the Star Wars machine, I'm awaiting the ST version of Star Wars with feverish zeal. According to eyewitnesses it's practically identical to the arcade version, right down to the speech, and the mouse is the best alternative after the original SW controller. Until then, may the Force be with me, and also with you. Amen.

1990 SyksyAt last, after many years of waiting, Electronic Arts has managed to convert Starflight to machines other than just the PC. StarFlight was one of the first sci-fi role-playing games in its day, and it is still one of the best.

The empire built by mankind has collapsed, and only a small colony known as Noah 2 managed to save itself by escaping to a planet called Arth. They lived in underground bunkers for a long time, and their technology regressed a couple of thousand years. Now, however, the inhabitants of Arth have reinvented space travel and are trying to uncover their origins by returning to their roots, to the ancient planet of legend - Earth.

The player's task is to explore the last of the untrodden wildernesses and find out what became of Earth. While you're at it, you'd do well to find out why Arth's own sun is suddenly about to go nova, and to look for new planets to colonise. Well, that takes care of the afternoon.

At the start the player is given 12000 monetary units, with which everyone is supposed to kit out their very own Enterprise. Unfortunately the money only buys a few cargo pods. Funds for better equipment and weapons are raised by collecting minerals and life-form samples from planets and selling them at the space station.

The crew, too, has to be picked from five races and trained yourself, which costs a disproportionate amount. Only once you've got past the teething troubles and have a proper ship under you is it worth heading out to explore space beyond your own solar system, and even then you have to keep a close eye on your fuel supply and the condition of your crew. It's by no means worth shooting everything that moves; chatting with aliens is a very important part of the game.

Starflight's graphics are a very mixed bag. Many of the colour choices are extremely unfortunate and the scrolling jerks along one character at a time, but on the other hand many of the planetary landscapes and alien portraits on show are very skilfully done. The same goes for the Amiga version too.

StarFlight is not a game you play through in one sitting. The game's 270 solar systems hold almost a thousand planets to explore. Luckily for players, a star map has been included with the game, showing where the stars are located.

Despite the years that have rolled by, StarFlight is still a good game, and Trekkies will have fun as familiar elements crop up here and there. There are worse ways to invest your money.

1988"Eat plutonium death, you disgusting alien weirdos!" I roared, flipped the Starfox upside down and gave the ship in my sights its last rites by crooking my trigger finger. With a small movement I found the next enemy in my field of view and got ready to sow death its way as well. A glance towards the energy banks confirmed my assumption that the weapons were running low on energy. "Well, the wise give even from the little they have," I thought...

Surely everyone still remembers Skyfox and Arcticfox. Starfox fancies itself a sequel to them. The only difference is that Starfox was programmed by some German bloke, and not by the American Electronic Arts. And it shows. The most appalling basic blunder in Starfox is the way it responds to joystick movements. When you push the joystick forward, you naturally expect the ship to dive downwards. Like fox it does! Against all reason Starfox wobbles upwards, and there's no way you ever get used to these reversed controls.

The game is set in the Hyturia solar system, which is protected by the Rubicon, a kind of force field. The peaceful coexistence is interrupted by a message that the Rubicon has been breached and that a ninth planet has invaded the solar system. You are given the task of destroying the intruders. The game is crammed full of all sorts of functions, from switching weapon systems to a three-dimensional map. Still, you can make sense of the jumble by immersing yourself in the instructions.

The graphics are ugly and the sprites are extremely poor. The music passes muster, but the sound effects are wretched. Trying out the various functions holds your interest for a while, but the mindless shooting just can't sustain it. A Starfox II is reportedly on the way too; hopefully it will be better.

1987Evil, evil, evil Hermann Grudd and his forces have conquered the peace-loving planet Novenia, and only one person, in an Airborne Ground Attack Vehicle found in a museum, can shoot down Hermann Grudd's command ship Starglider I and restore consensus to Novenia. Funny, it's as if I'd heard all this before.

Starglider! This is the game we've been waiting for! The thought of Empire Strikes Back on your very own machine, and in an improved edition at that, felt like a grand celebration. And then came That Day...

At first I was disappointed. The AGAV's aerodynamic properties left something to be desired, and death came quickly. Then I read the James Follett novella that comes with the game and learned what the name of the game is. There's no point playing Starglider without the instructions, since only they tell you where to dock for repairs, where on earth to get energy from and how to bring down Starglider 1, not to mention plenty of other things. I got hooked and played Starglider for hours on end. No sense breaking the streak once you get going.

There's still room for nitpicking, though. The AGAV flies stiffly, and the Commodore version has no option to pick a Star Wars-style sliding gunsight. What's more, Starglider lacks that famous depth, and it has, death and damnation, a high score table!

Starglider's graphics were advertised in advance as fast and flicker-free, and that, by golly, is what they are, even on the Commodore. The wretched dots meant to create the illusion of movement are a failure, but luckily the otherwise excellent vector graphics make up for it. The Stargliders in particular look splendid, and another big favourite is the Walkers, which stride across the planet's surface as if torn straight out of ESB. And the TV-guided missiles... Yum!

With teeny-tiny improvements Starglider would have become a true classic. But even in this form it trounces, on average, 95% of the other C-64 games and is worth its high price. Time will tell what calibre of classic Starglider is.

1989 KevätIn 1986 Starglider was the first to give a foretaste of what the 16-bit machines are capable of. Around the time the game came out, its programmer, Jez San, claimed that the game couldn't be made any faster. By now plenty of games have already overtaken Starglider in development. So Argonaut Software struck back by releasing Starglider 2, equipped once again with the assurance that the 16-bits can't be programmed to go any faster than this. I'm gradually starting to believe it.

The plot of SG 2 is as follows: your mission, in your ship the Icarus, is to bring the Egrons' empire to its knees by collecting materials from the planets and moons of the solar system, from which a neutron bomb is then built. Every planet and its satellites has a strong Egron defence system, and most of the materials needed are hidden in underground tunnels, where navigating can be tricky without a map. SG 2 can be played either as an action adventure (the game has a highly useful save-game function) or as a normal shoot-em-up; in addition, the opening menu offers the option, instead of playing, of viewing all the figures found in the game and even doodling with them for fun.

As a showpiece of programming technique SG 2 is massive, and exemplary attention has been paid to detail. A complete three-dimensional universe has been created for the game, every object of which can be viewed from any angle. The filled vector graphics are astonishingly fast and smooth. The only visible (or rather audible) difference between the ST and Amiga versions (both versions load from the same disk, by the way, thanks to Argonaut's miracle format!) is the sound. The Amiga makes superb use of several digitised effects; the rumble of the Stardrive in particular as you jump into hyperspace (Warp one, Mr. Sulu!) is seriously majestic! The ST's sound side has been handled commendably, considering the machine's capabilities.

In the end it's pointless trying to describe SG 2 in words - go and buy it and try it for yourselves!

1987Once upon a time there was an age when Commodore 64 and BBC owners strolled around with Elite boxes under their arms, while the rest were, for the time being, the less happy keepers of other machines. In those dark days Starion brought comfort to these unhappy souls.

So Starion is a vector-graphics shoot-em-up too, but that's where the similarities with Elite end. Starion's backstory goes like this: aliens are threatening to destroy the fabric of time, but a time pilot can save it by warping into a time zone. There you shoot the enemy to pieces, collect the letter it was carrying as cargo, and once you have enough letters, form a word out of them. The word is then carried to the time zone whose clue it fits. This loop gets ground through again and again until the universe can breathe freely.

So nothing more remarkable than an unholy alliance of a crossword and a shooting game. It's just that the words are of such a calibre that they can leave a Finn completely stumped.

As a technical showpiece Starion is convincing. The vector graphics are really fast, jerk-free and impressive. As a game, though, once the novelty wears off, Starion is a fairly numbing experience.

Epilogue: some time passed and the Commodore 64 conversion hit the market. If you see it somewhere really cheap, it's worth buying, because it is surely the least successful conversion of all time. Seeing Is Believing.

1988Starray? For the thousandth blessed time a game has been called Starsomething, and nearly always it's a shoot-'em-just-like-a-million-times-before game. I shoved the disk into the Amiga while desperately trying to get my old, tired firefinger excited. But it was hard going: the wretched thing just moaned that lousy shoot'em-ups had taken all the flavour out of life, and played dead.

My ears had time to register a few seconds of catchy loading music, and then the monitor's squawk box boomed out magnificently: GO! STARRAY! Yours truly got tremendously interested, especially as the loading screen looked really well done too. I forced the still reluctant firefinger to click the mouse buttons, and the game carried on loading. After a while the game proper began. My eyes had been on the screen for all of a nanosecond when the firefinger shouted (at least I imagined I heard it shout): Yippeeee!

The next half hour then passed merrily, zooming round the planet Gorbaxa and protecting the kryptium energy crystals from baddies of every stripe. Landers sucked energy from the crystals until they got a taste of my lasers' destructive power, Krellian motherships popped into teeny little UFOs that my vaporiser bombs had no effect on, Blue Hunters pounced on me at lightning speed... in a word, this was action, action, action!

Game historians will well remember a video game called Defender, a huge success in its day. StarRay owes Defender its basic setup, which consists of a spaceship, a heap of enemies, a landscape scrolling in two directions, ground targets to protect and a pilot with super-fast reflexes.

StarRay plays variations on the basic theme, making full use of the Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities, and the result is a furious blaster fully up to coin-op standard. The backdrops, including a rocky planet and a jungle landscape, not only look really fine but also move across the screen in technically flawless parallax scrolling, the digitised sounds could hardly be better - for example, the jungle dragonfly lets out a screech well worth hearing as it fries in the laser fire - and all the objects glide across the screen as smoothly as dreams.

Logotron and the Hidden Treasures software team who handled the coding - German, judging by the programmers' names - have not wasted the ten months that went into developing StarRay.

1989 KevätSubLogic's Flight Simulator II and JET are surely familiar to every flight simulator fan. And if simulators are your favourite topic when talk turns to computer games, Microprose can't be a new acquaintance either. Microprose's Project: Stealth Fighter sat the player at the controls of modern technology's latest achievement, the F-19 Stealth Fighter, and now SubLogic's Stealth Mission follows in its afterburner's wake.

In Stealth Mission there are three planes to choose from: the F-19, the experimental X-29 and the old workhorse, the F-14 Tomcat. Before flying, however, you have to make a staggering number of choices concerning the time of day, armament and the nature of the mission, to mention just a few. When the instrument panel finally appears, the novice stealther is completely lost with the controls. Nearly every key controls something, but thanks to a good manual and keyboard chart, it doesn't take long to get airborne.

The real problems start in the air. For someone used to the speed of the 16-bits, the 64's sluggish screen update is sheer agony, and the control inputs overshoot badly. At the press of a button the filled vector graphics can be switched to slightly faster wireframe graphics, but SubLogic's usual graphical tricks, such as spot planes, control tower views and the like, lose their punch.

Compared with Project: Stealth Fighter, Stealth Mission is visibly slower and harder, because the simulation side has been emphasised, but it is much more versatile. Recommended only for the simulation-hungry.

1990 KevätSteel is already the second Hewson 16-bit title in a short space of time to be converted from an 8-bit budget game. Going by its price, this one can hardly be classed as a budget game, which in itself is a bit dubious.

The idea of the game is to steer a droid around the corridors of the starship USS Ent, I mean USS Steel, and collect eight modules belonging to the main computer. Destroying the mischievous robots earns you points, which you can spend on more energy from vending machines. The corridors are also decorated with contraptions resembling video games, and by playing on them you activate the computer's terminals one at a time. Not very logical, but who cares.

Playing Steel is a strain. It's impossible to make progress in the game without bumping into other robots, which pour onto the screen in an endless stream. The collisions take on utterly unbearable proportions because the droid's pitiful firepower can only be used while it's moving. The tasty graphics are really the only thing that keeps you motivated to play.

But then the game's most earth-shattering blunder came to light. When I had collected all the modules and my mind was filled with a happy "yippee, I've made it to level two" feeling, what appeared on the screen instead was a dreary congratulations message.

Actually, I should have guessed that nobody would bother making an improved Amiga version of a primitive C-64 budget game. So I suggest that if Steel's pretty packaging stirs the urge to buy, restrain yourself and head for your local arcade instead.