1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1991 Kevät"Viruses are the disease and I am the cure!" Sylvester Stallone's immortal wisdom sums up the basic idea of Vaxxine in seconds.

The player finds themselves on top of a three-dimensional chessboard grid (the human body). Pretty balls wander lazily here and there, but Hah! Those little balls are in fact treacherous viruses which, on finding another of the same colour, form clusters that, once big enough, latch on to the cells.

The idea is to destroy the viruses (colourful ball) by shooting them with another ball of the same colour. The game is over if you run out of any of the ammo. Luckily you can get extra ammo by shooting a virus with the wrong type of ammo, whereupon zapping the star that appears tops up your stock. At a horrendous cost in ammo, the vaccine can also form a kind of decoy virus, and the viruses that dock onto it go boom and scatter to the four winds.

Vaxxine was made by the team that bears responsibility for E-Motion. A dead screenshot can only give a pale version of how spectacular the graphics are. When the beautiful ray-traced sea of balls moves, it does so quickly and smoothly. Playability does get brought down by the inertia of your own "ammo". Working out their trajectory takes a ballistic computer, you see. You can switch the inertia off, sure, but for some reason after that not even a ballistic computer can work out the trajectory any more.

Vaxxine is a cleverly disguised shoot-'em-up with plenty of grip of its own, too. Obscure, but it takes practice.

1990 SyksyAbroad, Vendetta has racked up every accolade going, so at least on the strength of its advance reputation Vendetta ought to be easy to review. Although the reviews differ, people are generally pretty unanimous about 'exceptionally good'. And when the game has, on top of that, been made by the team that did the Last Ninja games, there shouldn't be any room left for doubt. Yes, there shouldn't.

In its presentation the game hardly differs from the Last Ninjas, which isn't a big drawback, though, since both ninja games are perfectly splendid. This time terrorists have kidnapped a bunch of important people and are holding them hostage. With the criminals also being cold-blooded murderers and the cold blood of revenge running in our hero's veins, the melodramatic opening is taken care of.

The game proper starts at the harbour warehouse area, where the hostages have been taken. You won't get far with just a knife, so first you have to find some proper firepower. Once the submachine gun and hand grenades have been collected, the detective work begins: while searching for the prisoners you should also gather evidence against the kidnappers. The evidence comes in handy later in the game if the local law happens to stop you on your way.

As in Last Ninja, there are flashing markers on screen that hint at important places or objects. Graphically the game doesn't differ much from its predecessors; only the driving section offers new kinds of views. The sound side has been handled quite commendably, even if the effects are few and far between during play. The same old hungover controls are still the same old hungover controls, and our (anti)-hero moves as if nursing a hangover. You get used to this quickly too, though, after which the playability is at a perfectly satisfactory level.

And there really isn't any cause for doubt. Vendetta stays interesting over several sessions thanks to its well-chosen difficulty level and good execution. System 3 hasn't created anything new or original, but this time it's a case of the old being the safer bet.

1988The Mask saga just keeps on going. The follow-up to the incredibly nauseating, lousy and stupid Mask II is Venon Strikes Back. Going by the formula, the next Mask will presumably be Son of Mask.

In fact, that could already have been the name of this episode, since the centre of attention is Scott, the son of Matt Trakker, old wooden-face and leader of MASK. He has been stolen. But who could be behind such a fiendish plot? Venom, of course. Either Mr. Trakker withdraws from MASK or Scott withdraws from life. MASK's men quickly locate Scott at Venom's base on the dark side of the Moon. Since not a single MASK craft can fly in space, Matt has to nick Venom's vehicle.

In practice the game follows one of the oldest formulas of all time. A man runs and jumps with pixel precision along a horizontally scrolling level where stuff drops from the sky and there's shooting going on all the time. Now and then Matt finds masks that give him the ability to shoot, extra energy and whatnot.

Mask III is actually quite a tolerable game. The graphics are both clear and functional, and Matt is well animated. The death in particular, where Matt scatters in pieces all over the scenery, amused me greatly. The sound effects are better than usual too. The kind of ten-year-old MASK man who hasn't already played millions of games like this might even think the game is cool. Nobody else need bother going to the shop.

MASK is a passably animated collection of clichés. But which one, the game or the TV series?

1990 SyksyWhat happens when, in the future, the world's green areas are nothing but fields sterilised of nasty mosquitoes? Summer's nicer, at least, but as an unfortunate side effect the whole ecosphere threatens to wither into desert. No problem, mused the engineer, and developed mechanical-bionic equivalents for the insects. Unfortunately they were so buggy that they were fit for the scrapheap straight away. At this point the game's eco-mindedly greenish plot introduces a suitably greenish hero, a killer fly called Venus.

The biomechanical critter that sets about debugging the eco-environment is an adorable ugly mug that gets around either by crawling or by catapult kicks of its cute hind legs. Its grasshopper-like anatomy also includes chitinous wings, which only carry its chubby body once a suitable add-on has been found and in the bonus section at the end of the levels; otherwise they merely cushion long falls by opening like a parachute.

Hidden under the deceptive appearance is an energy-charge-spitting commando hero, who kills in house and garden and strives to make an ox out of a fly by scooping up the round energy modules that the cyborg crawlers leave behind. Now and then the bug gets flipped onto its back, and progress continues upside down with its feet planted firmly on the ceiling.

From all this you might think Venus is a highly original game, but the overriding impression it left was that a good opportunity has been wasted to make a proper break from the usual hop-and-shoot contraptions. You see, this hopping and shooting goes on until the end of eternity - fifty levels' worth, to be precise - without the game changing one bit. Mild repetition also afflicts the kilometres-long landscapes, whose theme only changes every fifth level, but at least the style is polished coin-op stuff, right down to perfectly judged colour choices.

Thanks to the superb execution the game keeps its pull, as long as you take the time now and then to nurse your mental and physical numbness. Gaming morale is also boosted by passwords, thanks to which Venus can be munched in suitably small bites of five levels each. Buzz over to the nice man at your nearest shop to give it a try; maybe this is just the game you can't live without.

1990 KevätI have been waiting for this game like a kid waits for Christmas ever since I saw the first photographs. My expectations were raised further by a short test play at the PC Show in London. The test play didn't really live up to my expectations, but I assumed I had only scratched the surface of the iceberg and that a session of several hours would reveal even the game's finest nuances. Now I have played Vette for several hours, and great was my bewilderment when I noticed that I had already drained the game of everything it had to offer in my few minutes of test play. Is this really the company that gave us the excellent Falcon and Mission Disk???

The plot of the game is simply the same as in Test Drive: you race against the clock and an opponent from point A to point B, dodging crashes and the police. Spectrum Holobyte has spiced up this idea with a few little improvements, such as three-dimensional vector graphics, several different camera angles (most of which are practically useless) and city driving. Along the way you'll also find fine scenery, pedestrians, ambulances, trucks, sailing boats (not on the road, mind you, but on the water), multi-lane freeways and cramped one-way city streets.

At the start the player picks one of four different Corvetes. The options range from an ordinary series-production Corvete to a super-tuned road-devourer. Then you choose the level of realism. The three difficulty levels differ most in how the car reacts to crashes. On the easiest level even a 300 km/h crash does nothing more than give the car a slight jolt, and the journey carries on merrily. On the next level up, the engine and body take damage, and even a small crash knocks the top speed down considerably. On the hardest level realism is at its peak. You can't roar into every corner flat out and trust the tyres to grip. What's more, a bad crash kills the driver too, not just the car. Little crashes cause a drop in speed, understeer and oversteer, and gearbox faults.

After these you choose your opponent. The game is partly also a contest between American and European cars, since you can pick a European sports car as your opponent. The choices include, for example, a Ferrari, a Lotus and a Lamborghini. Then you just hit the road. The car has an automatic gearbox, which you can swap for a manual one if you want. On the right-hand edge of the screen there is either a map or a big heap of symbols showing the speed limit in force in the area, the state of the next traffic lights and other information. You can switch views pretty much as you please. Besides the normal cockpit view, you can look right and left. The player can also watch events from a surveillance helicopter flying overhead, whose altitude and tilt angle can be adjusted. Most of the views are just gimmickry, though, and you can't use them if you're driving in real earnest.

The graphics are fairly detailed vector graphics, and the level of detail can be adjusted to suit the speed of your PC. Version 1.0 still had a fair number of bugs, which will hopefully be fixed in the next version. The sounds are the usual buzzing you'd expect from a PC. To be honest, Vete's sounds seem to have been lifted straight from Test Drive II on the PC.

The playability isn't really bad, but it isn't good either. All too often you end up cursing a machine that won't obey the commands of the stick. The appeal is dragged down by the bugs, the easiness of the first level and the difficulty of the others. What's more, the game doesn't give you enough value for money, since you get bored of it far too quickly. Hopefully the upcoming scenery disks and extra car disks will bring some appeal to a game that could have been the biggest thing in years.

1989 SyksyImagine is a nifty outfit. When a new game comes out you never know which of its two teams made it: those top men, or that wretched legion of poor devils. This time the crummy crew has once again been let loose to bring shame on Imagine's name.

Thematically, Victory Road resembles Ikari Warriors. The screen rolls vertically and all kinds of extra weaponry have been left lying around the terrain. Vampires, many-headed monsters and other macabre creatures offer the chance to test how effective it is.

But don't get excited. If you're not depressed by the poor sprites that drown in the garish terrain, and you can even put up with the lumpy scrolling, the game gets to enjoy a reset at the latest when you try to move your man. Many an interesting discussion strikes up as players debate whether the man moves at all (yes, he does move, believe you me!)

Victory Road combines zero execution with zero playability, and the result is exactly what it sounds like.

1987Yet another track-and-field game, this time in Mastertronic's budget range. Video Olympics has six pretty ordinary events: the 100 metres, the long jump, the javelin, the hammer throw, the 100 metres hurdles and swimming. At least all the events are loaded into memory in one go - sadly not with a turbo, though.

The game gets you down right from the start, since getting your character to run is pretty awkward, and the first event is of course the 100 metres. Luckily the program has a small bug, thanks to which all you need to do when running is hammer a single key fast. (You can forget about torturing the joystick.)

All in all, Video Olympics is a perfectly decent Decathlon copy. If you have managed to avoid sports games up to now and simply must have one, here is a cheap option.

1989 SyksyNew York, 1994. The police don't dare patrol the streets. The army can't keep the city under control. Law and order are no more. With the gangs running riot in the streets, the ordinary citizen had best stay indoors. This is the setting for the latest karate game, Vigilante.

The aim of the game is to rescue your girlfriend from the clutches of skinheads. The hero has to make his way along the streets, practising violence on his enemies. Lying in the street are various weapons to serve as an extension of your arm, though using them does no good whatsoever.

There's no idea to Vigilante of any kind. There are dozens of similar games on offer, many of them far better executed. Vigilante's music and sound effects are absolutely, horrendously awful, you can't look at the graphics without weeping (don't trust the pictures on the back of the box, taken from the arcade version), the animation is completely substandard and playability doesn't even come into it. Buy Vigilante for your worst enemy as a Christmas present.

1991 KevätGrim is the life of Brian. I don't mean that bloke who lived in the land of Judea, but the viking brat raising a ruckus in Odin's realm. You see, he's had the heads of his family abducted to the astral plane and ought to set off on a rescue job. Well, fancy that, for once it's not a girlfriend who needs rescuing, but you can guess the rest anyway. So the hero jabs his sword at everyone he meets, who these days always seem to carry cash, and naturally you can buy all sorts of things in the shops, such as a clone of yourself.

So long is the journey, with no home in sight, but the background rolls by, a scenic delight. At least there's variety in invigorating quantities. The mildly terrorised countryside of the first level gives way to tall castle towers, even taller giant trees, labyrinthine jungles, barren mountains and so forth.

The little squirt can't climb, which is why the game slightly overuses horizontally and vertically moving platforms. You have to concentrate too much on jumping that demands precise timing, which I'm not especially fond of. The jump is also clumsily done: first the hero glides diagonally upwards for a while, then it floats just as steadily diagonally downwards. The programmers could at least have tried a parabolic trajectory; it's not that hard to do.

The heavily stylised naivism of the backgrounds will hardly please everyone, but at least they're tidy. The animation of the irritatingly smiling hero is dreary, since when it walks only its legs and its tuft of hair move. On long falls it does do some comical somersaults, mind you.

VC is a reasonably playable piece of mediocrity, burdened by a mild flatness. What burdens the nerves, on the other hand, are the idiotic loading routines. At the start you have to be ready for a five-minute wait, and between levels, and sometimes in the middle of them too, the disk drive munches through data at an absent-minded pace.

1987The first game from Danish outfit Kele Line starts out as Vikings Line.

You'd think those who got bogged down in the jungles of Vietnam rescuing prisoners of war would go wild with joy when this Rambo-formula opus turns up on the game shop shelf.

The Scandinavian horn-head has to plunder an island or two to put something by for his old age. The natives don't want to share what little they have, and instead pelt smørrebrød-Conan with spears. Finding a sword helps settle old scores, and with a torch you can burn the huts to ashes too. Compound interest, that is.

Finding a few other items makes it possible to build a splendid new Viking ship. In it you set off on a package tour to the Isle of Death, on whose shores lie the bones of millions of Vikings, bleached by the midnight sun.

A little self-censorship could have been applied to the number of enemies. They breed faster than even the spryest Viking could kill them.

What I liked most about Vikings was the amusing demo before the game starts. The full-screen loading picture is fine too. No need to pester Mum either: the instructions are in Finnish as well. A pity this type of game doesn't really grab me, or it would have been fun worth every penny.

The graphics in Vikings are a real Rambo rip-off, all right, but at least the hero keeps his shirt on. The music was pleasing. It underlines the slaughterfests nicely, instilling the will to fight in the face of the overwhelming enemy host.

Vikings is no triumph of originality, but for, say, active Rambo players the game fits like a sword in the gut. Decent Nordic workmanship.

1989 KevätSay "Yep" if this sounds familiar. Mankind has been almost wiped out thanks to monsters from outer space (yep), and (yep!) only one man (YEP), Vindicator, can save the world (YEP!).

Vindicator is a space opera in three acts. In part one the Avenger fights his way through four mazes. The aim is to find a way of destroying the aliens' computer centre. This calls for lift passes and passwords for the computer, as well as oxygen bottles and more powerful ammo. Apart from the oxygen, the items can only be found by eliminating the complex's guards. When the right password is offered to the right computer, winning a sub-game gets you one piece of the bomb for the final act of sabotage.

In part two we get down to the familiar business of shooting, in its vertical form, as Vindicator first flies his fighter and then drives his jeep through hordes of enemies to reach the Catacomb, where the big bad Gog is lurking. Entirely predictably, in part three you fight your way through a horde of enemies in classic Green Beret style and send Gog off to kingdom come. Mankind can carry on eliminating itself without outside help.

Ocean carries on with its careful work. The graphics and sound in Vindicator are first-class, and as a game it isn't half bad either. The first section does, admittedly, represent the "Map or die" style I hate, with the added anti-bonus of confusing navigation through identical corridors where the shifting compass points turn your little head upside down. Vindicator is a professional product based on such a familiar and beloved type of game that by all logic it ought to appeal to a wide audience. An extra plus comes from Ocean having thrown in genuine Finnish-language instructions.

1989 SyksyTwo-player games are always welcome, in principle. Vindicators is a derivative of the old classic Battlezone, although the differences are obvious right off the bat. Vindicators shows its playfield and the inhabitants thereof straight from above. The idea is to steer your tank from the bottom of the screen to the door at the top, collecting fuel and stars along the way, which get you extra weaponry between levels. Naturally this sort of thing doesn't happen entirely without opposition, so the playfield also holds other tanks, gun turrets, electric fields and mines.

There's not a bad word to be said about the graphics, but not many words of praise either. The tanks are miserably animated and look more like they're sliding across the surface of the playfield, since absolutely nothing happens in their tracks. What can you expect, when even the arcade original doesn't have massive graphics? There's no talk of aural pleasure in Vindicators' case, since by some miraculous trick the programmers have dug up from somewhere the mustiest sounds imaginable to spruce up the game. The theme music consists of a single short sample that is run round in a nauseating loop and which, what's more, sounds like a sped-up Gauntlet theme. Steering the tanks is tricky at first, because the controls simply aren't logical (that's illogical, captain!). Well, you get used to anything. With two players it's quite a nice game, but on your own... one swallow doesn't make a summer.

1988Something wonderful has happened: Your ST is alive!

Skipping the tedious virus jokes, we can state that the god David "1/2 Elite" Braben's conversion of Zarch from the Archimedes has been one of the most eagerly awaited programs of the year. So how did it turn out? Do Archimedes owners get to laugh themselves silly at a jerky ST conversion?

The basic pattern of Virus is incredibly simple: virus carriers from outer space are spraying the player's home planet with a red virus strain, and the player flies about in their Hovercraft, using a laser cannon and missiles as antibiotics. There's a lavish selection of different types of enemy.

Unlike the basic idea, the execution is then complicated: the player flies their craft over hilly terrain that scrolls in every direction. The view isn't from inside the craft but from outside it, which presumably sort of makes things harder. The blotchy landscape is filled with trees, houses and nondescript buildings. There's even a bunch of cheerful fish hopping about in the water, not to mention perch-looking sea monsters.

You can't fully appreciate the graphics from a still picture, but live they draw enthusiastic cries of "Gosh!" from an impressed audience. Even at its slowest, Virus fights on almost equal terms with the likes of the Amiga's Interceptor.

An incredible amount of detail has been crammed into Virus. For example, the ships' exhaust shows up as a multicoloured shower of particles and splashes up water when you fly low, trees are left smouldering and so on. Braben's idiosyncratic sense of humour deserves a mention too; it's concentrated quite heavily in the Hi-Score table.

Virus retains Zarch's famous mouse control system, which drives the most faint-hearted to the verge of tears. After a few hours of hard practice you start to appreciate the freedom it offers.

Although Virus is basically a simple shoot-'em-up, it has that certain something that separates the immortal classics from the cranked-out rubbish. Do yourself a favour and catch the infection today.

1988Martech is, of course, the very company that started using Page Three girls in games marketing with Samantha Fox Strip Poker, in which the aim was to reveal the girl's vocal talents. The next celebrity was Maria Whittaker, and now she is joined by Corinne Russel.

Vixen is the last survivor of the dinosaur-infested planet Granath, and her task is to make the lizards extinct as well. Evidently she succeeded, judging by how rare dinosaurs are these days.

The game is very simple. Vixen runs forward against a time limit, thrashing dinosaurs with her whip as well as various hiding places, where there are objects that affect the course of the game to a greater or lesser degree. By collecting "fox time" the wonder girl can turn into a fox and go underground to collect jewels and other junk. In other words, the game is roughly as interesting and original as a Finnish light entertainment show.

The graphics are neat. Vixen herself looks really good, and even on the C-64 the sprite is easily recognisable as a beautiful young woman. (And the fox as a beautiful young girl fox.) The animation is good, and no wonder, since Vixen's movements have been digitised. The dinosaurs themselves are small single-colour blobs that look like anything but dinosaurs. Admittedly it took me a couple of games before I even noticed them.

Vixen is sure to sell reasonably well, but the credit for that certainly won't go to the game. The best thing in the whole package is a big poster of Corinne Russel. It may, however, be missing from the copies that daddy has gone out and bought for his son.

1989 SyksyWhen Voyager went on its way far out into space all those years ago, it carried with it a gilded record which contained, among other things, an invitation to come and get acquainted with planet Earth.

In Carpenter's film Starman, the well-meaning visitor first had its ship shot out from under it, and the being itself came close to ending up on the operating table. This time the visitors, having evidently seen the film, destroy Earth's spacecraft and start building production plants on the moons of Saturn in preparation for the final attack.

But little do they know that one more ship is still out in space. It drops a tank onto the surface of the most weakly defended moon, and the battle for the future of mankind begins.

The game idea in Voyager is simple: every moon has to be cleared of enemies, after which you escape to the mothership before the moon explodes. Besides the versatile computer, staying alive is helped by the extra weapons and devices that can be collected from the moons' surfaces. Finding the glider unit literally gives the tank wings. Among the nice ideas, let's mention for instance raising the vehicle's gun turret against flying aliens, and droppable cameras that are also fitted with a laser for a spot of long-range sniping.

In terms of execution, Voyager is flawless. Once you've had your fill of admiring the three-dimensional Voyager, a fine intro shows the tank being dropped onto the moon's surface, and the filled vector graphics are not only fine-looking but also fast and atmospheric. The same line carries on in the game itself. It is quite simply tactically brain-racking yet reflex-demanding shooting against enemies that feel genuine. The worst things about the game are the skimpy manual and the lack of a save option.

For those who love the C-64's Stellar-7 the game is a dream come true, but even apart from that, Voyager is one of those games that belong among the must-buys of any 16-bit games collection. Games like this are what I bought my ST-Amiga for.

1990 KevätSo far the Amiga has not proved to be much of a strategy game machine, despite its much-advertised capabilities. Only a scattered few bright spots have appeared in the grey strategy sky, but when a Spectrum strategy game is converted to the Amiga, you can assume the result will be unforgettable, to say the least.

Vulcan is an improved version of the old Spectrum game Desert Rats, which once even won a good many awards. But that was then, and these days folks demand some quality too, and that is something Vulcan has very little of.

The basic idea is the only thing that manages to be even slightly interesting. The fighting in Tunisia in 1942-43 hasn't attracted much interest, because plenty of other exciting stuff was going on in Africa. Vulcan, however, plugs this gap and lets you simulate the collapse of Rommel's armies, on one side or the other. You can fight either the entire Tunisian campaign or the biggest battles. As additional options you can choose various historical situations, such as Malta captured, certain strategic airfields in German hands, or the Afrika Corps wiped out.

So far it sounds good. But everything else is s**t of the deepest kind. The graphics give you a headache, the sounds seem to have been digitised straight off the Spectrum (and made worse), and it takes a great deal of imagination to keep up with what's going on. Only the icon control is even passable. The map looks as if it were put together from building blocks, and the game's a real blockhead too.

For Zarquon's sake, how can anyone release something like this? And sell it commercially? Even Battleforce, the PD version of Battletech, is better and more playable than Vulcan or most other Amiga strategy games.