1133 reviews from "Pelit"-books

1990 KevätThe role-playing-flavoured Y's repeats the eternal theme of the quest for a mystical object. This time it's the Books of Y's that have gone missing, and the heir to Sir Galahad's armour is tiny Aron. The powers of darkness are represented by Dark Dekt, the sworn enemy of the kingdom of Esteria.

In the first half of the game Aron roams the surface of the land, acquiring weaponry, building up his knowledge and gathering experience through orc-butchery. The overground area is rather limited and exceptionally straightforwardly laid out: town, forest, village and mountains. Keen mappers' pens will get some use in the fairly extensive maze networks of the temple and the underground caves.

For the grand climax at the end of the second part, the stage is the enormous 21-storey Tower of Doom, which is swarming with monsters and traps.

Slaughtering the monsters sprinkled across the scrolling landscape happens in real time, with little Aron jabbing away with his little sword. The best touch in the graphics, which are drawn from above Egyptian-style (that is, in profile), is in the caves, where visibility is limited to the circle lit by a torch. When you drop in on buildings you get to admire pretty interior pictures.

Now for the brickbats. First of all, the plot is too thin. It ought to have more side paths to liven things up, and getting a musical performance as your reward for finding the harmonica a girl has lost doesn't really count as one. The most infuriating thing in the whole game is the gatekeeper monsters that halt your progress. Among them are a couple of really frustrating nasties that you have to practise killing for days on end.

Y's loses to Phantasy Star in playability, graphics and music alike, but only narrowly. If you make it past the unfair monsters and the first half, where the game tends to flatten out into mind-numbing slaughter, then the gaming pleasure is saved.

1987Oh dear, the situation looks bad. According to the KO meter you can take just one more hit, while your opponent FAN's meter looks almost full. Seems things have gone wrong... Now Fan throws a kite, and drat, it hit! Oolong, the game's hero, flails helplessly on the ground.

What we have here is the kung fu game Yie Ar Kung Fu. Your task is to control Oolong, a kung fu master, and kick and beat your opponents flat into the dirt. There are 16 moves, eight kicks and eight punches. The game has fine graphics, but it has been ruined by really clumsy controls. Playing this game on the keyboard, you can't help thinking that the game's author must have been all thumbs, with a thumb stuck in the middle of the palm. That's because the fire key is right in the middle of the direction keys. What's more, even if you're using a joystick, kicks and punches have to be selected separately with the space bar. Extremely clunky compared to the arcade machine, which has a button of its own for both the punch and the kick.

The moves are fairly smooth, but feel hurried compared to the C-64's "The Way of the Exploding Fist". The sound effects are quite pleasant too, apart from the cliched music.

Yie Ar Kung Fu keeps the player on their toes, because even though the first four of the nine opponents are easy to beat, Oolong is guaranteed to be floored by the sixth level at the latest.

If you're hankering after a fast-paced game, you'll find one right here.

1987The game is, naturally, a kung fu themed fighting game, just like the first part of the same name. In the background there's gorgeous scenery and fine oriental music, which speeds up as your energy runs low.

The main character in the game is Lee Young, who knows four different moves: a high and a low kick, a punch and a flying kick.

The various opponents all carry some sort of weapon to extend their reach, for example a knife or a boomerang.

Right at the start dwarves jump you, and you can either fight them or try to dodge them. Destroying them pays off more: after pummelling enough opponents, Lee Young gets more energy.

Sometimes a mysterious power-giving bowl appears on the level. If you get hold of it, you earn invulnerability for a short while.

The game also has an interesting two-player option. The second fighter's skills differ slightly from Lee's, so there may be surprises in store during the fight.

Yie Ar Kung Fu II is dependable quality and a must-buy for all fans of the first one.

1987The Yleisurheilu game has the following events: 10,000 m, 5000 m, 1500 m, 800 m, 400 m, 200 m, 100 m, shot put, javelin, long jump, hammer throw, high jump, triple jump, pole vault and discus. It is precisely this wealth of events that is one of the cornerstones of the game's appeal. The downside of having so many events is that each one has to be loaded separately from tape. Only the running events all go into the machine's memory in one go. Because of this, a session of Yleisurheilu often lasts as long as an hour.

The best events turned out to be the shot put, the javelin and the long jump, whose graphics put your funny bone to the test. The worst-event citations go to the runs and the simplistic high jump. The hardest event is probably the pole vault, about which even the manual says nothing. The world record is easiest to break in the shot put.

Sound and graphics

As far as sound goes, the game is a total disappointment. Not every event even has sound. The javelin, the hammer and the discus come with the crowd's applause. The best events for sound are the pole vault and the high jump, which have twice as much sound as, for example, the javelin.

The graphics are a notch above the level of the sound. In the shot, the long jump and the triple jump the athlete's figure looks tragicomically hilarious. The same goes for the pole vault and the high jump. The worst graphical flaw is in the high jump, where the jumper falls not behind the uprights but off to the side of them. On the whole the animation has gone completely down the drain, though admittedly it is rather hilarious. In the javelin, the spectator's head looks ridiculous compared to the size of the javelin. In the events where the competitor takes a run-up, it looks as if the athlete were running sideways.

It's understandable that the graphics and sound had to be skimped on, since there are so many events. The game needs an 8 kilobyte memory expansion, so there was 11.8 kilobytes of free memory to work with when the game was written. Divide that figure by nine to get the memory per event.

A successful program

The Yleisurheilu game comes on cassette, in a large case. Inside the case are the game cassette and a 12-page guidebook with card covers. The guide has the essential information on almost all the events printed in it. Strangely enough, the guide has no clear instructions for playing the pole vault, which is in fact the booklet's only major shortcoming.

The manual explains the instructions for the games thoroughly, and an easy-to-follow summary on the manual's back cover helps with loading. The manual states clearly that using the program requires an 8 kilobyte memory expansion, paddle controllers and a cassette drive. The instructions for each event also include playing tips.