1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

A-10 Tank Killer1990 SyksyPermalinkDynamix, who specialise in creating worlds with vector graphics, have churned out games by the bucketload over the last six months. Unfortunately Dynamix's problem seems to be achieving that final polish (or, more accurately, failing to achieve it), since the crew's games are almost without exception superficial and tedious.

That's how things stand with A-10 Tank Killer too. The programmers have been content to show off their skill at writing fast graphics routines and nice pictures, and the game design has been left to go to seed. The player is plonked into the cockpit of an A-10 multi-role fighter and handed a pile of missions that affect the war going on all the while. Beginners get a training area, so you don't have to charge off to war with the backs of your ears still dripping wet.

Running in true VGA mode, the game offers an excellent 256-colour vector landscape that updates commendably briskly on 386 machines. The amount of landscape detail can be turned down if there isn't a 20,000-mark games machine sitting on your desk. According to the sticker on the box the game supports the most common sound cards, but in the usual Dynamix fashion only the title music comes from the card, while the sound effects come out as beeps. CMS's Soundblaster and the AdLib work flawlessly, but for some reason the game didn't notice the Roland sound card.

Playability isn't top of the flight-simulator class. This minus docks points from Appeal's pocket at the same time. The A-10 is an extremely sensitive and badly over-responsive aircraft, at least according to this simulation. The control inputs are coarsely notched, and moving the joystick more than a millimetre easily sends the plane into a spin. In a nutshell: playing with a joystick will make you blow your top! So I'd recommend keyboard control, although that has its own shortcomings too.

All in all A-10 Tank Killer is technically top class, but it gets nowhere near the same level with its design or its playability. Try before you buy.

A.M.C. (Astro Marine Corps)1990 SyksyPermalinkRipley's masculine alter ego sends one last subspace telex to his relatives, who are already grieving in advance, and yanks a thirty-kilo plasma cannon under his arm. Then begins a furious charge that leaves behind it one planetful of organic alien compost. Why do I get this feeling that I've seen games like this before?

Dinamic has become known as a designer of middling action games that stick to the basic ideas. Astro Marine Corps carries on along the familiar line. So the only questions left open are what it looks like and whether it can be played.

The background graphics at least make a thrilling first impression. No wonder, since they're a straight copy of Shadow of the Beast, right down to the pretty parallax scrolling and the pink tint on the horizon. A fresher visual phenomenon is the softly rolling terrain, which throws in a stretch of vertical scrolling. The otherwise pleasant look is spoiled by smeary animation and a colour palette set far too dark, which seems to be a common blunder in Dinamic's games.

Now for the stately fanfares and a reception at the Government banqueting hall: for once Dinamic has managed to make a game that is just the right amount of difficult. The hero can shift the aim of the barrel, leap and crouch smoothly enough that the situation stays under control. You can hold your own against the bogeymen even after the extra weapons have fizzled out. The biggest cause for grumbling is that in several places an endless conga line of the same monster populace is marched at you. A tighter grip would have been in order.

It's about time Dinamic gave its C-64 programmer the boot, since the work is shoddy yet again. The graphics are colourful enough, and both scrolling directions have been squeezed in, but the playability trails the Amiga by several astronomical units.

Abrams Battle Tank1989 SyksyPermalinkTank games seem to be in fashion these days, since besides this Electronic Arts/Dynamix game, similar ones are on the way from Accolade, Realtime Software and Spectrum Holobyte. ABT is a traditional tank game, viewed from the cockpit, and it uses three-dimensional filled vector graphics.

The player gets to choose from a handful of missions that, when all is said and done, are pretty similar, and are geographically set in Central Europe. One time you have to destroy a bridge, another time you have to guard a factory. You can also pick the so-called World War Three scenario, in which all the missions come back to back.

Before the mission starts, the player finds themselves and their best friend (the Abrams tank) at the depot, where you have to pick a suitable selection of ammunition and decide whether or not you need the rev limiter. The right ammo stock is vital, because the moment a pack of Soviet tanks comes at you and you've got ONLY the wrong kind of shells in store, even a tougher-than-average guy easily finds himself thinking of his mum. The rev limiter slows your progress, but stops the engine from blowing up as a result of overheating.

The graphics. Well, the usual story: the zippier and more powerful the PC, the zippier and prettier the graphics. EGA is perfectly OK, but Hercules is of course awful. To Dynamix's credit, let it be said that ABT is quite playable even on a slow PC. Don't expect anything new from the sound, since the PC can only manage its BEEP noise, unless the programmer can be bothered to fiddle for days on end with playback routines for digitised sounds. In this case they couldn't be bothered.

ABT is a perfectly passable but somewhat dull and simple tank "simulation". Simulator fans should wait for the tank games from Realtime and Spectrum Holobyte.

Academy1988PermalinkA year or two ago CRL released a game called Tau Ceti, which was, is and always will be an excellent cross between an adventure game and a simulator. And now this brilliant creation of Pete Cooke's has got a sequel.

Skimmers play the lead role in this game too. Every skimmer driver is trained at Gal-Corp's skimmer pilot academy (Galcorp Academy for Skimmer Pilots, or GASP!), because a skimmer is an expensive bit of kit and you don't just hand one over to any old butterfingers. A proper pilot has to get through 20 missions before the training is over.

These twenty missions are split into groups of four. Each group has to be cleared with a score of over 90 per cent before you get to try the next one. The missions, flown on planets of different types, have enough variety that boredom is literally light years away.

And can this really be true: if none of the standard skimmers satisfies you, you can design your own, right down to the instrument panel. The equipment includes all the familiar lasers, missiles, flares, infrared displays etc etc. The only limits are money and the weight of the equipment. Admittedly, though, you can't design a contraption to match the Tau Ceti skimmer however much you weep. Something always has to give.

The graphics are three-dimensional and shaded according to the time of day. On top of the buildings and enemies familiar from Tau Ceti, there are some twenty new ones. The only innovation on the skimmer side is the powerful DeLay bombs.

There's action aplenty. Lasers flicker, missiles and anti-missiles zip about and, as a good game should, Academy sucks the poor player deep into its world. So much for the praise - now for the slating.

The ST version uses about 10 per cent of the machine's capacity, the graphics are primitive and the sound is poor. There are no pictures of the nuclear power stations and the other places you can dock at, and the exterior graphics could have been done better too. At least it's fast, thank the Lord. So what are you left with? If more sweat and effort had gone into the implementation, the end result would have been one of the two or three hottest megagames in the world.

As it stands, my verdict on Academy is: my god, I love it! Despite everything, Academy is an excellent game and one of the few games I'd take with me to a desert island. Recommended without reservation in all its incarnations!

Ace of Aces1987PermalinkIn this game you take the controls of an English Mosquito aircraft to defend British airspace and carry out various strikes.

At the start you choose the mission you will fly. A successful mission, of course, also means making it back to your home airfield.

After that you choose suitable equipment: bombs, rockets, ammunition, fuel. And then you are ready for take-off.

The screen shows your take-off, and soon you are over the English Channel, flying towards your mission.

When enemy aircraft appear, you can either fight them or try to hide in the cover of the clouds. All the while you have to try to keep your heading towards your targets, which may be, for example, bombers, trains, submarines or V1 rockets.

In the cockpit you can see the altimeter and airspeed indicator, the radar, the artificial horizon and the compass. From time to time you have to keep an eye on the map and any damage reports. You also have to look after the power of your engines.

For a bombing run to succeed, you have to choose the right altitude and open the bomb bay doors at the right moment.

The game may feel difficult at first, but after a couple of goes you pick up the right tricks and can start enjoying some fine feats of flying.

Since the game is not a simulator as such, it will probably appeal to many players, especially fans of, say, the familiar Dambusters.

Action Fighter1990 KevätPermalinkThe sale of Firebird to Microprose stirred up mixed feelings at the time, but could the firm slowly be getting its game tap turned on? Is Firebird still a guarantee of quality - ah, that is the question.

Action Fighter has been shaped into a vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up whose central idea is the vehicle changing from motorbike to car and from car to jet plane. At first you barrel up the road collecting flags and letters in between bouts of frantic shooting. Every now and then a truck turns up with Sega written on its side. By edging your way into its back you get extra weaponry as a present.

Once you've spent a while going round the same stretch of road on two or four wheels, the game turns into a Xevious-style blaster. In other words, if it flies, shoot it, and if it crawls, bomb it. After the player has destroyed the targets shown at the start, the round starts over on the next level.

The first half, set on the road, scrolls smoothly and plays without any particular huffing and puffing. It even has a few original touches, such as the road sign at the top of the screen that warns of bends and a narrowing road. As it stands AF would be reasonably jolly entertainment, but the quality of the game is not the sum of its parts.

In the shooting section, you see, the programmers' grip has slipped badly. The sprites come down with a serious fit of the shakes as soon as even slightly more stuff appears on screen. It's a real thrill weaving between enemy bullets that slow down and speed up any old how. On top of that the collision detection seems very buggy: the ship was destroyed a couple of times for no visible reason, and sometimes bullets fly straight through.

Mixing game styles, Action Fighter's basic idea, might well work very nicely, but the game leaves an unfinished taste. With a little polishing it could have been made into a quite workable shoot-'em-up package, but when a game is half average and half rubbish, you can't really be bothered to start singing its praises.

AD & D: Champions Of Krynn1990 SyksyPermalinkYet another new line appears in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series, as Dragonlance pushes its way into territory more serious than joystick-wrenching. I'm not allowed to recount the plot, but before evil gets its just deserts the word 'dragon' starts to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Naturally COK won't accept a party from any other game, set as it is in its own Draconlance continuum. As a nice touch, by the way, you bump into names familiar from the action series here and there. At first there are slight problems adjusting your attitude, when you have to switch from clobbering giants with superheroes to pestering puny dung beetles with a team that couldn't hit a barn door unless someone held its hand.

COK uses a game system almost identical to the previous 'serious' AD&D games. So, to recap briefly: usually you see a 3D view of the surrounding landscape, when a conflict breaks out you switch to a 'man by man' tactical combat screen, and roaming around Krynn is done on a map one screen in size. The functions are found in menus. There's some small improvement here and there, but AD&D doesn't seem to be progressing in giant leaps the way the Ultimas do.

The graphics are of the familiar standard without any major surprises. Hopefully menu selection by initial letter will make its nest in the C-64 version too; it's a great deal nippier than fumbling about with the stick. For some strange reason, by the way, Champions of Krynn demands a whole 1 megabyte of the Amiga.

As a minor annoyance, there's one spell level fewer than in COAB, i.e. only up to level four. If I'm going to grouse about something else as well, the combat system could be developed in a more tactical direction. Even the doorway of every little room is still at least three men wide, which can hardly be natural.

Those who have ground their way through Pool and Curse will surely fall for this latest brew as well. At least it's nicer to bump off new monsters than old, all-too-familiar ones.

AD & D: Dragons of Flame1990 SyksyPermalinkOnce again the forces of evil have broken loose, this time in SSI's second attempt in the field of 'action role-playing games'. The evil queen, Takhisis, has quietly managed to raise herself a vast army, with which she now intends to conquer the whole land. The only ones who can stop this plan from coming to pass are the party familiar from Heroes Of The Lance. This time the task is to attack Pax Tarkas, a grim fortress, where you are then supposed to free a group of people enslaved by the queen, and swing the mighty sword Wyrmslayer about a bit to turn things for the better.

DOF is really an indirect sequel to Heroes of The Lance, which admittedly has never been seen on the C-64 at all. But who cares - it's said to be much worse. The game proceeds by wandering around a top-down landscape that is so angular and unnatural that you'd be hard pressed to find worse. The road is mostly straight, and interestingly enough - in most places you can't get off it if there's a brown mass of pixels beside the road, which presumably means terrain too hard to cross. In a fight, though, this harder-going terrain looks suspiciously like a huge wall, since the battles are fought in the same kind of turning 2-D environment as in the Amiga version. The characters themselves are fairly well drawn, and smoothly animated like most of the monsters too, but they move terribly slowly - a single jump can take several seconds...

The combat moves are limited to three items: flailing with a weapon, shooting/throwing, spellcasting and blocking. There are of course some friendly characters around as well, who at best may even join the party. And conversation means you listen.

All fine so far - but DOF's difficulty level gives cause for complaint. If you run into, say, a couple of trolls, the only way to come out alive is to run (walk?) away. And this happens often. Too often for the game to keep up even the slightest interest. The sound, too, is limited to a few blows and the spellcasting. I don't recommend it to anyone but chronic DragonLance fanatics. And to them only with reservations.

AD & D: Dragons of Flame1990 KevätPermalinkThe Dragonlance saga seems to have a problem. The problem is a woman: occupation queen, name Takhisis, hobby tormenting the land of Krynn. Draconian armies are sweeping across Krynn, and saving the land rests on the shoulders of the gang familiar from Heroes of The Lance, surprise surprise. This time the menu features freeing the poor slaves of Pax Tharkas and putting the sword Wyrmslayer to the use its name suggests. That way Takhisis stays put, all the way until the next game.

DOF was developed on the basis of the feedback Heroes Of The Lance received, and it shows: DOF gives a considerably more faithful picture of AD&D. The playing area is thousands of times bigger, which in practice means the hero posse roams a big map just Gauntlet-style. Running into something from the expanded monster selection, or into an NPC, yanks the party into a fight with melee weapons, spells and ranged weapons.

Combat goes the way familiar from HOTL: the party's point man does the fighting, while the rest apparently roll themselves a smoke and belt out cheers of encouragement. Combat couldn't be simpler: with the fire button held down, the hero on shift hacks away, and the stick sets the direction. It's fair enough to grumble that a band of up to eight is represented by a single hero, while the monsters get to come as a pack.

The seemingly hopeless situation is improved by the option to rest, which not only raises hit points but also recharges Goldmoon's lighter clerical spells. The wizard Raistlin's staff is a rechargeable model too, although the procedure does call for nimble fingers. You see, when Raistlin is leading the party, spells cast against him are absorbed into the staff. Overloading it naturally burns out the whole stick.

In terms of playability Dragons of Flame is a considerably better-working game than HOTL. The characters move briskly and obey the joystick the way they should. The menu system also works by the first letter of each option, which speeds up routine actions.

If bad luck puts the boot in, with, say, a good solid troll pack for a boot, and causes a chronic crop failure of heroes, a new game starts without massive disk swapping or rebooting. There's a save game option too.

Flame Draggos is a working combination of role-playing and action, and its role model is obvious: Zelda II, familiar from the Nintendo. Someone could start giving the plotlines a little thought, though: every other AD&D game has you bashing Tyranthraxus, and the other half Takhisis. But what of it, flambéed wyrms is a good game.

AD & D: Dragonstrike1990 SyksyPermalinkBlack dragon at two o'clock! That wouldn't take long if there were a Sidewinder hanging under the wing, but I suppose I'll have to make do with the Dragonlance. Unfortunately its range is a few metres, so Tally-Ho!, Sirdar! Flap Flap Flappety Flap. The Dragonlance meets the black dragon's belly with fatal consequences. In the collision, however, I'm thrown from my mount's back. 'Siiirdaaar! Caaatch meeee!' And Sirdar pulls it off. The mission ends in a victory loop.

The newest and most unusual of the AD&D games is set in the worm-infested world of Krynn. Dragonstrike is apparently the world's first dragon flight simulator, although, considering the exotic subject, Dragonstrike does resemble a conventional flight simulator a remarkable amount. A magic crystal ball serves as the radar, the dragon has two breath attacks (which ones depends on the species), and otherwise too the big lizard flies like a fighter jet, though it can't manage a loop.

Dragonstrike even has a HeadsUp-Display screen (the dragon holds its head up), but no afterburner, which would nevertheless have been easy to simulate by giving the serpent a big helping of pea soup.

There are differences too. Not many flight sims make you keep an eye on the hitpoints of both the pilot and the flying machine, and aeroplanes that chew and claw at each other haven't caught on yet, let alone pilots whacking each other with swords or Dragonlaces. When flailing about on a dragon's back the rider would do well to take it easy so as not to fall off, in which case survival hangs on the mount's catching skills. Luckily the game has no dragon called Tellu.

The War of The Lance campaign lasts for 22 missions. The missions are mainly combat against other dragons, apart from the occasional stealth mission.

The graphics are rather nice, especially in VGA mode. Apart from the dragons everything is shown as polygons, and if you get fed up with the Lego-ish dragons, you can tweak them into polygons too. For PCs short on oomph there's room for adjustment in the complexity and shading of the landscape. Flying goes however it goes on the keyboard, and better with either the mouse or the stick.

DragonStrike's advantage is that it's easy to play and there aren't many keys. Somehow it just doesn't manage to get me excited, because of a certain monotony in the missions, but maybe Dragonstrike will go down well with someone who has played fewer flight sims.

AD & D: Heroes of the Lance1989 KevätPermalinkIn case nobody remembers any more, SSI and U.S. Gold made a deal. SSI's job was to make a role-playing game based on Advanced Dungeon & Dragons, and that is just what happened. And it didn't turn out half bad, either. Now it's U.S. Gold's turn to show its mettle with an arcade-style version.

HOTL is based on TSR's Dragonlance mythology and is therefore set in the land of Krynn. The player takes command of an eight-strong party, the Companions of the Lance, as they push into the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth to look for the disks of Mishakal and to save Krynn from the beautiful but ah! so wicked hands of the Queen of Darkness, Takhisisks. Before the disks can be had, the heroes have to come up with a way to clobber the dragon Mishakal.

At first glance Heroes of the Lance is strongly reminiscent of Psygnosis's Barbarian. The game is shown side-on in the same style, and fights are fought with the joystick. The player can walk, run and jump, sadly not crouch, but can at least get stuck into hand-to-hand combat or else plink away with long-range weapons. Other actions, such as spells and manipulating objects, are conjured up with the mighty "PRESSSPACE" spell. The ruins yield treasure, weapons and assorted magic items. Somehow the instructions gave the impression that the heroes can't actually use the weapons they find.

The two magic-users each have a staff holding 100 charges. Minor spells bleed off 1 charge, but fending off dragon's breath takes a whole 10. Apparently the staff can be recharged in some places. "Apparently" because HOTL isn't as childishly easy as Barbarian, and my little party bites the dust with depressing regularity.

The most irritating thing about the combat is the tiny hit area. Killing the dwarf in particular is a real blow to the ego, when the little shrimp is a couple of millimetres out of place and refuses to acknowledge your blows.

The graphics in the game are excellent. Xak Tsaroth looks every bit as gloomy as it should, and everything that moves is beautifully animated, if on the slow side. Fortunately the slowness isn't in the same league as Barbarian's, but even so the heroes seem to move at the same speed as a Finnish hero after a night on the town. In a really tight struggle, a heroic eyebrow doesn't even have time to twitch before Death's agent collects what it is owed. The SAVE option saves you plenty of blubbering.

The menu system could have done with some polishing. Taking stock of the items the characters have picked up is laborious as well, and having the character sprite loaded in every time you pick the active character gets annoying too.

Although these blunders cloud the overall picture, Heroes of the Lance is a strong enough game to deserve its five stars, if only by the skin of its teeth. A must-buy for the 16-bits, but on the eight-bitters I'm starting to have my doubts.

AD & D: Secret Of The Silver Blades1990 SyksyPermalinkIn the Dragonspine mountains there's a thriving mine where they struck a real lode: an ancient burial vault, and out of the hole broken into it all manner of monsters and demons began to pour. Can a party of six heroes stop them? Who is behind it all?

SOTSB uses the Forgotten Worlds game world and of course accepts the heroes from Curse, whose careers stretch to around level 15. The difference from the earlier ones is, once again, a few new spells and a bunch of new monsters. There's probably no point going over the game mechanics again.

Secret of the Silver Blades is exactly as good as its predecessors Pool, Curse and Champions. And that's the crux of the problem. Since no progress is made, it gradually starts to feel as if you're playing exactly the same game for the fourth time.

There's room for improvement especially in the combat. Some sort of improvement is needed in the terrain and above all in the enemies' AI routines. The Random Encounter battles ought to be eliminated too; they just slow the game down. The most numbing part of SOSB is combing the mines: a sprawling maze without any real highlights.

Still, I played Secret Of Silver Blades quite contentedly. A role-playing game that doesn't sprain your brain and moves along smoothly is always welcome.

AD & D: War Of The Lance1990 SyksyPermalinkNow I've been swindled. What kind of Dragonlance game is this, when Queen Takhisis isn't even in it? This time the draconian armies of the Highlord of Neraka decide, as it were, to slip the yoke over the rest of Ansalonia, with the good guys putting up a fight. And this time in the strategy game format that nearly everybody hates.

The war proceeds in phases. A news roundup is followed by a report on the heroes. The rascals out hunting for magic items can get wounded or get stuck in the enemy's nets. The gang familiar from the other Dragonlance games waves its ugly heads in this game too, by the way. After that you throw a spanner in the works of the villains on the other side by sending your own troops out on patrol. Unfortunately those troops are then out of the actual war effort for that time.

In the diplomatic phase the player has one chance per turn to try to ally with some neutral state. Success is rewarded not only with that state's troops falling into line but also with right of passage, since troops normally aren't allowed to march through a neutral state. The Highlord can also declare war on a neutral state. Whether the alliance comes off or falls flat, the diplomacy phase is also when envoys are sent out to rock the boat over to your side.

And then the massive armies come crashing together. Who goes first is apparently decided by how well you did the previous turn. The units include infantry, dragons, navy, griffins, heroes, flying cities, fleets, in other words not exactly your run-of-the-mill Stalingrad stuff. Some of the units can transport others. Units are moved with the joystick, and orders are given by waggling the stick, which is unusually user-friendly for an SSI game.

And the heroes' expeditions play an important part in the battles. Considering how effective dragons are in general, even battle-hardened veterans burst into tears and kiss each other when, say, a Dragonlance becomes available. The expeditions also turn up other usable junk.

Graphically the game is unusually advanced for a strategy game, and in other ways too it has been tuned up to look like Pool and Curse. The manual is a bit useless, leaving unanswered such questions as why do the griffins refuse to carry anyone but their own country's troops? The typical SSI tables are also conspicuous by their absence. And as you might guess, the biggest problem is the 64 itself: the disk spins and the machine ponders.

Heavyweight strategy games like this are, along with text adventures, hugely unpopular in Finland. Hopefully a certain populism in War Of The Lance will help people realise that the effort put into more difficult games is paid back with interest.

What was said above otherwise applies to the PC version too, but playing off a hard disk is of course light years faster and more pleasant than floppy-flipping. Besides, the PC version plays a varied game and doesn't always follow the same strategic formula the way the 64 version does.

Adidas Championship Football1990 SyksyPermalinkItalia 1990. Plenty of people are surely boiling over already at this point, while over at the game companies they're chuckling and rubbing their hands. All kinds of official conversions, licensed games and games released alongside major events are a temptation to churn out worthless products and sink a bigger share of the budget into marketing. A good example of this is U.S. Gold's official football game, released at the time of the Mexico tournament four years ago. This year, though, the game companies have wisely put effort into the quality of the program itself too, apart from a few odd budget outfits.

Adidas Championship Football at least starts promisingly: three loading screens, loading music and Ocean's spinning logo. Once the game has loaded, though, reality strikes back. The menus are rather meagre and you can't do much to influence your team. You can pick the nationality and the attacking formation, but you can't fiddle with the line-up. This won't necessarily bother every gamer, since this way you get into the game itself much faster and with less hassle.

The game is viewed from directly above, with attacking done vertically. The player sprites are quite small, and the playability isn't the best possible. The graphics are otherwise handled competently, and the hubbub of the crowd and the sounds of the ball being touched are clear. The refereeing is the strictest of all the football games I've played, which in turn is good attitude training for future stars.

The player you're controlling at any given moment could, however, have been shown in a better way than with a flashing shirt, which isn't always clear enough. The slowness of the game also nags, which is why you can't get excited enough about the action.

The kick power adjustment has been done quite well: the player holds the fire button down until the power bar at the bottom has grown big enough. The spot where you kick the ball can also be changed. The ball doesn't automatically stick to the dribbling player's foot, but twirling around with the ball is still remarkably free. Goal kicks, free kicks and penalty kicks are all yours to take, and now saving a pen is also within the bounds of possibility.

Among the rest of the season's offerings Adidas Championship Football holds its own pretty nicely, but doesn't stand out from the others. Since you can't really influence the result of a match other than by playing, the action part itself ought to have been faster-paced and better executed. Ocean didn't, however, fall into the same trap as Players, who released a batch of different but uniformly poor football games around the time of the World Cup.

Still, the Adidas footie is by no means a bad game, and it appeals more to football fans who are interested only in the playing part.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Hillsfar1989 SyksyPermalinkAD&D got off to a promising start: the massive Pool of Radiance and the Barbarian-flavoured Heroes of Lance both gave you your money's worth, and so Hillsfar was awaited with interest.

And sure enough, it went the same old way again. Well, at least Hillsfar can't be accused of being built on a single style. There's show jumping, a puzzle game, a Gauntlet variation, archery and beat'em up, with even some role-playing thrown in as extra seasoning, so the idea is apparently to appeal to action fans.

So the game goes like this: the hero rides towards the town jumping obstacles on horseback, wanders the town Bard's Tale-style, racks the old brain trying to pick locks and, on success, gets to go burgling houses Gauntlet-fashion. Then you can go and fight in the arena, and at Tanna's range you can practise archery, dagger-throwing and whatnot. Your own guild hands out little jobs in which you can of course use these arcade skills. These give the game a bit of a role-playing flavour.

The trouble is that the sub-games are simplistic and pitiful; only the lock-picking is something a bit newer. The graphics are clear and well animated, but that doesn't save the game.

Hillsfar left no role-playing flavour whatsoever, even though you can import your fave character from Pool. A pointless release, but luckily Curse Of Azure Bonds is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Pools of Radiance1989 KevätPermalinkAdvanced Dungeons & Dragons is presumably the most eagerly awaited new role-playing release of the year. Thank God the project is in the hands of SSI, who usually keep their promises.

The package, at least, is stylish and holds a nice amount of stuff. There is, of course, the obligatory rulebook, the Adventurer's Journal with hints, information and tables for this module, a flimsy machine-specific instruction leaflet and a translation table for turning the runes into English. The disks are in there too, four of them, making eight disk sides in all.

First off, you put together a party of adventurers. A six-strong band is the maximum, which still leaves room for two Non-Player Characters.

Character creation, at least, is thorough. First you pick race and sex, roll the stats, choose a class and an alignment, and give a name. And then you also pick a portrait to represent the hero and tweak the sprite to your own taste. Afterwards you can still adjust the hero's stats to match your own AD&D character. Base cheats will of course max out every stat at this point.

And then we're off. The screen switches to the 3D mode familiar from the Bard's Tales. First there's a guided sightseeing tour of the main attractions of the city of Phal, after which the party is on its own. Like proper tourists, you first rush off to buy souvenirs such as armour, swords and bows. Then it's straight to the town hall to check whether there's any suitable job on offer.

Before you know it, you're busy clearing the city's slums of monsters. The monsters appear in the distance first (if you're lucky) and then things move to close quarters. The tactical combat takes place in a Gauntletian setting, and combat turns are handed out according to each character's initiative.

Combat flows very smoothly and is considerably more rewarding than in many other role-playing games. Heroes who've been hacked down don't die straight away but can be saved with some quick first aid. As tradition dictates, a dead hero can be brought back to life, but it isn't entirely automatic. A champion who has been utterly obliterated by a dragon, for example, is guaranteed not to bounce back up again.

Once the orc horde has been put to the sword, the dividing up of the dearly departed's estate begins. What is exceptionally positive is that when a band of ten leather-armoured, short-sword-wielding orcs have kicked the bucket, you really do get to collect ten suits of armour and ten swords. After a fight the weary heroes pitch camp, the members of the magic profession study their spells and the others daydream about a trip to the countryside. Out there you get to admire Ultima-style graphics. The 3D graphics are bare, but on the plus side the buildings have their own individual features. The combat graphics are simple too, but they do the job. AD&D earns a special plus for the option of switching the heroes over to fight under computer control, which lightens the burden of endless orc-slaughter.

The world of Pools of Radiance feels thoroughly workable and realistic. You can hire NPC muscle for dangerous expeditions, there are brawls in the taverns and whatnot. Eight disk sides promise more than enough to do. The menu system could have been better, and the disk spins like nothing you've ever seen. Even so, disk swapping is pretty rare, which testifies to careful design.

AD&D isn't quite in the class of Ultima V and Dungeonmaster. Even so, it is insanely good and definitely belongs among the elite of role-playing games, leaving behind even such institutions as the Bard's Tales and the Phantasies. The matter ought to be reasonably clear: AD&D won't entertain anyone sitting on the shop shelf.

Advanced Tactical Fighter1988PermalinkWho still remembers a classic flight simulator called Fighter Pilot? It was buggy and not much to look at either, but funnily enough people played even that, for want of anything better. Digital Integration was the company behind FP. After years of wandering down the wrong path, putting out the likes of Tomahawk, TT Racer and Bobsleigh, DI has now returned to its roots by releasing Advanced Tactical Fighter.

But DI hasn't learned much over the years. Tomahawk challenged Gunship to a battle for supremacy among helicopter simulators and lost bitterly, and now ATF is crossing swords with Stealth Fighter, the subject this time being the fighter planes of the near future. After half an hour of test play the outcome is clear: another thrashing, and a decisive one.

The graphics are fairly tolerable; after all, a landscape built out of vector graphics is always worth praising. Speed is usually where the trouble lies, but ATF copes well with that too. Where it misfires, then, is playability - ATF hasn't got a scrap of it. Fumbling about with the joystick and the keyboard takes all the kick out of the game, and since the sound is the usual hissing typical of games like this, ATF can't hold your interest for more than a few goes.

Adventure of Link, The1990 KevätPermalinkThe Adventure of Link, otherwise known as Zelda II, is a direct continuation of the legend of Zelda. The plot spins its yarn along these lines: Princess Zelda is snoozing the sleep of ages on a dais in a temple, and there she will stay, unless somebody manages to find the Power of Courage hidden in the Great Palace. Link signs up as the hero once again, but first he must seek out the crystals in six smaller palaces, so that the spell guarding the Great Palace would be broken.

Zelda II is a more varied product than its predecessor. The pointy-eared pixie hero scampers about a landscape viewed from above, which switches to side-on scrolling in villages, caves and palaces. If you stray from the road, you may find Ganon's tenacious followers on your back. Then a side view a couple of screens wide is used, whose scenery and cavalcade of bogeymen vary according to the type of terrain.

Out in the middle of the landscape, too, you can come across places depicted in more detail, a typical example being the monster-infested bridges. The palaces are such vast, multi-level mazes that they actually form separate sub-games of their own.

In role-playing style, Link grows more powerful as the adventure progresses and learns new spells. The keys to success are conversations with the people you meet and combing the play area down to the last nook and cranny.

The whole thing has the feel of an adventure, but the main emphasis is on self-explanatory swordplay and platform jumping. The game has commendable variety and superb playability, except that in places the difficulty slips over onto the frustrating side. In principle the ingredients of a classic are all there, but some undefinable factor didn't click into place in my head. Perhaps it was down to the conventional execution typical of the Japanese and the clichéd plot. TAOL is nonetheless an excellent game.

Adventures Of Robin Hood, The1991 SyksyPermalinkRobin Hood is surely one of the most idiosyncratic adventure games ever made. For one thing, the player hasn't the faintest idea what they're supposed to be doing in the game, and if you do something, the consequences are hard to foresee.

Robin and his companions roam a miniature world viewed obliquely from above, in which soldiers, monks, peasants and the like bustle about their daily chores. At first the game seems to have neither head nor tail, because the hero is a proper rogue. Left alone for even a moment, he immediately starts doing his own thing. He practises his archery, dashes off to watch important events such as funerals or necktie parties, or at worst gets up to unseemly mischief and arranges his own hanging. Nor can you ever be entirely sure of the outcome when clicking on the action icons. Choosing the speech icon, for example, either launches him into a chat with a local or sends him off trailing after them.

The hero with a personality of his own is a neat invention in itself, but the rest of the game's implementation limps a little. As a bowman Robin is really not worth his reputation, because first you have to laboriously line up the enemy vertically or horizontally and then wait through many agonising seconds while he digs out a new arrow. Shooting at the dragon that terrorises the locals, for example, only ends with you becoming its lunch. The actions also include swordplay, stealing and giving, as befits this particular hero's job description. And as the adventure progresses, new icons appear.

Robin's ultimate goal is to take the castle back from the Sheriff of Nottingham, and even that only becomes clear from a sealed hint slip. The freedom the player is given to do what they please in whatever order adds interest, but it's a burden at the same time. People are used, after all, to a game progressing fairly linearly, with everything spelled out in words of one syllable.

After The War1990 SyksyPermalinkDinamic has had an unlikeable habit of cranking out stubs of games ruined by their difficulty, but might going independent have brought some extra vision with it? Not much, at any rate. ATW's concept is bland Street Fighter-style crispbread: a stiffly walking macho hero kicks, punches and now and then boosts his killing power with the odd length of chain or a baseball bat. If you can't otherwise come up with a plot for a game, you flatten the world with a nuclear war, and hey presto, the guys have something to fight about.

The first impression isn't improved one bit by the jerky scrolling and the stiffness of the movement, though that's less annoying on the ST than on the Amiga. The sound side seems dismal too, as the review copy didn't even have music and the Amiga's crackly sound effects have been lifted straight from the ST.

But once I got down to properly admiring the characters' animation, my jaw clunked on the floor. Why, they can roller-skate, throw karate kicks, do somersaults and pull off other varied and vividly executed moves. Also top quality is the ruined Manhattan scrolling in the background, which contains lots of carefully crafted landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty buried in the ground.

And that was only half the game. After the slow-paced first part the fun gets lavishly topped up, as the hero tucks under his arm an assault rifle that spits death non-stop and forces his way into a subway tunnel inhabited by rats, mutants and other small fry. The control has been solved ingeniously, as you can adjust the aim of the hail of bullets more or less steplessly with vertical movements of the stick. Small details, like the flickering muzzle flash and the flying cartridge cases, create such a convincing atmosphere that a stupid sadistic grin spreads across your face. Luckily you can skip straight to the second part if you know the code.

This time Dinamic hasn't succumbed to excessive difficulty, but the game still has a slightly forced, grinding feel to it. ATW is a reasonable beat 'em up, if you like that sort of thing.

The C-64 version is tear-jerkingly wretched. The smudgy hero sprite skis along in a stiff tango pose and flails his way, with a repertoire of two moves, to the end boss, who is harder to squash than all the others put together. Not even the marginally better second part rescues the game.

Afterburner1989 KevätPermalinkHere it is at last: the hit that was hyped hardest ahead of Christmas '88. Afterburner was a hit before the game had even come out; a massive advertising campaign took care of that. So what's the result like?

The game itself is based on a really simple idea. An F-14 fighter hurtles towards the horizon at a terrific speed, blazing away furiously with its cannons. By "painting" oncoming enemies you can get a missile lock and even launch the thing. In an emergency you can flip the plane onto its back and dodge the thickest clusters of missiles. And that's all there is to it.

Afterburner's popularity in the arcades rested entirely on the game's insane speed, its massive graphics and above all the hydraulic seat, which threw the poor player about until well past the point of throwing up, so how does the game fare on home computers?

Of the C-64 version it has to be regretfully said that no no no, the C-64 just doesn't have the resources for a game like this. The poor little machine does give it everything it's got, but the result is not playable. Dodging enemies is down to luck, because the jerky screen update means you don't notice approaching missiles. Strip Afterburner of the seat, the mega-graphics and the unbridled speed, and what's left? Why, the C-64 version, that's what.

So how do the mighty sixteen-bitters fare, especially as the conversion is the handiwork of Argonaut Software, known for the Stargliders? The boys talked up the result in advance and claimed they could produce a near arcade-identical version, but their big talk came back to bite them. The ST version hardly dazzles with breakneck speed, the backgrounds are spartan and there's barely any sound. The Amiga version is unlikely to be any different, though presumably with a better soundtrack. The truth, after all, is that the actual content of Afterburner amounts to very little; the appeal comes from the special effects.

Afterburner is a wretched conversion that I wouldn't recommend to anyone for love nor money.

Agent X II The Mad Prof's Back!1988PermalinkFrom our series of plots contrived purely for contrivance's sake:

The Mad Prof is on the loose again! The very same one whose plans you, Agent X the Second, foiled last time when he tried to kidnap the President. This time the supervillain has built a base on the moon, from which he intends to fire the Zit Ray. The Zit Ray causes an incurable case of acne, and the Prof is planning for the world economy to go haywire as people blow all their money on spot cream. Only you can save the world (yaaawn...) by infiltrating the Prof's base with the help of your jetpack and destroying the ray machine.

Right then, so much for the 'plot'. The game's graphics are quite good, but nothing special. The screen scrolls from right to left, and all manner of objects spin around on it, draining your energy when they hit you. Your job, of course, is to shoot them from the saddle of your jetpack off to the happy spinning grounds. After that you infiltrate the underground base, destroy the ray gun and that's that. The music is quite good, but nothing special. The plot isn't good, but it certainly is special. Is there anything in the game that's both good and special?

There is. Actually, not in the game but in the cassette loading routine, which is no ordinary turbo and which is the reason I wrote this review at all. Thanks to the nifty loader the game loads off the tape in no time flat, while Rob Hubbard's excellent loading music plays in the background AND at the same time YOU CAN PLAY SPACE INVADERS!!! A really fun idea, thanks to which you forget all about your cuppa and your snack while it loads. The loading game is simple but it works, and so you'd almost rather play it than the game itself. Still, it's not worth buying the game just for the Space Invaders.

Airborne Ranger1988PermalinkI throw myself into the darkness. My parachute opens and I touch down softly. I hide my chute, gather my weapons and check my position on the map. Footsteps! I don't want to announce my existence to the whole world, so I grab my knife and act at lightning speed. Krrk! "It was you or me, pal!" I remark to the ex-guard, and scamper off among the ruins. I crawl carefully towards the target area. Suddenly a machine-gun burst rattles out and I feel a blow to my shoulder. I whip the launcher off my back and let fly a LAW rocket at the muzzle flashes. The bunker is gone, but in its place comes a legion of soldiers.

With my rifle singing, I lob fragmentation grenades and start to feel pessimistic about whether I'll ever even set eyes on the pumping station. But I am a Ranger, the elite soldier of the US Army, and only death - if even that - can stop me.

Airborne Ranger is Microprose breaking new ground. The software house, known and loved for its simulators, has now made its first arcade game. But then Microprose's idea of action is not the same as that of the lighter-weight software houses.

Roughly speaking, Ranger resembles Ocean's Rambo. There are various weapons, one man up against an army, and a mission. And that's where the similarities end, because Airborne Ranger wrestles in a considerably heavier weight class. For starters, there are twelve missions, with objectives ranging from freeing hostages to photographing a top-secret aircraft. The paratrooper can crawl, walk and run. Unlike in Rambo, you can - and are meant to - use the terrain to your advantage. In some missions it's essential not to alert the enemy until it's too late. Microprose has crammed the game with such attention to detail that you can only take your hat off to them.

There are weapons to suit every taste. There's the CAR-15 Colt Commando assault rifle, fragmentation grenades, a LAW disposable rocket launcher for use against buildings etc., plastic explosive with time fuses, and a knife for silent killing. Shooting has been implemented very nicely, since a small sight shows where the bullets, grenades or rocket will fly. Instead of the classic eight firing directions, the paratrooper can rattle away in 32 compass directions.

The graphics look quite nice and work excellently. The sound side is taken care of too, with decent machine-gun noises and explosions. In true Microprose style the game comes with a 40-page manual that tells you everything there is to know about both the game and Rangers in general. A key overlay that sits on top of the computer shows where the functions are.

All in all, Airborne Ranger is surely one of the best games of the year, and it is guaranteed to fascinate each and every player. It's easy to learn but big enough to keep your interest alive for a long, long time. A must-buy for disk drive owners; tape users should keep their enthusiasm in check, since the game was made in a country where they probably don't even know what a cassette drive is.

Alex Kidd High-Tech World1990 KevätPermalinkLife is hard for a little Japanese prince. To get to play at the local arcade, he first has to survive the most boring adventure game in the universe. Namely, Alex has to find the eight pieces of a map in the palace.

This game apparently belongs to the series "introductory studies for the little ones". Alex has to do his homework by answering weird multiple-choice questions ("What is the password on level 15 of Space Harrier?"). Alex must not touch Daddy's computer. Alex must not climb on broken stairs. Alex must not stick his head in the laundry pot. If Alex is naughty, Alex dies. And the game starts over from the beginning again.

Once Alex has got the map pieced together, next up is a trek through the forest towards a technological land of bliss. Along the way Alex mows down a countless number of ninja men. But the first part is so numbing and dull that hardly any six-year-old brat will have the patience to get through it. On the other hand, the graphics are really cute and sweet, as befits the Japanese style, and in the background plays a selection of infuriatingly perky plinky-plonk tunes.

If you ask me, Alex Kidd doesn't fit into the Finnish gaming landscape. The family's little monkeys will hardly keep up, and for the older folk who understand English it's too limited.

Alien Syndrome1988PermalinkConverting coin-op games to the 8-bits is no easy job, as numerous failed attempts have shown. But the coin has a flip side too: graphics handicap notwithstanding, good and even excellent conversions do appear.

And with Alien Syndrome they've pulled it off. The game is very much a Gauntlet-style romp in which you rescue scientists from a genetics laboratory that has suffered an accident. The laboratory is, naturally, full of nasty surrealist monsters. Besides the scientists, the levels also hold more powerful weapons and maps with which you can locate the missing men (or women). It pays to hurry a little, since every level has a time limit. Clearing a level is rewarded with a fight against a big but, luckily, ugly creature. Simultaneous two-player play is possible, of course.

Real effort has gone into Alien Syndrome. The graphics are good, and in the case of the giant monsters one can even speak of "brilliant". The playability is top-class despite the unavoidable multiload. The only thing you can give it stick for is the slow scrolling, thanks to which an impatient player at the edge of the screen is easy prey.

For Edge's sister label Ace, Alien Syndrome is a decent start. If you want to see how the game could have been ruined, get hold of U.S. Gold's Shackled.

Aliens - US. version1987PermalinkSince you can make a game out of even bad films, Activision apparently believes you can squeeze two out of a good one. Electric Dreams' Aliens is already on the market, and now the parent company is releasing the Yankee take on it.

US-Aliens consists of six parts, tied together by digitised pictures from the film and snippets of dialogue. Thanks to this, US-Aliens is an exception among movie games: it actually follows the plot of the film.

Included are the landing on Acheron, four soldiers running the gauntlet in the atmosphere processor, breaking through a two-ton steel door with a horde of aliens pressing in, the escape through the ventilation system, fetching Newt, and the final showdown with the Alien Queen.

All the parts are more or less different from each other, so the boredom threshold is higher than usual. A very positive feature is the chance to play the same section for as long as you can stand it, without the program curtly throwing you back to the start. Good news for owners of cassette drives.

You can also jump straight to the next section if your skills aren't up to it. Some of the parts are so hard that the little veins in your head would be popping without this handy option.

The downside of cheating, though, is that you never get to see the ending. Oh dear, what a pity...

The sub-games are all fairly simple in themselves, but Aliens draws its strength from variety. The graphics range from good to middling, as do the games, and the Aliens theme sets the rhythm for the action.

Like the British version, the Yankee game too does justice to James "Terminator" Cameron's creditable sequel to one of the best films of all time. Aliens-U.S.Version has earned its right to exist.

Alter Ego1987PermalinkChew out your boss, punch him on the nose, betray your best friend with his wife, or say "yeah" to the man who asks you into his car when you are 6 years old. Alter Ego has arrived! Alter Ego? ask the masses, struck dumb with amazement. AE is a program that simulates the greatest adventure of them all, namely life. In about seven hours you literally live your way through a human life, as rowdily or as sanctimoniously as you like. Practise Landonisms (cf. Highway to Heaven, i.e. behave so sanctimoniously that even the saints weep) or live like a little scumbag. Almost anything is possible.

Alter Ego consists of nothing but text, but what text! The Nobel Prize in Literature would be roughly adequate recognition for this brilliant prose, which floods the screen and of which there is a lot (6 disk sides on the Commodore 64).

Enter your own personality or let the computer create one, and then comes the miracle of birth. Decide the important things in your life (women, getting married, children, work etc.) with the decision icons around the edges of the screen. Experience life through the experience icons in the middle of the screen. These are a kind of miniature play in which you have the lead role. Choose your mood and your action, and the story then moves on accordingly. At the end you see how things turned out, and usually you also get a hint as to why they turned out that way.

Some of the experiences are unpleasant, some pleasant; in some of them you may die, and in some somebody else may die. That's life, and Alter Ego certainly doesn't sugar-coat the facts. They include the death of friends, sex (you don't have to experience it, but...), social interaction, trouble at work and so on. The experiences shape your character, which you can check on through its own icon. Among other things you see your age, your relationships, bar charts of your various character traits and social relations, and whatever property you may have (house, car, VCR etc.). And now comes the time for praise, pointless though it is, since the Finnish language has no superlatives strong enough. Alter Ego is an ingenious game, absolutely part of the aristocracy of games, and is sure to become a cult classic. The experiences are varied and often genuinely surprising, and yet so universal that almost every one of them has something familiar in it. They are cleverly written and ooze surprising twists, humour and wicked sarcasm. The game is extremely user-friendly, since you never have to type a single word; everything is done with the joystick.

Alter Ego is a "game" that can be recommended without reservation to everyone, except those who don't know a word of English or don't have a disk drive (a disk drive can be bought, and English can be learned). Alter Ego leaves no one cold. You either love it or you lose your mind over it. Despite its rather steep price, Alter Ego is worth every penny. If you don't believe it, go and try it out in a computer shop somewhere. First you'll be sold, and then the game will be.

It should be mentioned that Alter Ego comes in separate male and female versions, so everyone gets an equal chance to become an Alter Egoist. So off you go: piggy bank to the chopping block and into the queue at the shop.

Altered Beast1990 KevätPermalinkIf one type of game had to be wiped off the face of the earth, beat'em-ups would be a pretty strong candidate, what with their rehashed clichés and numbing sameness. Every now and then, however, along comes a game that forces a hater of fighting games to reconsider.

The player is a warrior long since dead, whom a wizard raises from the grave to rescue the wizard's daughter, much to the chagrin of the hungry worms. The warrior can punch and kick, so up to this point Altered Beast can't be bothered to offer anything all that new or interesting.

But lo and behold! By collecting the Power-Ups left behind by terminated hellhounds, the hero turns into a monster of devastating power. On level one, for instance, you get to steer a fire-breathing werewolf that mows down a screenful of monsters with a single flick of the joystick. On level two you can steer a flying dragon whose special skills include the use of electricity. A bear creature is on the menu too.

And a monster has to be tough indeed to hold its own against the classic end-of-level monsters, which, screen-sized as they are, will block the hero's progress with their eyeballs if they have to.

The graphics are exactly what a proper fighting game should have. The monsters really do go splat into pieces when you give them a shove, and the hero's habit of chopping up boulders suits the macho mood too. The animation, the use of colour and the sprite design all hit the spot, along with the roaring sound effects.

The result is a playable coin-op conversion that brings a strange sort of satisfaction. Extra bonus points go to the option for two players at once. In the preview version, though, the players couldn't be told apart, which caused certain problems.

Altered Beast's blood, gore and macho posturing lift this game far away from the dismal herd of Renegade variants.

Alternate Reality - The City1989 SyksyPermalinkWhat came before Alternate Reality - The Dungeon? The City, and it shows. Although The City is almost identical to The Dungeon, it is much weaker in most respects. The basic idea is the same, a role-playing game in a '3D shell', but the execution dates from much further back.

The plot of the thing goes like this: a flying saucer abducts you, and when you wake up you have no idea where you are. There's no actual plot in AR: City; it's a question of staying alive.

On opening the box, an RPG fanatic may suspect for a moment that they've been sold a short package, since role-playing games usually come with hefty wads of orc lists, spells and suchlike. The City couldn't care less: one manual of a few pages and a small slip of extra instructions. The player has to find out most of everything on their own.

It would be best to keep quiet about the execution, but... The so-called 3D routine is rather mushy and stiff, and moving around isn't exactly nimble. Worst of all is turning - agony. The graphics are awful anyway, but what can you do.

The disk handling won't have you singing for joy either. Every single battle and location is loaded separately, which means you get to swap disks (ahh). And after the loading you get to peruse menus whose makers didn't give clarity much thought.

I've run into many RPGs, but AR - The City is in a class of its own. Maybe once upon a time this was magnificent, but now... time has taken its toll.

MacArthur's War + The American Civil War Part II1989 KevätPermalinkWill SSI's blood fly when SSG takes the battlefield? The battle of SSI versus SSG continues with the latest releases from Australia's SSG. But these ones don't actually fare all that splendidly on the field: there are better games around.

MacArthur's War is set in the Korean War of 1950-1951 and contains nine decisive battles from that war. In SSG's familiar fashion, the game's instructions are not terribly delightful: a sample game that shows you how to play through the first turn, and after that menu explanations by the bucketload. The best part of the instructions is the interesting background to each scenario and the accounts of how it all happened historically.

After playing for a good while, something seemed to be missing, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. MacArthur's War can't meet my needs, though I can't claim it's a bad game either.

In all other respects The American Civil War is identical to MacArthur's War, except that it takes place during the US Civil War. The menus have been changed a little, the maps are different, and naturally there's no air support or armour.

SSG uses a similar menu system in every one of its games, so old hands will wade into the depths of the game with no trouble. For a first-timer, SSG's game system may be confusing: all orders are given from various menus, and units aren't moved one by one, a hex at a time; instead they're given a particular objective to head for. The system naturally speeds the game up and makes it considerably easier, but the feeling of having your own grip on the game has gone missing.

SSG games still have a charm of their own, and there's plenty of variety too. As usual, both Warplan and Warplant are included, orders aren't limited to just moving and attacking, and there are several types of units, but That Certain Something just didn't turn up while I was playing. I enjoyed playing SSI's Shiloh, Rebel Charge at Chickamauga and that company's other Civil War games immeasurably more. They have an inner (civil) depth of their own that both of these games lack.

SSG fans needn't come flailing at my throat with tridents, since the poor thing is completely innocent. MacArthur and TACW alike are good games, they just aren't to my own taste. Let us wait until Interstel's Empire turns up on the C-64, then the fun will really kick off. I've spent over 150 hours in front of my Amiga playing that game, so it's guaranteed to be worth the wait for C-64 owners.

American Ice Hockey1989 SyksyPermalinkYou don't see many ice hockey simulations on the games market these days. The first to spring to mind is SuperStar Ice Hockey, which some people considered a top-notch game. Now Mindscape is trying to lay down the last word in this type of game with a 'new release' called American Ice Hockey. Let it be said straight off that owners of the first-mentioned simulation needn't bother heading to the games shop on AIH's account, since this is one and the same game.

American Ice Hockey is an action strategy game in which you get to use both your joystick talents and your powers of deduction. In the action part the player controls the team's centre or the goalkeeper, and the computer handles the rest in its own brusque style.

Movement on the rink simulates the real thing excellently. The players build up their speed little by little, and skilful skating keeps the momentum going. Sudden stops, contact with the boards and closer acquaintance with opponents slow the players' progress considerably. The screen follows the puck rather than the centre, and the offside rule is in force.

Stoppages in play give you the chance to step into the coach's shoes. Choosing which lines skate out onto the ice, and the game strategy to follow, are an essential factor when success is measured. The different lines have differing attacking and defensive abilities, which weaken in proportion to time spent on the ice and the players' age. The state of the game and the opponent's choice of lines affect what kind of line-up it makes sense to throw into the fray at any given moment.

The aim of the game is the SHL league championship and victory in the SportTime Cup. The league is split into two conferences, each made up of two five-team divisions. The hockey teams' game statistics and each player's abilities have been carefully recorded over nine seasons.

American Ice Hockey's highest strategy level covers developing the team in the form of training camps, recruiting young players and player trades. These measures determine the make-up of the individual lines. Changes to the team require you to hold trading points. At the end of the season you get fewer of them the better you've done, so that the game keeps some semblance of sanity.

AIH is an ice hockey simulator with alternative ways of playing to spare. Presenting every side of it would eat up an insane amount of column space, so readers will have to make do with this, and players can get to know the product at their computers.

Anarchy1991 KevätPermalinkHands up everyone who has played Defender (one balding pensioner shyly raises a paw)... all right, forget the whole thing. So Anarchy is built on an idea so old that after countless reheatings all that's left of it is a charred carcass. After Starray and Datastorm the genre suffered what you might call a burn-out.

The idea, of course, is to whizz your ship left and right, guarding capsules lolling about on the ground. One enemy type tries to lug the little logs off to the top of the screen, while from another you can steal shield fields that foil the fetchers' plans. If every object you're guarding gets destroyed, by enemy action or your own stray shots, the punishment is a transfer to a red hyperdimension, where you really get to pump the button for all you're worth if you mean to come out alive.

Dragging the idea into a new decade has brought nothing new with it except improved background graphics, which are admittedly yummy to look at. In every other respect the game is a fine example of how to make a complete pig's ear of a foolproof basic idea that's ridiculously easy to program.

The game is ruined by a blunder as small as the ship being impossible to stop. When you brake, it usually shoots off at double speed in the opposite direction, which gives the controls a completely unruly feel. In any situation that's even slightly tight, playing is just brainless joystick-whisking.

Among the other shortcomings, let me mention the critters getting lost in the background and the overly thick-skinned mega-monsters. Anarchy isn't actually dismal, but what can you do when its predecessors are so overwhelmingly superior? In Anarchy a hefty shield gets pummelled down to reserve power in no time at all, whereas in Datastorm one hit and you were a goner, yet you still stayed alive in quite unbelievable situations as long as you tortured the fire button hard enough. If you find it somewhere, then by all means buy it (Datastorm, that is, not this one).

Andy Capp1988PermalinkAndy Capp is familiar, at least to the men of Turku, under his Finnish name Lätsä. The adventures of this work-shy, beer-bound bum can now, thanks to the strong men of Mirrorsoft, also be followed on your own little screen.

The plot is to help Lätsä stay alive for a week on the dole. Good practice for everyone's future, come to think of it. The money goes mainly on beer drinking and not much else, since Lätsä's vital signs are measured by an abstract Alcometer, which has to show at least some kind of reading. The landlord, the police, the wife and the like must of course be avoided, or the result is a fight. Rather peculiarly, the outcome of a fight is decided at random. Victory is rewarded with money.

You can quench your beer thirst in the pubs (during opening hours only), and there are other places to visit in the neighbourhood too, such as the bookie's and the police station and so on.

The execution is careful. The game is naturally icon-driven, and all the sprites look the way they should and not, say, like a Blob. The animation is exemplary and the end result really does resemble its comic-strip original.

The game type is the good old arcade adventure. Lätsä walks from one screen to the next trying to find useful objects, and chats or brawls with the other characters. As usual, you'd have to map your route, or else you'll never know whereabouts Lätsä is supposedly adventuring. In a word: deadly dull.

Without the licence nobody would buy Andy Crap. Even with the licence, it will probably only be bought by that band of arcade adventure fans who crave the least sensory stimulation. The game itself does give you good ideas about where to invest the money you had set aside for buying it.

Apache Strike1989 SyksyPermalinkThe year is 1997. World peace is in danger, and only a brave pilot in an Apache AR-64 helicopter can save the world by destroying the defence computers of forty cities. The cities have such plucked-out-of-thin-air names as "Novgorod" and "Moscow".

The Apache flies through a maze made of skyscrapers, battling enemy aircraft and tanks. The view is straight from the cockpit, and a radar screen helps with the flying. The Apache can fly fast, can fly slow and can even hover in place. For armament there are missiles and an autocannon.

If Apache Walkout still sounds interesting at this point, the blow lands all the harder once you actually play the game. The simple vector skyscrapers move quite nicely as such, but the pathetic splotches bear no resemblance to tanks or aircraft. Apache Strike is no simulator at all, just a fairly straightforward maze game seasoned with shooting. There is roughly as much suspense and feverish action as in the weekend devotional "Sana viikonvaihteeksi".

The idea of the game is good as such, commie-phobia aside, and by putting more into the execution and into further ideas AS might even have been a good game. As it is, the result falls well short of Activision's usual standard.

APB1990 KevätPermalinkTengen is a coin-op company lurking in the shelter of the massive Atari Games Corporation, and its brainchildren include Xybots, Vindicators and this APB, or All Points Bulletin. The name means a police alert for a wanted suspect, from which you can deduce that the subject is a cop's daily grind.

The aim is to make a set number of arrests before your shift or your fuel runs out, and then get back to the station to collect the reward for a job well done. At first you're chasing litterbugs, hitchhikers and other petty criminals, but as you gain experience the rookie cop gets handed drunk drivers and wanted drug criminals to deal with.

Upholding the law is a leisurely affair in a police car patrolling a playfield that scrolls in every direction. The player gets a nice soft landing into the game's mysteries, since on the first level there's only a short loop round the block to patrol, but the area keeps growing and new details come along, such as a busy railway line.

Arrests are handled by hitting the siren, i.e. the fire button, and steering the crosshair that appears in front of the car onto the criminal. Not everyone complies the first time, and for the most dangerous criminals you need a gun in your shoulder holster, but you only get hold of one once you've proved your competence. Wanted criminals must additionally be "interrogated" by waggling the joystick as roughly as you possibly can, which describes the nature of the proceedings rather aptly.

On the outside the game doesn't promise much, since the sound hardly sparkles and the graphics are an unusually crude jumble of blocks. A special mention must go to the notepad-style scoreboard, whose yellow text on a white background is as easy to read as Hebrew written in Arabic in Chinese characters.

Despite its misshapen looks, APB is quite enjoyable to play, as it has an original approach and even a wee bit of humour. The game's loading system is a pleasant surprise too: the levels load separately, but you only have to rewind the cassette to the start when the tape runs out.

To boil it down: no mega-game, but perfectly playable entertainment.

Apollo 18: Mission to the Moon1988Permalink"Not again!", I roared, slamming the joystick down on the table. "It's just flat-out impossible!" Such were my feelings after I had been trying to get through the game's first section for ten minutes or so and about a hundred times.

Accolade's Apollo 18 is a game simulating the famous moon flight, in which the whole project, from start to finish, gets dumped on the player's shoulders. What could be more fun - if only the game were even a touch easier. After playing for a while you start to believe that getting through the game requires astronaut training.

Apollo 18 is divided into seven sections which, oddly enough, get easier towards the end. That is just the thing to wear out those who wrestle with the first section for half an hour or so and still don't make it out of the atmosphere. Getting to the next section takes a stiff shot of patience, and then, beneath the first impression, an interesting, skilfully made simulator that rewards its player is revealed.

The graphics, while not top-notch, are very beautifully animated and suit the game well. As for the sound, suffice it to say that besides the obligatory rumbling and hissing of rockets the game has plenty of digitised speech, and very clear speech at that. A special mention goes to the disk turbo on the disk version, which is one of the fastest I have seen.

Apollo 18 is a very successful simulation, although the difficulty of the opening will make the impatient player blow a fuse. Warning: pressing the fire button on a joystick in port one sends the game right back to the start, which certainly did not delight a tester who had got a long way.

Apprentice1991 KevätPermalinkProceed to your homes immediately, close all doors and windows and listen to the radio for instructions on the hour. The evil Mario-man has taken over the city. Not that this had anything to do with the plot, mind you, but it does capture the mood when you run into the umpteenth copy of Mario Bros. At least the courtroom isn't looming this time, since nothing is left of the basic idea but a feeling of familiarity tickling your spinal cord.

The idea is simply to scurry from one end of the level to the other, collecting fruit and other bonuses along the way and, above all, the key that fits the last door. The game starts off very non-violently, as the hero hasn't got a single weapon to use. Later on, though, you can scrape together things like time bombs from the shops, with which you can blast hedgehogs and other cute creepy-crawlies sky-high. But don't try this at home, kids, because the hedgehog is a protected animal.

The early levels are so dreary that you have to check the calendar to see which decade we're living in, but later on the game turns more promisingly Mario-like. At least the designers have realised that not everything always has to be force-fed; it can also be left to the player to decide whether to comb the level from top to bottom or head straight for the door.

The most room for improvement lies in the skills of the pixel-smith who designed the graphics. Of course the style is supposed to be childish, but the palette, a muddle of murky blue, poison green and candy red, hurts the eyes, and the hero is a lifelessly drawn little stump-legs that hasn't even been animated properly. The easy-going background plinking suits the game splendidly and there's nothing to complain about in the sounds either; in the title music especially they're really crisp.

Sure, we've seen these before, but a foolproof formula doesn't turn into anything else, no matter how many times you roll it out.

Arcade Classics1989 KevätPermalinkToday's games are more advanced than you'd ever believe. Back in the days when Atari's video games were the cutting edge of home entertainment, games like Netherworld were pure sci-fi. Not to mention Federation Of Free Traders and Dungeonmaster.

Arcade Classics offers a chance to peek into that lost era. It packs four really old games into one box. Space Invaders can hardly be unfamiliar to anyone, and nor can Asteroids. Gravity Wars is well known to everyone who owns a bigger machine. Bringing up the rear is Snakes.

Space Invaders has been done with authentic monochrome graphics. The alien horde trickles slowly downwards while the defender, lurking behind the bunkers, thins out their ranks. There has never been a decent version of Asteroids for the C-64, so it was high time this gap was filled. Asteroids successfully looks like its arcade counterpart and, most importantly, plays smoothly. The idea of Asteroids, of course, was to chop anabolic asteroids into ever smaller shreds and pick off UFOs on the side. This version is one of the best, although it loses comfortably to Megaroids, familiar from the ST and the Mac.

Gravity Wars has a sun in the middle of the screen whose gravity causes problems for two battling spaceships. The gravity can be set to several strengths, or even turned right around. The game requires two players.

In Snakes you steer two snakes, the aim being either to eat your opponent out of existence or to cause a collision. And this history lesson, too, requires two pupils.

Every game in Arcade Classics has nostalgic appeal and, lo & behold, a certain amount of playing pleasure too. The only real minus is that Gravity Wars and Snakes won't do much to cheer up the lone gamer. Worth getting if the prehistory of games is a bit hazy for you.

Archipelagos1989 SyksyPermalinkIf anyone is curious what happens when Sentinel and Virus get married, well, now that too is revealed. They have a bouncing baby boy (or girl) who, on top of a strong game-genetic inheritance, shows plenty of ideas of its own.

On every one of Archipelago's 10,000 islands there is an obelisk that has to be destroyed. The obelisk can be destroyed by destroying the island's stones, which can only be destroyed if they are connected to the obelisk by land. And that, naturally, is usually not the case at all. Building land (and disinfecting it) takes energy, which you get by absorbing not only stones but also energy spores.

All this would be easy and relaxed if various trees weren't spreading infection around and, what's more, homing in on the player with the aim of contaminating the player. Jolly Necromancers destroy land, lost souls turn the player into one of their kind with a single touch, and the blood eggs that hatch when there's thunder in the air cause either a massive infection or a horrific land famine.

Moving about on the chessboard-like screen is easy. You point with the mouse at the square you want to get to, and at the press of a button you glide there. You can't enter water, sand or a contaminated square, but you can certainly move across them, like a certain mythical figure on the Lake of Gennesaret.

Archipelagos's fast Virus/Sentinel graphics combined with real-time play create such an impressive sense of pseudo-realism that the panic you feel is your own. In the thinly populated league of weird games, Archipelagos is first class.

Archon + Archon II1987PermalinkArchon is an excellent combination of chess and shooting! It is considerably faster-paced and more eventful than chess, but on the other hand a quick trigger finger alone won't guarantee you victory. You also need planning, cunning and the ability to exploit your opponent's weaknesses.

Archon's playing area is a grid on which both players' pieces start out on their own sides. Some of the squares are black, some white, and some change colour every turn.

The white player's (the Light side) characters are at their strongest on white squares, and the black (the Dark side) player's on black squares. On the other squares their strength depends on how dark the square is.

The aim of the game is either to wipe out the opponent's forces completely, or to take control of the five flashing squares around the edges and in the centre of the board.

Both players have numerous different creatures in their ranks. Each side is led by a Wizard, and this is the most capable of all the creatures in the game. As well as being a powerful fighter, it has certain spells at its disposal for striking at the opponent. The Wizard can reverse the flow of time, bring one of its own back to life, summon one of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) to help, or, say, swap the places of two characters on the board.

Destroying the opposing wizard is therefore a worthy deed, but at the same time an extremely difficult one.

So when two players' characters land on the same square, the 'stronger' one doesn't necessarily always win. A battlefield comes up, onto which the two characters appear to fight it out. The survivor then returns to the square where they met. Some of the characters shoot, others strike, and some make use of an energy field.

The different creatures have quite different ways of fighting, and it takes a while before you work out the best fighting strategies against each opponent.

Despite all the action, success in Archon requires planning. Attacks have to be timed right and needless battles avoided. The graphics are unfussy and very clear. There are just enough sound effects, with no pointless jingle droning away in the background.

Of course you can play Archon as a straight duel too, but you get more enjoyment out of it when you make use of all the possibilities the game has to offer.

Fans of adventure games will probably be fascinated by the characters alone, which include among others a dragon, a djinni, a basilisk, a unicorn, a phoenix (firebird) and a golem (orc).

Archon II is a similar kind of game, but somewhat different in execution. Instead of a grid, the playing area is made up of various elemental layers. Each side again has a whole host of different types of characters to choose from, and now you can pick them as you please, within the limits of how far your energy stretches.

The aim is the same as in the first game, but the way you move and the use of spells are different. Archon II, too, is an interesting duel strategy game.

Arkanoid1987PermalinkAn old idea is better than a dozen new ones. Imagine's latest action-game twist traces its roots back to an ancient relic called Breakout, which is probably one of the first ten computer games in the world.

Since not everybody will necessarily have even heard of Breakout, let's go over it a little. The gist of the thing is to bounce a ball, using a bat that moves sideways along the bottom of the screen, against a brick wall at the top of the screen. The bricks crumble when the ball hits them, and once you've destroyed all the bricks you get to go and batter the next wall.

In Arkanoid the bat's job is done by a spaceship, and that ball-looking gadget is actually an energy bolt. The walls are more imaginatively shaped than in the original, although the first two screens, with their old-fashioned layouts, try to bore the player to death. As extras there are also a few aliens, who are mostly just in the way, and a set of energy capsules hidden under the bricks, which make playing easier in various ways.

The program's problem is the controls. The joystick doesn't really give enough precision, and even if the program does work with the Neos mouse, Geos is a lot more common these days. On top of that, there's no way at all to either quit or pause the game.

Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh1988PermalinkThe 16-bits have long been plagued by a disease called Break Out clones. The disease has apparently spread to the eight-bits as well.

What? You don't know what Break Out is? From where? Alpha Centauri? I see. Break Out is an ancient video game of ours, the inhabitants of Earth, in which you use a ball to try to smash up a pile of bricks at the top of the screen. Some of these bricks give you special features such as cannons or a wider bat.

Interestingly enough, Arkanoid was the first Neo-Break Out and is still one of the best. Now Imagine intends to mint more money from the same mould.

Naturally Arkanoid II is a good game, because it is extraordinarily hard to knock out a boring version of this subject. The graphics and sound are better than its predecessor's, and naturally there are new features, not all of which are useful any more. What use, for example, is a bat half the size?

You can bounce the ball around with either a joystick or the Neos mouse. The mouse, if anyone actually owns one, is naturally much better.

Despite all the praise, though, the second part doesn't really offer anything new, so it is only worth buying if you are a true Arkanoid fan or don't own a single Break Out. (Surely there are no such people?)

Armour-Geddon1991 SyksyPermalinkPsygnosis, a veteran of the 16-bit machines, is now trying its hand in turn at vector graphics. Armour-Geddon offers futuristic warfare with six different contraptions and throws Carrier Command-style strategy into the mix. A horrific nuclear war has ravaged a beautiful planet. Which planet is not said, but pessimists will surely guess straight away. Those in power saved themselves by going underground into vast tunnel networks, but left their voters to survive on the surface. The planet's decaying ecosystem throws the climate into chaos and makes life on the surface hell. Naturally the surface dwellers get a little miffed at the passivity with which the folks living below ground help them out. So they plan a horrific revenge strike and begin building a Doomsday weapon; a weapon so terrible that once activated it will wipe out all life on the planet. As chief of the "Tunnel Rats", the player's task is to find the five parts needed to build a neutron bomb and use it to destroy the Doomsday weapon. The game thus splits into six missions; the first five involve hunting for the parts, and in the sixth you have to find the death weapon and destroy it.

You have a limited number of scientists and technicians at your disposal. The scientists develop new weapons and the technicians build them from the raw materials you find. When raw materials run short you can scrap existing equipment and recycle it into material for new devices. You can command six craft at once, hopping from one cockpit to another with the function keys. Each craft can be fitted with three devices. Besides the usual missiles, shells and fuel tanks there are, for example, teleport devices, which neatly get you across even long distances without wasting precious fuel.

Once you reach the planet's surface you don't have a moment to admire the scenery; enemy tanks and planes are buzzing around you almost immediately. If your tank starts taking a real hiding from enemy planes, get your own plane into the air to chase the baddies off. Tanks, in turn, can take out the AA guns that give your planes grief. Choosing and using the right craft gives the game that strategic depth that games like this need.

The vector landscape hasn't exactly been spoilt with fine detail. Partly for that reason the screen update is surprisingly fast, and the playability excellent. There are external views of your craft, and for once they're actually useful; the cockpits of the planes and the ground vehicles look alike to the point of confusion. You can't always be sure whether you're in a tank or in a plane sitting on the runway. But this is only a minor flaw in an otherwise near-faultless product. Armour-Geddon is a splendid blend of action and strategy game that ought to charm at least those who fell for Carrier Command.

Army Moves1987PermalinkOcean is churning new games out onto the market at such a rate that it can only lead to one thing. Quality drops, and fast. Ever since Knight Rider the quality of Ocean's games has been on a downward slope, apart from a few gems that Ocean has bought in for big money to distribute.

Army Moves comes as no surprise. It could just as well be Green Beret with the sprites changed. Something new has at least been attempted: the game comes in two parts, and the second part is loaded only once the first has been played through. So do the parts really take up so much memory that they have to be loaded separately? I hardly think so. With a bit more effort on the finishing touches both parts could have been squeezed into memory at once, that's how simple they are.

The idea is good old kill-or-be-killed. At the start you're joysticking your way along in a jeep fitted with rockets that fire in two directions. Coming at you are trucks and helicopters, and on top of that the bridge has holes in it that you have to jump over. The game is disproportionately hard right from the start, but once you work out a good tactic it turns all too easy. The graphics are middling, and the backgrounds are nicely drawn, if repetitive. The title music is actually good, but the tune that plays during the game is tedious. Luckily you can switch it off.

As things stand, Ocean's downhill slide just keeps going, with no end in sight. Army Moves is an unimaginative, dry game.

Arnheim1989 SyksyPermalinkStrategy games are traditionally detailed but loooong games, and to get through one you have to set aside at least a weekend kitted out with a public holiday, plus three thermoses of coffee. CCS's Arnheim - The 'Market Garden' Operation, however, is something else entirely. Even at its longest the game is over in about six hours, and the short scenarios take under an hour. That sort of thing won't faze an old strategist much, but for anyone who wants to try out strategy games in double-quick time, Arnheim is just the thing.

The speed naturally also means doing without superfluous detail. Supply is unheard of, and so, by and large, is air support. Even the anti-aircraft batteries are there mainly for the ground-combat strength of their gunners... The program concentrates on shuffling troops around, while at least giving the artillery a chance to help the other side with its foxhole-digging.

Arnheim simulations are dull in that they concentrate heavily on capturing the bridges over the Rhine and its tributaries. In practice, of course, the whole offensive was fought and lost precisely because of those bridges, but as a game the theme easily starts repeating itself. There is not much room left for dashing strategies of your own.

Despite its age (the first version was made back in 1985) Arnheim is a perfectly decent simulation for someone looking for their first strategy game. Everyone else can save their money for, say, UMS II. The game's best plus point is the option of a three-player game (Germans vs. England and the U.S.A.).

Around the World in 80 Days1989 KevätPermalinkHow closely, I wonder, does an adventure game based on Jules Verne's famous novel follow its original? Hmmm... bribery, gambling - now this sounds good!

The game begins in London, after Phileas Fogg has bet that he can travel round the globe in 80 days. This part is shown to the player as a narrative. After that the game moves on to a world map, which also has a menu. From this menu you can bribe the driver of whatever vehicle you happen to be on, which speeds up the journey, or play cards and try to earn some money. In the card game you have to guess whether the next card is higher or lower than the previous one. As a third option you can choose to move straight on to the next adventure section.

There are four adventure sections. In India you have to escape from a holy temple that Fogg has strayed into by accident, jumping over traps and killing dervishes as you go. In Japan you have to be the bottom man of a human pyramid. The idea is to get the leaping acrobats onto your shoulders and also to keep them balanced there. If you pull this off, you get to go with them to America. There Fogg's servant has to rescue his master from the Indians by dodging wolves and dancing a rain dance, copying the medicine man. After that you still have to escape on a sail-sledge without falling into the cracks in the ice. When the player finally arrives in London, the police try to arrest him for a bank robbery. Naturally that mustn't be allowed to happen, so that Fogg can get to his club in time and win the bet.

The game is extremely varied and well made. The title screen in particular is neat, and the music is downright infectious. The difficulty level is about right too, since the start isn't too hard, while at the end there's enough challenge to cost you a few nights' sleep. For a fairly unknown company the game is an excellent achievement, and there's more to be expected. (I think Around... is lousy and boring. NN)

Art Studio1987PermalinkInside every human being lives an enormous need for visual expression. In some it bursts out as exciting naive-art compositions on the walls of public places, in others, such as L. da Vinci, as static portraits that nobody remembers for more than a year.

This need can also be satisfied with a computer. For the C-64, for instance, there's a fair old pile of graphics programs of varying standards. After Art Studio the choice is easy. It may not be perfect, but it's definitely the best! To make pictures you can use not just a joystick but also the keyboard, a mouse and a Koalapad or similar. Art Studio uses the C-64's normal two-colour hi-res mode, with a resolution of 320 × 200 pixels. Limited use of colour is still possible. There's a huge number of options, but that doesn't mean constantly leafing through manuals, because all of Art Studio's options can be brought up as windows at the top of the screen. Fast and easy to use.

On top of the features ordinary graphics programs offer, Art Studio has some completely new ones. Copying parts of the screen and moving, flipping and spinning them can be found in every third program, but in Art Studio you can also enlarge and shrink them smoothly to any size. As well as the normal solid fill there are 32 patterns. If none of them satisfies you, you can define them yourself. The same naturally goes for the brushes and pens too. The most interesting of the fills is Wash Texture, which fills only the bits you worked on last. A small example should make its use clearer. You've managed to produce a completely black creocyte, and you want patterns on it here and there. Pick, say, one of the eight spray cans (sic!) and set it to erase, so you can see what happens. After the operation, choose Wash Texture and the pattern you want. And a miracle happens! The erased pixels reappear as a pattern. If you slip up, the Undo option brings back the original drawing.

You can of course add lettering to the picture, even at three times normal size. Defining your own letters is done with the built-in character editor. The character editor has an interesting Capture Font option, which forms letters from a marked-off area of the screen. That way you can load characters in as a picture and convert them from the screen for the program to use.

Naturally the pictures have to make it onto paper too. Art Studio supports all printers capable of printing graphics. If the printer is up to it, you can print out a 5 × 5 enlargement of a picture.

These were just a few selected points about Art Studio, since presenting everything it can do would eat up oh so many pages. It's worth getting to know it yourself if you get the chance, because Art Studio says more than a thousand words.

Arthur - The Quest for Excalibur1990 KevätPermalinkThe Englishmen's national hero King Artturi is back in fashion again, for a change. Lately a bundle of books has been written, a heap of films directed and a stack of computer games made about Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin, Excalibur, Morgaine, Lancelot and the rest of the gang. Not that I'm sick to death of it, but when all fantasy nowadays seems to revolve around the Artturi legend, whatever the characters happen to be called, the whole business is slowly starting to wear me down. A pity that Finland's national epic is regarded as such a holy book that nobody dares to market it. The events of the Kalevala would provide material for more than one computer game (book, film, ...).

So the story is the same old familiar thing: Excalibur has been jammed into a stone, and Artturi is supposed to pluck it out. Someone, however, has swapped not only the stone for a swordless one but also the sword for a stoneless one, so it's going badly, but let it go, and he also has to prove to Merlin that he is worthy of the king gig.

Arthur represents Infocom's new line, meaning that even the old veteran has had to sell out its sacred principles in the face of market forces - every location also has a picture. Luckily, and to the delight of the old greybeards, the game can also be made to forget its graphics screens, so the old Zorkers may breathe a sigh of relief. Besides the graphics, Arthur also draws a map as the game progresses and contains an effective help function.

In principle Arthur is indeed a perfectly decent game, especially if you like the mythology woven around old King Artturi's court. Then again, if that particular legend is already coming out of your ears, it may be time to change the channel.

Artura1989 KevätPermalinkKing Arthur and his bold knights are an interesting subject, so when I found out that Artura dealt with those times, I took the liberty of expecting something interesting.

And it really is interesting how ancient game types stay alive even though not a single drop of interest trickles out of them any more. Arthur knocks back another goblet of Grail on discovering what he's being used in this time.

Artura (note the original old form) wanders along corridors, can go in and out through doors and - oh my - can even toddle up and down the stairs. On every screen he pelts endless enemies with his endless supply of axes, without any interesting or demanding effort whatsoever. He may even find a piece of a rune, which he may even be able to combine with the ones found earlier. Once all the runes have been clicked together, the people of Albion can breathe easy, for the son of Uther Pendragon has foiled the schemes of his sister Morgause.

The most noteworthy thing about Artura is the 64 version's beautiful sprites. Unfortunately the animation is the usual minimalist lurching about, even on the ST. Artura is pretty to look at, but that still isn't enough to make up for the total lack of innovation oozing out of the game. Even so, it's hard to slag Artura off as a bad game. Gremlin has simply assumed that if a game is based on an ancient legend, the game idea isn't allowed to be any fresher either.

Astaroth1989 SyksyPermalinkAstaroth is the game whose cover was censored in England because it featured lady parts unfit for the eyes of brats. A pity, because the poster that comes with the game, which would probably have been the game's cover, is really great.

Astaroth's creator Marc Dawson started work on the game after reading a certain Stephen King short story that deals with powers of the mind. This is reflected in the game in every way: Marc has given the game an atmosphere that puts the player in mind of supernatural powers.

The player's task is to seek out and destroy Astaroth, the angel of death. It's no easy task, because Astaroth's soul is guarded by three creepy creatures that have to be destroyed first: a living sphinx, a three-headed dragon and a female demon. On top of that, a large crowd of little devils is in the picture, all more or less of a nuisance to the player.

The playing area is some kind of labyrinthine temple built of stone. Scattered around it are ten mind powers, which help the player in the task. At first the player can do nothing but walk and jump. As the abilities pile up, the player can move objects, start fires by the power of thought, levitate, freeze things and other nice stuff. Besides the enemies, the temple is full of pesky traps and secret doors, and powers of the mind are needed to avoid them.

Astaroth is a really fine game, right down to the packaging and the manuals. The graphics are really carefully done and the animation melts in your eyes. Every room of the temple is like a separate work of art. The music playing in the background and on the title screen is perhaps some of the best ever made on the Amiga. Apart from the music, the ST and Amiga versions are identical.

Looks alone won't make a game brilliant, though. Playing Astaroth is the same old fiddling about the whole time. The labyrinthine temple is too big, and you soon get fed up with hunting for objects. Let sworn fans of seek-and-destroy games give Astaroth a try; those who like action needn't bother.

Asterix and Magic Cauldron1987PermalinkWho's the little guy who takes a magic potion and heads off to start a fight? Wrong, it's not some Finnish idiot but Asterix, of course, the freedom fighter of Gaul. So he's the latest comic-strip hero to be turned into a game. I can hardly wait for my idol Judge Dredd to start laying down the law in bits (it's on the way from Melbourne House).

The year is 50 BC. All of Gaul has been conquered, except for one village. The secret of its unconquerability is a magic potion that gives superhuman strength. No wonder, then, that there was great fear when Obelix, in a fit of temper, kicked the cauldron from here to eternity. The pieces have to be collected, so Asterix and Obelix are put to work.

Asterix has successfully captured the comic-strip feel. The varied backgrounds look as if they've been torn straight out of the albums, and you don't have to torture your imagination to recognise Asterix and the others.

The game itself is a joystick-controlled adventure game with some Fist-style fights thrown into the mix. Wild boar get hunted and Roman legions get roughed up in between searching for the pieces of the cauldron. One thing starts to grate as the game goes on, and that's the music! By Tetanus, why does every single game have to have music crammed into it, when it could have been replaced with thumping sound effects? Otherwise there's nothing to complain about in the game, apart from the stingy rations of magic potion. A good arcade adventure and Melbourne House's guaranteed quality.

You'd certainly sooner play Asterix than take a punch in the mouth.

Atlantis1987PermalinkSharks, octopuses, crabs and assorted other critters keep going for you. You have to help the diver Skippy rescue Cute, a sailor, a pearl and a beautiful mermaid from the clutches of the wicked Neptune. Shoot the sharks, octopuses, little fish and crabs, but remember not to shoot Neptune's prisoners, or you die. With six shots you can also destroy Neptune himself.

You have a set amount of oxygen, which of course keeps running down all the time. The game has three screens: in the first you have to rescue Cute and the sailor, in the second Cute and the pearl, which is inside a clam. You can only get the pearl when the clam is open. On the third screen you have to rescue Cute and the beautiful mermaid.

Among the game's downsides is the small number of screens. Secondly, the numbers and text can't be made out properly. Loading the game takes only 41 on the tape counter, since the cassette has a turbo loader, like all of Anirog's C-16 games.

The game has a fair amount of sound: music at the start, then pops and some other racket. The graphics are good and don't need any further explanation here.

Atomic Robo-Kid1991 KevätPermalinkShoot-'em-ups seem to come in two main schools: the super-macho-hi-tech games and the somewhat cuter 'big head, huge eyes and lots of funny fruit' games. In terms of weaponry ARK belongs to the former group, while the metal hero's cuddly look would point to the latter.

The task of the Atomic Nipper, fresh out of combat school, is in all its simplicity to destroy every bit of scrap metal in its path that shoots back or otherwise just looks like it's begging for a smack in the snout. The twenty-four levels plus a few bonus stages follow thoroughly typical international design, meaning they are crammed chock-full of inconsequential metallic creatures, small ones and slightly bigger ones alike.

The arsenal does at least include spectacular mega-beams, fireballs gushing out in five directions and missiles that go off with a handsome whump. Even with this kit you can barely cope, though, because if you lose your guns when you die, there's usually no point even trying to destroy the super-monsters waiting ahead.

The biggest minus of this destruction-fest, which scrolls horizontally and vertically by turns, is that the game slows down at the same rate as the screen fills up with cannon fodder. On the ST at least, the game at its worst judders along like a badly programmed 3D game. It's hard to understand what on earth the program manages to squander so much time on that, with no exaggeration whatsoever, you have to wait half a second for the hero to twitch a couple of pixels in some direction.

Graphically the game is pleasantly arcade-like. The creatures are big and clear, and the metallic backgrounds are, at their best, a caress for the senses. Even the screen-filling explosions have the same feel as Irem's arcade games at their best. The soundscape doesn't exactly set the pulse racing, but at least it's basic racket that suits the game.

The Commodore 64's colour choices are strange. Robo-Kid has been made to look like a painted tin barrel, and the backgrounds look like E.T.'s vomit. The robot moves nicely compared to the speed of the enemies, but the overall pace is pretty much non-existent and dodging bullets is incomprehensibly easy. The game's sound-space fills up with space bleeps and space hiss that don't stand out from the ordinary for the better, nor, to be fair, for the worse. The bigger blobs bring slightly better variety to the game's run-of-the-mill animation.

The difficulty level changes nicely, so that you can clear a fairly large share of the 28 possible levels without having to spend several weeks on the game.

If players are still going to have basic mush like ARK pushed on them, it could at least be smoothly implemented. But there's no point complaining about it to Activision, at any rate, since the company threatened to stop supporting the Amiga and the ST for good.

Atomino1991 SyksyPermalinkIn the beginning, on a Heidelbergian vacuum level, there sat a forlorn hydrogen atom, with one measly electron twirling round its orbital. But out of a quantum-mechanical uncertainty gate there wriggled a nice oxygen atom, which formed a valence bond with the hydrogen, leaving its other electron free to extend the compound. In the end all the electrons had found a partner, and the freon molecule, having achieved chemical stability, buzzed off to the skies to nibble away at the ozone layer.

Playing Atomino is a bit like picking plastic atom models out of the chemistry classroom's display cabinet one at a time, trying to assemble them into a structure with not a single free connector.

The atoms have from one to four electrons, which form bonds with the neighbouring balls, and as a bonus there's an accommodating joker atom. The levels usually specify the number of molecules and of atoms required, or else the structure has to fill a marked-off area. Nimbleness is called for too, since the storage box has to have room for the atoms that keep dropping in at a steady pace. The job is complicated by obstacles and by atoms screwed into place, which unlike the others can't be swapped for the one at the bottom of the stack.

So the basic idea is extremely stripped-down and clear, but the flaw is Klax syndrome: the fun of playing fizzles out as the difficulty starts to brush the limits of what you can manage. You're not given much time for thinking; the lumps clattering into the box have to be hastily flung into free spots. Then again, the pace is precisely Atomino's most appealing feature, and it doesn't call for any furrowed-brow straining either. But this time the marriage of puzzle game and particle physics didn't spawn E-motion-level genius.

Auf Wiedersehen Monty1987PermalinkMonty Mole (in Finnish, say, Mauri Myyrä) is back on screens once again, as Gremlin Graphics maximises its profits by cashing in on this critter, who has already become a cult figure. This time you guide Klepto-Monty around Europe on a spree of pilfering all sorts of useful stuff, all to buy a dream island in Greece.

The game's idea is a little dubious from an educational point of view. Children are taught from a tender age that crime doesn't pay, and what does Gremlin Graphics do? It throws a Monty trilogy into the ring that shatters that myth in one fell swoop. But what does it matter? The game itself is a rather fun jumping game, which you'd certainly sooner play than take a beating from the biggest brute in the class.

The graphics are perfectly tolerable, with multicoloured backgrounds and single-colour sprites. Monty obeys the joystick admirably, so there's no point bouncing your joystick off the walls if the game isn't going well. As for the music, it's probably enough to mention that it was done by the maestro himself, Rob Hubbard. One special feature worth mentioning is Monty's lively dance moves in time with the music.

The game is weighed down, though, by the sheer age of the idea, and since nothing remarkable has been come up with to add to it, it's hard to work up any interest in it. When all's said and done, it's just a slightly better-than-average jumping game among a thousand others.

Automania1987PermalinkAutomania is a product of Mikrogen, a company that is fairly unknown in Finland. The game's main character is the likeable Wally. Could he be some relation of Jet Set Willy?

In the game Wally has to assemble cars that are built from six parts. Every part has to be fetched from a dangerous spot on top of moving girders, and Wally has to clamber up and down ladders. Bouncing tyres do their best to block his way the whole time.

Controlling Wally is easy. The only controls are right, left, up, down and jump.

The game is a bit tedious. Every time you lose three lives you have to start again right from the beginning. Assembling the cars is slow. Only when you get on to building the next car is there some variety. The parts store is different then, so you're forced to plan new routes.

The graphics are good. The characters are clear, the movement smooth and the colours clear.

Avenger1987PermalinkI'm a grey little bloke. Fresh out of The Way of the Tiger school, I kick all sorts of creepy-crawlies, throw stars around and hunt for useful items. "Another boring karate game!", I hear you sigh. Not at all, not at all! Avenger is a new kind of karate game and not boring in the least.

The action is shown from above. The scrolling is top-class, with no nasty judders to speak of. The graphics are brilliant (the bloke really does look like a bloke!), the use of colour is truly ingenious, and the sound effects are nothing to sneeze at either.

Interest is nicely kept up by the great big 300-screen playing area and a mission that is something other than mechanical fighting. The object of the game, you see, is to free the god Kwong from hell.

Playability is pretty good, although the enemies are too hard to kill without losing energy. The game's map is made up of six floors, and you can move between them through the sewers, provided you have the tool you need. Doors can only be opened with keys, which are in really short supply. You have to plan your way through the game right at the start according to where the keys are (which is pretty irritating). Well done, well done, Gremlin Graphics!