Reviews

When id Software opened a portal to the underworld, its army of fiendish monsters invaded the surface of Earth, barging into millions of households and abducting DOS owners, and the only way out was to play a game about them called Doom. What transpired next is elusive. All right, that is not quite what happened, but the point is, Doom was a phenomenal success, and the venerable Amiga by the time of the game's release was already trapped in its own aged hardware - a dramatic reversal of the two OSes' muscle, with DOS proving after 12 years of being on the market that it reigned supreme over any other, even the best console. Commodore's management and marketing department, meanwhile, since the Amiga's 1985 debut almost consistently shot themselves in the foot with their ineptitude (the Amiga was fully IBM-compatible, which, bizarrely, they seldom ever advertised). Perhaps the Amiga's death was inevitable, but Commodore certainly hastened it and its own, and id Software believed the OS was hopelessly underpowered and refused to port its game there.

In Europe, several small developers attempted to create at least the equal to the DOS classic, but on the Amiga. In short, most of these "Doom-clones" were average or unimpressive, but a few stood out, such as Black Magic Software's Gloom in 1995. It goes without saying that Gloom is a blatantly self-aware attempt at replicating the king of FPS games by rhyming with it not just in title, but in gameplay (even the expression "doom and gloom" is prone to puns), but it was also the first serious attempt to create a good FPS on the Amiga, bested only by Team17's Alien Breed 3D the same year. Other than consciously aiming for low hardware requirements much as id Software did with Doom, the main difference between both games is that, while they are set in a distant future and deal with a single space marine, instead of just demons, Gloom has the player fighting cult-driven sorcerers suspected of illicit activity and putting an end to that activity. It is a novel concept for a shooting game, and here it feels refreshingly original.

Loading up Gloom, we are greeted by an occult-themed logo for Black Magic, followed by a title screen consisting of a truly welcoming and not menacing - you guessed it - demon, accompanied by a catchy tune that sets the mood as it portends what literal inferno awaits. The setup is straightforward: select the keyboard, a joystick, or a CD32 Joypad. As a note, my computer's keyboard would get cranky when I press certain combinations of three buttons at once, and, while this is likely a problem with the Amiga Forever and WinUAE emulators, when holding down the joystick button for sidestepping, my character would get stuck in strafing. No rotating left or right. Therefore, I resorted to using a CD32 Joypad, and after rejiggering my keyboard to behave like one in Amiga Forever, I was ready. Also, be sure to set the "VIOLENCE MODEL" to "MESSY" in the menu; you will appreciate the results, trust me. There is very little story beyond what is in the manual, but we do have well-drawn intermission screens before each level featuring what I presume is my chief, who offers very concise statements, sometimes as valuable tips, for the current level. There are 21 levels divided into seven per episode: the cultist-controlled craft Spacehulk, the Gothic Tomb, and Hell. They are relatively short, but they all have beautiful walls, floors, and ceilings and are structurally molded in ways you would be glad to know deeper into this review. There is no map, but, thankfully, it is unlikely that one would get lost in any of the levels' halls of misery, not for long at least. As a downer, however, the maps are limited to floors and ceilings of the same distance, thus more resembling the archaic Wolfenstein 3D, to the dismay of Amiga zealots looking for something state-of-the-art. At least the levels were fun to play, and the game does what Wolfenstein 3D could not. For one, whole sections of walls may move and even rotate, and power-ups may linger around, such as thermo glasses for seeing enemies through walls and a power-up that upgrades the player's plasma gun's bullets so they reflect off walls once - all very useful stuff allowing for more variety and strategy. For another, wall textures may be animated or translucent and set to change, and the floors and ceilings now also textures. The floor and ceiling textures are the same throughout the level, but we tend to forget that. The game looks gorgeous even on a 68020 processor without expanded memory. Of course, this did mean slowdowns when the action picks up, but if that were too much for people with those computers then (which it was not for me in Amiga Forever), the floor and ceiling textures could be disabled or replaced with solid gray that gets dimmer as it gets farther away from the player.

What about the gameplay, you ask? It's marvelous. Everyone wants to kill Agent Black, the alias of the "Gloom Guy" sent to investigate the cultists' activity for the third and hopefully last time, but all he needs in self-defense is a plasma cannon, which he uses until the end. He begins with a firepower and firing rate of one both, which is less than ideal for settling any dispute, but it will work against the dim-witted cultist warriors early on. Later foes will prove problematic, but dispersed throughout are bouncing orbs to modify the Gloom Guy's gun. Orbs differently colored from the ones he fires will replace his gun's firepower, usually upgrading it, and those of the same color will increase its firing rate by one. In the latter case, if the rate is already five, the gun will fire two orbs in an arc at once for several seconds. Collect many orbs in a short span of time, and it becomes three, so do not squander your opportunity to waste your foes! You will relish the sight of watching your enemies' body parts flying across as you quickly obliterate them, enhanced by using the "MESSY" violence setting in the menu, which lets floors remain littered with your carnage. Even tiny droplets of blood occupy the screen as one progresses, which can be "wiped" off by pausing and unpausing the game if they become annoying. I admit, using an upgraded ammo type changes little about the gameplay beyond making enemies somewhat easier to kill when I am dealing with the same enemies such orbs are the ones I end up upgrading my gun with for a while, but, as I had early on, I can see the upgrade being significant when I push a wall to reveal a secret area containing them. Speaking of secret areas, they will prove helpful. Health items, which sardonically take the form of baby bottles, are sparse and many hidden in these areas. Besides the power-ups such as bouncing bullets, which provide an edge over the enemies as one hides behind walls, rarely, the player may play a fictional game called "Underkill" on a secret cabinet for an extra life. What that game is based on, I will let you find out (hint: it is from the golden age of arcade games). If the player dies, they lose the bouncy bullet power-up, the only non-ammo power-up that is not temporary and lasts one level, and they must reset with a firing rate of one, though they keep their ammo type. Lose all lives, and the player must restart the episode.

One type of enemy, a spirit in the Gothic Tomb, can pass through walls, and I especially like how it appears as if they are awakening out of coffins on the walls, adding a whole new layer of spook. It is rare to see a team of developers attempt a take on a popular work and manage to capture the style and essence of that work. Gloom really is the Doom for Amiga, or rather a little more than Wolfenstein 3D with a Doom look and feel. It is a disappointment to see maps limited to a single-story framework, but the game retains a tongue-in-cheek attitude combined with a sense of difficulty that the enemies, one of which is actually ripped off from Doom, promise to provide the player with. Clearly, the New World Order could have sent along a gunner on the Gloom Guy's side, but they did not, because they new the game would have been boring. Actually, they did. A multiplayer mode exists where the second player can fight alongside the first, either on the same computer, over a serial connection, or a modem (!), which was such an underappreciated piece of hardware in the world of Amiga games at the time, with the ability to chat. Alternatively, the two players can gun each other and try to deplete each other's lives. It is an average mode, but the levels are reasonably small. As evidence that Black Magic sought a high-quality title with an extensive shelf life, the game will accept user-created levels with their own textures and sound effects. As for the things I would change about the game, I would favor room-over-room architecture, mouse support, being able to rotate and strafe at the same time, and add a setting with options better than the rubbish 3×3 pixel mode. Fortunately, an edition of the game called Gloom Deluxe has that setting. Also, just mowing down monsters and advancing can potentially get repetitive, though I have not reached that moment yet despite beating the game once.

VERDICT: I can conclude with endless jokes involving puns about the names of this game and the one it imitates, but Gloom is Doom Jr. On the Amiga. It is smaller, but it's got the wits and atmosphere seldom seen in Amiga games. With Commodore having condemned itself to perdition, nothing, of course, could have raised the Amiga from its grave, but, the flaws notwithstanding, the game was just one of the treats for anyone who held onto their Amiga for as long as possible, granting reprieve to those knowing they would need to switch to Microsoft. May the Amiga rest in peace, indeed, except that the zombie system would see more commercial releases for a few more years.

After escaping Osiris base in the last game, we find our hero's shuttle taken to the Indomitable, an Earth military ship, where he then awakens in the quarantine bay. He soon discovers that there is no rescuer to meet, that the ship has been attacked, and that it is by the aliens, and his job is to escape again. As a sequel to the marvelous Alien Breed 3D, what should follow is a game that showcases the best of the Amiga 1200's capabilities, with thick atmosphere and combat, sophisticated multiplayer, and possibly interactive elements, all exceeding the entirety of great games ever released on the Amiga, including Team17's own ingenuous classic, Worms. Not quite. Rather, I think I just described Quake II.

Interestingly, Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds (TKG) comes in two varieties, each on a disk: 2MB and 4MB, the latter requiring two megabytes of expanded RAM and another disk for the sound effects. The 4MB one is no doubt the one that should be played, but its shipping proved something of an afterthought. Testing it in Amiga Forever with A1200 settings produced sluggish frame rates, a famous critique then, that became barely acceptable with an expensive 68040 CPU. Presumably, the performance was stellar with a 68060 accelerator card, but the less fortunate were condemned to a tiny resolution, with all the ugly black surrounding the screen. If that is too taxing, the grudgingly better-designed 2MB version steps in. It is visually inferior even to the original AB3D, with textureless floors and ceilings, the still-small screen, and 2×2 pixels instead of 1×1, making objects from afar disgustingly faint, yet even with the wimpy, non-upgraded hardware, it was playable, at least up until the larger levels. During my replay, I switched to the 2MB version after level 1 (which I had completed in that version beforehand). It is nice that progress is saved on a separate levels disk. What the game was really designed for was the Amiga 4000 for businesses, guaranteeing frames at the expense of a player base.

If you do get it running smoothly, you will learn, as my score suggests, that TKG is stunningly mediocre; everything from the basics to some partially realized details is in place, but it all feels off. For insight into what went wrong, we shall turn to none other than Team17's Andrew Clitheroe, the lead programmer and chief designer of this game, as well as AB3D. To begin, the game's technology is awesome, with all the lighting, the 3D models, and crisp graphics. It truly looked as good as the screenshots in the Amiga magazines. Alas, the game did not know how to use its potent strength. Apart from the severe frame stutters, it is largely due to the gameplay and content. Clitheroe explains he blew his time on the rendering engine and spent too little on carving out ideas and levels. The result became something that impressed at first glance before letting down.

In true Alien Breed fashion, TKG retains the series' horror elements, with the goal being to just escape. There is always the possibility of danger lurking ahead or around a corner, all intent on smashing the hero into a thin red paste. The differences are that, like AB3D, the game is fast-paced, is all viewed from the protagonist's eyes to its creepy atmosphere's advantage, and there are no terminals that dispense weaponry and items for credits or infinitely spawning aliens. The story, still conveyed in text only and now redundant at this point, continues to fill the mind with imagination, and some of the hero's thoughts on the current situation now appear at the bottom of the screen. As always, the player completes levels by running from point A to point B, with a few objectives like "kill X" and "destroy this object". All five weapons from the last game return, including my favorite, the grenade launcher, but new to this game are the assault rifle and a gun that fires bouncing lasers, and they all have nice models. The assault rifle deserves special mention, as it is capable of drilling bullet holes into the enemy. The plasma and laser guns can be set to fire more bolts at a time in a dispersed manner, suitable for vaporizing large or multiple enemies. Proximity mines are the only questionable addition, as the enemy leaves little room for their use. By the end of level 5, the player will have picked up all eight weapons, as well as an anti-gravity device (jet pack) that can be charged up to five seconds indefinitely at a terminal. Each lacks an ammo capacity, but they all must be used economically.

The alien marines return as average battle droids, and the big red ones equipped with flashlights and an assault rifle are frightening for a relatively common baddie. The 3D models look great, but most enemies are still 2D sprites, and one type - the freakish red doglike creature with a gaping, ravenous mouth - is actually pulled straight out of the game's predecessor as further evidence that TKG was built on top of AB3D, and was not properly finished. More importantly, the enemy is capable of nasty damage, but the player can collect medkits without fear of a maximum health limit. However, how it presents a challenge leaves me bittersweet. Reenter Clitheroe, who tells us that, while cramming ideas left out of AB3D into the sequel, he made the aliens sensitive to the player's sounds, and they would locate the source of the sound in groups, splitting up if it could have come from multiple directions. It certainly felt as if the aliens were ambushing me from all sides, and it all quickly gets harder after level 1. Nonetheless, they were predictable. Besides getting clipped to walls and the red doglike creatures biting from a distance that should make it impossible, the aliens are not much intelligent either. They cannot open doors and are too stupid to physically block the player. I restarted only once on my first run, on level 7 for failing to escape a room with toxic sludge in time, and twice on my second run, on level 2 due to a silly mistake and on level 15 because the slow frame rates made dodging harder. In other words, being tough does not make them bright. Contrary to how the series portrays Team17's breed of aliens, this game's specimens' asininity makes fighting them farcical.

The levels have generally good outlines and textures, but they are virtually featureless and undecorated, despite their many large rooms and halls. No exit signs either, not even explosive barrels. It is a good thing an automap of explored areas is included. TKG is not a true 3D game, owing to its said sprite usage, lack of slopes, and the fact that the rooms rarely ever stack over one another. After all, jet-packing over a toxic floor still hurts the player. It is now possible to look up and down, but that is limited. Thankfully, crashes are rare, having happened in the 4MB version twice on level 15 on my first run and one other time since, all apparently from going underwater.

Typically, I disregard a single, minor design flaw, but it is incredible when they are so many and so glaring, and that makes me peevish. For example, if the mouse is used, one must move forward with the left mouse button and fire with the right, with those actions disabled on the keyboard. Keyboard-only players be unconcerned, but if they are facing straight or spinning at the time they enter midair, they are stuck facing straight or spinning until their feet find the ground. Therefore, I prefer mouse mode. Miraculously, I adapted to the awkward control scheme later on, but it gets worse. Team17 has (for once!) replaced the level password system with one that saves progress, but only between levels. That would have been fine if the save slots were not limited to five, as opposed to 15 - the same number of levels minus the first. Keep in mind there is plenty of room for human error with no limits on health or ammo, and one may wish to retry a level to improve both statistics.

With TKG, it seems Team17 had finally appreciated the importance of playing over a modem and a network, with up to eight players allowed at a time and the host being able to customize the rules of the game. Just kidding, the multiplayer still involves a serial connection with all doors open, no monsters, and two players fighting endlessly in any of the game's 16 levels (except the last, another flaw) until either dies. Thrilling. As a final note, Team17 supplied copies of the game with editors - something missing in their splendid AB3D - that allow players to change anything from textures and light sources to weapons, items, and even alien logic. Sounds good, but if only things were so simple. In the words of Amazing Computing, "a whole disk's worth of files were missing", so not only were owners forced to download a patch from Aminet for the editors, but by the time Clitheroe released the game's source code, only one level had been uploaded there. Coincidence? Sadly, I think not.

VERDICT: It is hard to tell how serious Team17 was about its ambitions, which was apparently to deliver its take on Quake, and it amazes me how well-received (up to the mid 90s) The Killing Grounds was then. What I see is just Alien Breed 3D, but upsized, with bells and whistles and admittedly badly-needed editors, and lacking QA and polish. It is slow, suffers from perhaps the worst code optimization in a commercial Amiga game, and even when it does run well, no amount of digital trickery can hide the fact that it is just boring and buggy. The game is Team17's Daikatana moment, but instead of development problems plaguing the project, I am convinced it was simply underfunded. It is a wonder why they even bothered, let alone not considered that the beefy DOS might have been a better pick than the "doomed" Amiga. For all that went wrong, the game surely looked good on that system. It helps that the source code is out, and the mods greatly bring the game to Clitheroe's vision of what the conclusion of the original Alien Breed games should have been.

On the calm South Coast of California stood a city named Santa Monica. It was a peaceful resort town, except that it was bustling with tourists and a vibrant economy that included music, film, and video game firms. Among these, a fledgling company called Stellar Stone rose up with the idea for a racing game about lorries outpacing the law as they speed to become the first to deliver truckloads of cargo from one destination point to another. That game would appear on the lesser shelves of Wal-Mart stores across the continent. This is the story of the creation of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

Stellar Stone was a small company with not a whole lot of money, and hiring skilled employees at home was an expensive undertaking. Instead, it looked far ahead of the country, across the Atlantic, all the way to the European East, aware that employees there could be hired for miserly but affordable payment. In its early but short years, Stellar Stone remained obscure, turning out development of a few games in that region, riding off their impecunious employees' predicament along the way, to minimum reception. On a bright day in 2003, Stellar Stone ordered the development of the truck racing game. The game was to boast four big rigs, four routes, day and night times, "1000s of miles of highways and byways", and three levels with many various challenges, as its own packaging would lead one to believe. Like its earlier games, Stellar Stone turned to a team in Ukraine, TS Group Entertainment, spearheaded by Sergey Titov. Stellar Stone prodigally sold off its shares to Titov for a license to his Eternity, a game engine. Think of a game engine as the heart of a video game, much as the engine is the heart of a truck. Without it, the game is nothing. With much at stake, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was the game that would make or break Stellar Stone's name, the one that would elevate the company's profile, and the one that would sink its existence.

Sergey Titov: "So you Americans are calling us boys in Europe to ask us to whip up a racing game about truckers hauling cargo across the United States, while outrunning the police?" Stellar Stone: "Yes, and it will be a large game with days' worth of content that players will devote weeks of their time to. It will be unlike anything we have produced thus far." Titov: "What sorts of games have you produced?" SS: "That's beside the point. We need someone to develop a game that would raise our publicity among players and critics and could earn us awards and recognition, but we just don't have the money to do it ourselves." Titov: "Oh! Then, why should we make it for you?" SS: "I'll tell you what. You give us your Eternity engine, and we give you a large chunk of our stocks. Is that a deal?" Titov: "Okay, that's a deal, but-" SS: "Good, now tell your employees about their new assignment. Don't worry about the future or where this project is headed. Just focus on developing the game, and we will get the publishing sorted out."

Titov's first job after the call was to convene his team at TS Group and notify its members of their new project and their tasks, while he himself would oversee the game's production and programming, or so he is credited, as Titov has claimed that his only involvement in the project was sending Stellar Stone his Eternity engine. Stellar Stone sent out a series of emails outlining the new game's concept, followed soon by emails attached with files of concept art, as a frame of reference guiding the newly commissioned European developers. Unbeknownst to Tutov were what the deadline was or how his profits would turn out.

On a monthly basis, Stellar Stone would telephone him about how far his team was in the project and what it did in the interim, acting as the latter's supervisor and delineating its ideas for the game along the way. Titov, for his part, remained dubious about his own company's or game's future, the game's fate resting on the decisions of his employer - a studio of next to none - and his fortune on the game's successes. Nonetheless, he was used to receiving unexpected calls in case plans change or new ideas are embedded. In one such irregular morning, however, ahead of the game's release, Titov's office received a call from Stellar Stone, informing him of news.

SS: "We have entered an agreement with a new publisher. GameMill Publishing will publish the game, and it will be called Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing." Titov: "Thank you for the information. I'll notify my team of the project's new name." SS: "Now tell me, Mr. Titov, what is your progress?"

Titov told Stellar Stone that the game was still in a very early stage of development, but now in a working state with racing now possible, while explaining the computer bugs and other areas in need of improvement.

SS: "We'll take it from there." Titov: "But this build is literally every racing game in its pre-alpha stage." SS: "We're calling the project. Besides, GameMill wants to publish Big Rigs as soon as next month, and after that also a game called Midnight Race Club: Supercharged, based on what you have been doing."

Titov was bewildered by the caller's demands and the publisher's wishes of splitting such an unfinished game into two.

Titov: "But what about what I have just told you? What about the graphics? What about the physics? What about the lack of police cars? What about the fact that it is impossible to lose a race? What about the trophy screen shown at the end of a race with a message stating, "You're winner !", which was clearly written by one of my designers with little proficiency in English? That's not finished, and for that matter, why does the trophy have three handles instead of two? Will any of this not bode badly for players and critics alike?" SS: "Oh, they'll love it." Titov: "What will the players think of us if they read the credits? What about how much money we will make from the game's sales. Will we even earn one penny?"

Alas, Stellar Stone heedlessly ordered TS Group to send back the source code and data, files, and everything else they have changed since the last call via a server. Having retrieved the files, it took back control of the project to have it published as it is by GameMill Publishing, another fledgling company with an equally unremarkable collection of games published. As it stored the files in an archive for sending, it called GameMill's headquarters.

Stellar Stone: "The project is finished, and the game, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, is ready to be delivered." GameMill: "Good! We have tens of thousands of blank CDs on hand, and we cannot wait much longer. Send it to our company headquarters through one of our servers, and we will then begin the process of disk manufacture. We already have the packaging ready, with the box art and the back cover showing screenshots and describing what the game is about and its features."

Of course, Stellar Stone omitted that the game was actually still badly incomplete, not that it would have mattered much to GameMill anyway, who demanded that the game be split in two and rushed out the door. Within a few weeks, the publisher would stamp out its inventory of fresh compact disks with the game in its current state, print out its inventory of boxes in which copies would be stored, and finally negotiate a deal with Wal-Mart to distribute copies of the game, starting November 20. Over the months of its sale, the game would prove a commercial failure, and it would also accumulate caustic opprobrium deriding what they considered one of the worst games ever for garbage graphics, bunk physics, the fact that there are no police cars as advertised on the back of the box, the incompetently designed trophy screen, and an irredeemable level of challenge that is utterly nonexistent - the very same concerns raised by Titov, the alleged producer - thus setting a new definition for "worst game" in ways transcending nature's metaphysical boundaries, if "game" is even an appropriate designation for the product. It would be more years during which time critics ranked it as one of the worst.

Over in Ukraine, Titov, unsurprised by the game's poor performance, would see his stocks at Stellar Stone remain abysmally cheap. However, under the direction of GameMill Publishing, he was forced to continue the project, now renamed Midnight Race Club: Supercharged. Of course, his team would only be allowed a few more months of work, which meant that the next game, a sequel to Big Rigs, would remain severely unfinished, be released largely unchanged from the original, and his stocks hovering at the bottom, and Titov would since distance himself from both games and his involvement with Stellar Stone. At least Midnight Race Club was marginally better than the original, but it is without doubt that not a single member at TS Group behind either game has ever included either on their resumé.

This tale is based loosely on the real story of the game's development and subsequent reception. However, the source material, based on what we know, is riddled with numerous plot holes, so I had to fill them in with dialogue and actions by the characters involved. Don't think I am putting words in anyone's mouth or insinuating bad behavior. Try to read this story as if it were true to the source material, but without the plot holes to begin with.

Every fan of racing games is aware of what flavors they come in: traditional motorsports, futuristic, kart, arcade, simulation, etc. Whatever their themes and the settings they take place in, chances are that car damage in games that featured it was usually either taken for granted or something right-minded players sought to avoid, but a studio in Debrecen sought to make it and end in itself. Enter Invictus Games with its Insane, an off-road racer that blends some realities of the sport of off-roading with an emphasis on both how vehicles interact with undulating terrain and savage collisions causing the vehicles to get flattened and deformed, with wheels sometimes popping out. The mere act of rutting the earth is gratifying, but deliberately smashing one's own car and watching how it drives next is inexplicably amusing.

All right, that description of car gore is a little overkill, and you will probably flip over more than you want to, but there is truth to it. Insane, the spiritual successor to an older Hungarian game with the English title "Deformers" by the same creator, pits up to eight players driving in one of 22 vehicles across one of 30 locations in one of eight different game modes. The locations of the races are mostly named after countries or regions around the world. While fictional, they are characterized by familiar geographies suitable for their names. For example, Colorado is mountainous, Ethiopia is dry, France is snowy, Niger is sandy, and Hawaii is island-themed. The vehicles - all unlicensed - range from 4x4s such as buggies and Blazers to sports cars, pickups, trucks such as the "Behemoth", and an "extreme" class of lightweight hill-climbing cars, which live up to purpose. In fact, all the vehicles are good at climbing hills, some better than others, and it is a good thing, too, because all the maps have some degree of rugged terrain that threaten to upend them. Besides those vehicles and locations, there are others unlocked in campaign mode, including a low-gravity map, a vehicle that I assume could have been used in most famous galactic races of the game's time, and even a map generator, where one can select one of five terrain types and climates each and set roads and road signs and the amount of water and vegetation. While the generator adds to the game's longevity, I admit, I would have liked to see more variation and overall work put into it, and the 30 maps have more scenery to look at, but since Invictus had replayability in mind in ways I will explain, it does not matter.

True to its tagline, Insane stresses "no limits, no rules, no roads", making it a true off-road racer. The maps are decent in size, but, importantly, they are wrapped around so that players driving off the north side will appear on the south, off the west side on the east, and vice versa. Players expecting to bump into walls should keep that in mind, but it makes the world feel infinite, and also allows for more paths and more strategies to exploit. Though prioritizing "fun", the game also blends in a degree of realism, where the vehicles feel weighty, respond to the terrain and ever-changing elevation it traverses, and allow for controls for gear-shifting and differentials. There is also a setup where the player can tune their vehicle's steer lock, suspension, tire pressure, brake and handbrake power, and gear ratios. Above all, there is a damage modeling system where the vehicles undergo deformations, with gradual to drastic effects on their performance. A button exists any time that automatically fully repairs the vehicle after three seconds. It is this semi-realism that works in a game like Insane. It is unfortunate the tuning is absent in multiplayer, and, despite my efforts, I could not get it to work in most single-player modes as I am supposedly able to, only in campaign - a programming error - not that the tuning produces drastically affects performance anyway. One may do without it, and, as with the maps situation, there is something far better.

With the said amount of content, 66 events in campaign, and a Quick Race mode where the player can select the location, time of day, vehicle and which class thereof is allowed, one of eight game modes, the goal length, and opponent number and difficulty level, along with separate options for toggling trees, water, rain, and even animals like bison that are sturdy enough to stop a truck and will amusingly unexpectedly get launched in the air from time to time, Insane superficially packs a bang for the buck, and considering its flaws, its $30 price tag at launch is fair. There is the traditional off-road racing, but also Jamboree, Gate Hunt, Pathfinder, Capture The Flag, Return The Flag, and Destruction Zone. Jamboree has a set of gates, one of which is active at any given time, and the player must drive through it before the others for a point, turning on the next gate in a cycle. In Gate Hunt, players drive through as many green gates as possible, and since claiming one turns it red, the green gates vanish quickly, making for hasty strategy. Pathfinder has players vying to speed through all the gates the first, stressing the part of finding the shortest paths, and so is less frenetic. In Capture The Flag, the player must pick up the flag, holding onto it for as long as possible for points and carrying it through the green gate for a 20-point bonus until they meet the objective. In Return The Flag, the goal is to carry the flag, here randomly dropped, to the starting base. Destruction Zone is about bashing into other vehicles, occupying the green "X" and defending it from opponents, and rolling them over, all for points. Some of these game modes, particularly Jamboree and Capture The Flag, the best ones, are original. Blazing through the earth in Jamboree for the green gate and waiting for the next in the cycle to turn green is thrilling, and Insane sports one of the best renditions of Capture The Flag I have seen in a racing game. When playing solo, there is also a Free Roam mode (also available in multiplayer), where the player drives aimlessly for as long as they desire. This is actually my favorite mode, and I cannot tell you how many hours I have sunk into it. The other modes are fun, too, though some can grow tedious.

The real challenge of the game is speeding and keeping one's vehicle upright against relentlessly craggy slopes. This may turn off players expecting to not roll over a ton, but it feels as if I am inside the game, pounding the rock. A vehicle can only be deformed and lose tires and not be destroyed, but watching the wreckage and watching how it still drives is zany. There is also a replay feature where races are automatically recorded for viewing, which the player can then save. It is helped further by the fact that there are 12 camera angles, from the driver's view to the four that look like watching a televised racing event, and with so many angles to view from in a replay, one can sit back and watch a whole group of cars cascade down a cliff. The best part - the replayability - is that players can create their own cars and locations and play them over a network with up to seven others, provided they have the same files, extending the game's longevity well beyond its shelf life. Based on critic anecdotes, the short-lived Codemasters Multiplayer Network, for which the game is the debut title, was popular.

While the game's content has held up, its graphics, admittedly, never have. Rather, their quality can be described as being not terrible, but cheapish. It is not offensive, and each vehicle has at least one paint job to choose from that I like, but the graphics will not impress either. Nor will the landscapes, again cheapish. There are landmarks to keep everything from going totally bland, but the game reads everything as 2D from the top down, and the maps are all plains and hills with no arches or tunnels, which limits what sorts of maps can be created. To Invictus's credit, structures such as bridges can be added as work-arounds. Lastly, it is best to consider Insane as a multiplayer game. The computer drivers have proven themselves gallant fighters, but they are not brightest, and even on the "Insane" difficulty level, I have seen them occasionally make questionable choices, like stealing a flag and immediately driving away from the goal that is close to them. The paths they make are not ideal, just satisfactory.

VERDICT: Visually, Insane is at most modest. It will neither impress nor disgust. The programming is a little bumpy, figuratively, and the locations more so, both that and literally. Nevertheless, the concept of an off-road racing game emphasizing freedom and user-made creations could not have been better. My own score suggests the game is only good, but that is just for the visuals and programming, and the rest has to do with the fact that the game is addictive, offers many dozens of hours of gameplay, and long after my last session has brought me back to play more. I do not know how the Hungarians did it, but I think they created one of the best video games from their country with Insane. As long as you focus more on the gameplay and less on the visuals, and really you should, this game is a must.

One thing clear is that food is made to please taste buds, not gamer interests, and yet companies like Mars, Inc. Decide that gamers want to see food mascots go on adventures, save the world, serve food, and, in this case, race in go-karts. That's right, we are talking about a confectionary company seating mascots we sometimes see in commercials inside go-karts for a video game meant to drive Mario Kart into obsolescence. We were given DSI Games' M&M's Kart Racing, and what brilliant choice of a console would they pick for such a masterpiece of competent coding and design? The Wii, naturally! Sadly, this game (and the uglier Nintendo DS port) showed no signs of competent coding or design.

M&M's Kart Racing was just another episode in the decades-long chapter of advergames, where companies explore media through which to market their product, including video games. More than just containing product placement, the whole games are the advertisements. Although I am unconvinced they have ever had any meaningful effect on our food choices as consumers, some of them were fun to play. Others were shoddy cash grabs a reasonable company would find to be grounds for dismissing a marketing team. A favorite platform to develop games like this for was the immensely popular Nintendo Wii, where "cheap but good enough" beat "better" consoles, hence the glut of third-party Wii games, and unfortunately a lot of shovelware. I can safely say that when Forrest Mars founded M&M's in 1941, he did not intend the candy to be starred in video games, and frankly, it does not deserve to be. So what could go wrong with M&M's Kart Racing? Or rather, what could go right?

We get past the loading screen and enter the menu, and here we run into problem No. 1: the graphics. It gets obvious during racing, but already the graphics look fit for a GameCube game, though a GameCube game often looked more exciting. The color scheme is a mistake. One expects a game about candy like M&M's to be bright and bountiful in rainbow colors. Instead, the colors are pale, dark, brown, and just plain drab, and there is minimal lighting and visual effects. The game looks like a product that has passed the alpha stage of software development, and stopped there. On top of that, it feels as if some of its textures and models were recycled from the Internet as stock assets. Ironically, the graphics are anything but eye candy, and the loading screen is closer to that descriptor.

All right, pick one of the five generic M&M's as your driver, select a kart available in your garage, pick a race if you have not chosen Tournament mode, and you are off. As warned, the graphical shortcomings become obvious, but now we have entered problem No. 2: the courses, and boy, do these tracks look dull and lifeless. Everything moves like ever concrete, there are no elements to interact with, and driving on anything feels like racing on railroads (notwithstanding freedom of steering, a reverse gear, and even driving the wrong way - surprising if you ask me). And yes, one would have to be a fool to assert that having animated textures in several places brings about life to the world. It is still stale air, but with a scent of fragrance added. To make matters worse, the tracks are rendered with noticeably limited draw distance. Why would a Wii racing game ever need limited draw distance? Granted, it is long enough that it does not affect playability, but they did not bother to throw in fog for good measure? It turns out the capped draw is to prevent slowdowns, as evidenced by framerates getting halved when a lot of the track and scenery is drawn. You know, Mario Kart Wii had no fog and draw distances long enough that the limits are at least not glaring. Never mind that the courses can get disorienting to the point where the player wished there were more than a few signs on the track indicating where on earth they should be driving. Some of the tracks bear little semblance of what they are supposed to represent. Take the first track, The Factory, with mostly just large rooms with crates of M&M's. How about The Farm, where the only relation to a farm is a barn, several haystacks, and two mega-sized yet dilapidated tractors. The two maps set in alien spacecraft do feel alien, but not as if they are set in spacecraft. The Colosseum is unimpressive, and two tracks can be simplified as oval tracks. Even the NASCAR games had better ovals. To be fair, the tracks did show some potential and could have been fun to race on, but in the spirit of the developers keeping a low budget, we are in for a bumpy ride.

Already, we make an emergency pitstop with problem No. 3: the gameplay. Like the tracks to be raced on, it is dull and bland. There are no distinctive traits or obvious fun features, not even power-ups that rip-offs have tried to outmaneuver Mario Kart with, save for speed boosts in the form of coffee cups here and there. Too bad they do not regenerate until the next race - and even then, despite one voice promising enormous speed, they provide marginal speed bumps - because I bet I can ride my bicycle faster than any of my kart-seated losers. Speaking ill of my opponents, there is little skill involved. Although there are three difficulty levels, the AI is still shallow on Hard, and one can finish a race with a comfortable lead, provided they retain their sense of orientation. Maintaining that lead is possible even with an unhelpful camera, which centers on the player's kart sometimes and trails behind it often to give them a poor view for tight turns, and reports of rusty controls. The latter would not surprise me. I vaguely remember the steering responding somewhat awkwardly to how I tilted my Wii Remote in 2010, when my siblings and I received the game as the first family purchase for a console that, along with three games, was gifted to us while I was a boy approaching teenhood, and I think I wished I could use a gamepad instead. I do not need to play such a wreck of a game again just to confirm the controls. I only need to watch online videos to remember the dreck I went through and how and why I even enjoyed it until I beat it. I could play split-screen multiplayer with a friend as competent as I, but the chances are, if they think as I do that the game is far cheaper than its $19.99 price tag would suggest, we both would agree that it belongs in a junkyard. The only interesting thing about the game is collecting coins - a missed opportunity since they should have been M&M's pieces - and unlocking vehicles to see what they look like, the best of which is the 4×4 Jet Convertible Kart, being the only one to drive at a velocity of what the karts should be driving at. That and the car models, fairly nice. As a note, it is possible to perform a stunt that car aficionados would call skiing, whereby a car balances itself on a pair of wheels, either the driver's side or the passenger's. It is awfully dangerous in real life, but in M&M's Kart Racing, it is a minor inconvenience. Again, little skill involved, and it just seems to be there to up one's wealth. There is also a stunt in which the player quickly lifts the Wii Remote to cause their kart to jump. This might have been a fun feature specific to the courses, but of course, the developers decided not to explore it, so we are left with what has no tangible effects on player experience and is totally pointless. Tragic.

Our tires get blown flat with problem No. 4: the sound effects. The karts sound as if they should not be driven at all, with some sounding harsher and more grating than others. Related is the voice acting. The voice design is a joke, and one of the most ridiculous in commercialized gaming. The clips seemingly play all over the place, at least when one gets to hear them, including in areas they should not. The voices themselves, like the game and unlike the candy it advertises, are bland and say pointless dialogue. Take such instances of ingenious, unparalleled quotes as the un-lame joke "A tasty combination" that is heard arbitrarily in the main menu, or the clearly justified racer's grievance "I need a better engine" when the player is overtaken by opponents, and of course, let us not forget the monumental masterpiece of vocal euphony that is the clip for each time the player approaches a speed boost power-up, "Approaching SOUND BARRIER! {sic}" (emphasis added) This honestly would have been great for a film or another video game. It is funny that whenever this game shows signs of talent, that talent gets wasted in the wrong places.

The fifth and last problem is the physics. At this point, one should grasp that it is off-road, just like everything else, without my explaining why. It is subpar, there is no reason for these sluggish karts to perform wheelies, there appear to be physical as opposed to motor barriers for maximum velocity, and the karts actually skim down hills, hampering steering. On the bright side, surprisingly, there is kart-to-kart collision detection. It is still poor, but credit where credit is due, no matter how small.

VERDICT: In short, M&M's Kart Racing is engine exhaust, but is it really one of the worst games ever? Is it really worse than Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? I have seen games that are incredible to look at, games that engage us to let go of every preconception we have had of the worst game and accept that there may not be rock bottom for how execrable such madness of nominal entertainment could get. Coincidentally, the two games were outsourced by American companies from small European studios, but, whereas the truckers behind Big Rigs totaled it, the M&M's crew delivered a working product. It is still hard to recommend this product even as a form of dirt road cheap entertainment. It was supposed to bring us to more M&M's. Instead, I have not eaten it in years. This could be due to my desire to eat and live healthier. Then again, it could also be due to what I have witnessed.

In 1995, Interplay Productions put out Parallax Software's Descent, the Guinness World Record holder for the first truly 3D first-person shooter that plunged players into caverns, providing them with a 3D environment and disorientingly chaotic atmosphere like no other. Then, in 1996, Descent II grew larger and meaner, but also introduced a Guide-Bot that assisted those navigating the mines. Finally, in 1999, the ambitious Descent 3 vastly reworked graphics and moved its focus to storytelling and objectives-based gameplay with outdoor environments to explore. Now, after almost 19 years of silence, the same developers behind the Descent trilogy have released Overload as the series' spiritual successor. Essentially, up for testing is a 23-year-old concept brought to computers in 2018, so are there marvels awaiting us in Overload that sparked the magic of its distant relatives then, or does it fall short of anything more than nostalgia relief?

In Overload, set 100 years after the game's release, a corporation that mines minerals on the moons of Saturn is led by an overly keen and ambitious CEO. It suffers a catastrophic event as its mining robots, called automatic operators or auto-ops, suddenly attack personnel in savage ways, and a single pilot of military background is tasked with flying down the mines to cripple their reactor cores and escape in the style of Return of the Jedi. In case anyone has not spotted it, it has the same premise as Descent. In fact, everything about this game is highly reminiscent of the first two Descent games. Weapons, power-ups, robot mannerisms, electronic music, even fancy features like VR support. The rules, mechanics, and combat are equally familiar. Concerning nomenclature, PTMC is now Cronus Frontier, the Pyro-GX now a Kodachi gunship, CEO Samuel Dravis now Gabriel Kantor, etc. One might as well say that the fittingly titled Revival Productions ported Descent to 2018. In this game, the player pilot wakes from cryostasis on board a ship called the Iberia with temporary cryo-induced amnesia, blocking memory of his identity. The Iberia is controlled by an AI program called Mara, who briefs the player ahead of missions, helping the player and gathering new information along the way. Usually, Mara instructs the player to "overload" the reactor of the mine they are first teleported to before escaping, in a reversion from Descent 3's emphasis on story and flying outdoors. The next screen for viewing weapons and robots also echoes the first two games, as is the screen after that for the mine to be entered.

As a tradition of playing space games, I started with a joystick, but the rotations seemed to lag behind my Logitech Extreme 3D Pro's movements. While my joystick might perform rustily, I thought I would fare much better anyway with a peripheral that I never found myself being adjusted to when playing games of its kind: my mouse. To my gratification, this game handles it quite well, where it feels as if I am pointing my ship where I slide my mouse. Just be sure to map banking buttons. One of the first things one will notice about Overload is the graphics, which are quite impressive from an independent studio. However, they are about as good as any game from a prestigious publisher. For those not in the know, Descent's signature strength in its heydays was perhaps stretching the technology curve. Such did the old games that they were notorious for high system requirements, whereas this game will handle an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti fairly well on max settings, and to see it lose its characteristic technical foresight is disappointing. The second thing one will notice is that the game's story is stronger, though still not its focal point, establishing the villain's motives better than the trilogy combined. Mara collects recordings of relations between the CEO and the facilities, and logs of employees, their teams' activities, and finally the auto-op attack are scattered throughout the mines for the player to pick up. If losing boarded hostages one rescues to ship explosion sucked the joy out of the old experience, now one must simply touch cryotubes for the Iberia to teleport them to safety. By the way, there are no lives this time, so if one fails, the level must be restarted or a save reloaded.

I prefer to review games and spare excess comparisons with others, but Overload makes that challenging, to say the least. It really is a port of Descent for 2018. To its credit, it does use tropes employed by newer games, however oft used and hackneyed they have become. The first is upgrade points, which must be found in order to upgrade on the Iberia at the end of a mission practically anything from the guns and missiles to the ship. A lot of the points are in secret areas, adding another incentive to find a secret area. The second trope is a new arsenal of weapons, both familiar with different names and new. While not quite as large as Descent 3's, some worthwhile additions include the Crusher and the Lancer, two guns that are ammo- and power-hungry, but will obliterate what stands in their way. Another is the Time Bomb secondary weapon, which slows down time to the player's advantage. I find the player will use all the game's weapons more or less equally while factoring in their strengths and weaknesses. In challenge mode, the third trope, the player battles pouring-in auto-ops in five minutes or until their death, depending on the end setting. Though familiar, the mode works well here since no other six-degrees-of-freedom can provide such a chaotic experience. For this mode, experience points gained from destroying auto-ops throughout the pilot's lifetime unlock more favorable starting conditions for the player and make them better equipped to cause more carnage. The last addition is less a trope and rather original, giving the Kodachi gunship what the Pyro-GX couldn't: a smash attack. In this attack, the ship rapidly thrusts a slight distance toward an opponent, dealing rather impressive damage like a bull goring a beast. Granted, it is not most prudent against certain auto-ops without a power-up like invulnerability, and, admittedly, it is easy to forget about the attack when they have other weapons, but it is bullishly satisfying and always free and available. Lastly, completing Cronus Mission unlocks a related mode called Cronus Mission+, with more auto-ops and where one can spend the upgrade points they collected in their best-performing game in regular mode. There is a little twist to be had there, but replaying the story and catching what I missed is enough for me.

And after that, there is nothing new left to discuss. Really, it is not hyperbole to suggest that Descent was ported to 2018 with blatantly similar gameplay and a story barely more solid than that of Wolfenstein 3D. It so oddly hearkens to the 1990s subgenre of shooters that turned dormant not long after, yet reminding us that it is a new game - the same one that evokes memories of the past that led to Overload. All right, I suppose I owe readers who need a reminder of the Descent experience as I compare. In Overload, there are five difficulty levels affecting power-ups utility and robot strength, combat, and responsiveness, just like the original, although the difficulty curve seems more balanced. Fire on the enemy while dodging in swirls, just like the original. The Hologuide that is normally available to the Kodachi ship can lead the player to objectives as well as shields, ammunition, and power-ups, just like the Guide-Bot, although it now drains the ship's energy but at least no longer flies in front of one's view and gets in their ship's way of fire. The dreaded robot generators (now called fabricators) return, but can now be destroyed when unshielded. The built-in automap returns, and one marker at a time can now be placed anywhere on the map to better locate and reach a destination. Surely, there is VR support as pointed out earlier, but that was in the original, too. Same with a level editor. All these nuances, all these peculiarities one can safely expect to return in Overload. The multiplayer returns, but here is where the only regression lies. When Descent first hit the stores, the mode was divided into simple "Anarchy" deathmatch and cooperative modes, with Anarchy allowing for teams and hostile robots and cooperative involving multiple pilots loading a single-player mission file. By Descent 3, its player capacity would be doubled to 16 and one Anarchy and four non-Anarchy modes added. Overload trims the multiplayer back down to eight players and Anarchy modes, even doing away with cooperation. With limited options, this will be unforgivably disappointing to anyone looking forward to playing the game with friends.

VERDICT: Some old games are worth reviving, and some old games are better left not having a Revival Productions doing that. Overload occupies the fine middle of the road. To be sure, it will please Descent fans who wanted the decaying shooter genre to return with no obvious signs of hoariness. On the other hand, it breaks from the classic's tradition of taking risks and pushing technology, and plays it too safely. Worse, it fails to advance the subgenre and offers nothing to expand its audience, providing little more than nostalgia relief as its biggest strength, and actually trims down multiplayer. Surely, one can name me a joyous experience, as well as having to contend with motion sickness (though luckily I have never undergone that in the hundreds of hours I have put into the games), but my answer to each is that I have seen it or at least am familiar with the experience. Still, the mouse control will appeal to gamers who have abandoned the joystick, which could have been touted in its marketing. Overall, it is an average good game. At least it got released, unlike that Descent reboot, though it looks as if it will come out. We should meet it with both hope and skepticism.

A long time ago, in a galaxy we call the Milky Way, a new medium emerged that swept through humanity. What began life confined to universities invaded arcades, was then picked up by home computer junkies, and soon after blasted off onto home consoles, attracting crowds nationwide and beyond at a black hole's strength. For the next two decades, the computer junkies were left light-years away under the space bus, until the day that first-person shooters by a new company called id Software saw the starlight and took all media attention by a meteor storm. The junkies were, for the first time, assimilated into the gaming universe, and the console and arcade aliens decided that computer gaming was cool enough.

Enough of the bad space puns, everyone - the gaming population at large, the press, the studios - wanted to hop on id Software's newfound train. No stranger to the phenomenon was LucasArts, who sought to imitate Doom's success with its first first-person shooter, Star Wars: Dark Forces. While not quite a killer app, it was successful as an early frontrunner to the genre, but part of its success owed to its having a strong story and objectives-based levels, as opposed to simply reaching the other end of the maps. On top of that, it allowed for ambient sounds, 3D models and sprites, and scripted combinations of these in ways that I will explain made the Jedi engine awesome back in the day. While the maps are still perpendicular and feature no slopes, the engine removed the infamous barrier to maps with room-over-room architecture, and players could look up and down (though only on a keyboard, but hacks and source ports work around that issue), as well as jump and crouch. Set in various scenarios, the maps have their own textures, a more practical architecture with elevators and rotating floors, and atmospheric lighting. Star Wars: Dark Forces would amass a small cult following of fans of the original and later Jedi Knight fans, and without further ado, let's find out what the devotion is about.

The game starts off with Kyle Katarn, an Imperial officer-turned-Rebel mercenary, as he infiltrates an Imperial base on Danuta to steal the Death Star plans held there and deliver them to Princess Leia on board the Tantive IV (I guess it will take time for Disney to acknowledge at least some of his canonicity). The ingredients for a Star Wars-themed FPS are in place, but some things you will notice are that Dark Forces is slower-paced than Doom, though it need not be slow, and LucasArts' proprietary iMUSE system means that the music builds up and sustains tension when many enemies are alerted to Kyle's presence before relaxing when few, if any, are alerted. Such interactive music was unusual for an FPS game. There even apparently is music that was meant to be played when fighting certain enemies, which was scrapped due to problems making iMUSE play them on cue. Anyway, Kyle starts with his Bryar pistol, a basic yet surprisingly versatile weapon that can destroy many enemies with great accuracy, considering that there are eight other weapons to pick up that deal much more damage, the very next being the E-11 blaster rifle. The stormtrooper's rifle is comically not as accurate and more ammo-hungry, but still ends up being one of the most used weapons in the game. Kyle delivers the plans to the Rebellion, and the Death Star is destroyed. Clearly, that was just the prologue. This game takes place between the first two movies, and the Rebel Alliance learns of a swift, deadly capture of one of its bases on Talay, leading them to suspect a new ongoing Imperial project. On top of that, an Imperial officer named Crix Madine wishes to defect to the Rebels and provides crucial information about the project, known as the Dark Troopers, droids larger and more powerful than a stormtrooper. The rest of the game follows Kyle's adventures of finding clues, sabotaging the project, and destroying the starship harboring the droid factory, the Arc Hammer, while bumping into opposition from Imperials, criminals, bounty hunters, and droids at nearly every corner.

As you progress, you will find more weapons that allow for alternative fire. Thermal detonators are a fairly common weapon that the player also ends up using often, and for good reasons. They are intuitive to throw, shooting farther the longer one holds down the fire button before releasing it, can be set to either explode on impact or after a 4-second delay, and can quickly clear unwanted pests. There are other weapons with similar or more firepower. Notably, mines can be set up to explode on proximity or after a delay, and there are ludicrously powerful weapons such as the Stoker concussion rifle, a.k.a. The Star Wars BFG 9000, and the Dark Trooper weapon. There are also surprises to encounter, such as the Dianoga, who hide in sewage and pop out to crunch their prey. I am not joking, they are creepy, especially after the player hears their low gargled growl, with the creepiest part only to come. The game also stars a few famous villains, and it challenges the player's problem-solving to get past puzzles without disrupting the pace. The best part is how the story is told as the levels go on, rather than in between. The levels are scripted for that purpose, requiring players to complete objectives such as picking up an item, reaching a destination, killing a boss, and so on and playing dialogue as one goes. Also, the automap is useful since sometimes I miss places I have not explored.

Everyone in the 1990s who had a DOS home computer to play games on likely knew of id Software and its slew of inventive shooters, likely realizing that they and all successful imitators followed the rule of having a copious number of levels and room for user-generated levels, each with their own textures and sound. Wolfenstein 3D had 30 maze-like levels and let players design their own. Doom initially shipped with 27 levels and let players create their WADs. Descent had 30 levels bent on throwing gamers into disarray and let players design the most bizarre, most helter-skelter mines imaginable, all ending with the player destroying the core and escaping the mines' impending self-destruction in the style of Return of the Jedi. Funny that I mention that while reviewing a Star Wars game. Star Wars: Dark Forces has a paltry 14 levels. It is not a lot, and the game can be beaten in two days on average. Worse yet is the only thing that can keep it from being certified one of the greatest games: that Dark Forces is a single-player-only game. How did you miss the news of employees playing Doom online at work, LucasArts? Oh well, at least you recognized that players would naturally create their own levels in the GOB file format, which turned out to be a very good idea for reasons I shall explain.

The Jedi engine is highly flexible, as demonstrated by the user-generated levels. I looked to the DF-21 fan website to test some of the greatest maps for the game, marking the first time I have played fan-made levels for the purpose of reviewing a game. My favorite are the Dark Tide saga and the Assassination on Nar Shaddaa mission featuring Boba Fett as the player character. The levels are not technically mods, as the core gameplay itself is unchanged (the player still behaves as Kyle Katarn, and his weapons are mechanically unchanged, as are the enemies and the world physics), but practically everything else can be modified. The Dark Tide saga has original music and full-motion video (including even an improved LucasArts opening sequence) and is particularly heavy on in-game storytelling, and Assassination features a high level of interactivity and an intricate money system for buying arms and health items not otherwise easily found lying throughout the map. In either case, the missions have original assets, more animated sprites and models, and clever scripting, such as glass walls breaking and their shards falling to the ground. The best levels I have tried are of LucasArts' standards, and my favorites may actually be better than the original game. These levels combine world sectors and models in ways that give the illusion that one is actually interacting with models or running up and down slopes, and also use plenty of sequenced visual and sound effects. Granted, the 3D engine's rendering is not perfect. The textured models when close up look as if they were viewed under a magnifying glass, and sprites over edges sometimes suffer clipping effects. Still, the skill involved makes the scenery all the impressive. I also like to turn the music off when I want the ambient sounds to fill the atmosphere for realism's sake, which there are many more of. One of the levels in the Dark Tide saga has the player controlling a droid, and another even simulates the effects of illness (in this case dizziness). The hacks used to create the levels, without once modding the game, are so creative that, from a technical standpoint, Dark Forces may be the greatest sprite-based Doom-clone ever made, greater than even - dare I say - Duke Nukem 3D and its Build engine. Praises to the Jedi Knight community for the levels and helping me review the game.

VERDICT: After over a hundred hours of playing the game, studying its engine, and viewing the inner workings of the levels, I can safely see why Star Wars: Dark Forces amassed a cult following. It is a break from the norm of thrill-killing the bad guys that, by emphasizing plot development, better justifies the violence. While not influential like Half-Life, it was ahead of its time. Also, its 3D engine was magnificent, allowing for models, smooth animations, and complex, interactive structures. A little more budget would have made this a certified all-time classic, but, luckily, the developers did exactly that for the sequel, the first true Jedi game and one of the greatest games ever.

Since id Software's smash hit Doom enthroned the Texas-based studio as the king of first-person shooters and secured DOS's standing as a respectable gaming platform, it was only natural that DOS and Windows users would flock to the next major title from the company, whom they served regally as the leader of PC gaming. Every major release by id Software would turn out exponentially more remarkable and seminal than the last, so everyone who paid attention knew that its next project would be the next great thing for PC gaming. Less did they realize that many of the greatest FPS games in the years since would be powered by modified engines directly taken from Quake, and in the decades since would be inspired by the game or take elements originating in it.

Believe it or not, Quake was not originally intended to be a first-person shooter, let alone one of the greatest first-person shooters of all time. It was conceived as an open-world fantasy role-playing game, but the project proved too ambitious, and internal strife didn't help the situation. Instead, it ended up being another simple Doom-clone, but instead of demons and Mars, it was set in the future in a mysterious landscape that consisted of medieval castles, wizard lairs, lava tombs, and eldritch labyrinths, with high-tech weapons and bad guys even more evil than the satanic fiends from Doom. They include zombified humans with guns, ogres who tote chainsaws in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and fire grenades, knightly swordsmen, and monsters inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, and they are rather Gothically occult than blithely demonic. Regarding the plot, the player character is still a space marine, now named Ranger, who battles hordes of monsters from another dimension who sneak their way through the military base's teleporters as an unidentified being, codenamed Quake, plots Earth's destruction, but it was a unique concoction of dark fantasy and science-fiction thriller that, much like Super Mario 64, with fully 3D graphics was meant to showcase the very best of what games could and what they would be able to, all in an unorthodox genre for a game based heavily on European folklore, and it worked.

3D graphics was the first thing I said about why Quake succeeded, and it is the most obvious improvement over Doom. Everything is realized as being 3D. 2D sprites are replaced with models that, despite their age, hold a level of detail unachievable by sprites alone. Weapons and visual effects do not appear to be flat. The lighting is made greatly more flexible, and with added water to swim in come the effects of slightly bending light underwater. Most important of all is that the world is no longer confined to perpendiculars and single floors. The level architecture is more studious than ever, with slopes aplenty and what Doom's players had for years bemoaned the game's lack of: honest rooms over rooms. Though simple and not the first truly 3D FPS game according to Guinness World Records, Quake might be the first FPS where players could design levels in any way they wish, including those based on their favorite games, with only their systems' strength to worry about. As evidence in favor, level structures and enemies could be given scripted sequenced, many areas have booby traps that will cause significant harm, and, as a precursor to id Software habitually releasing the source codes of its old games only a few years later after their launch, practically anything about the game from variables to logic and rules could be modified either in-game via a console replacing traditional cheat codes - a first in gaming - or for precompilation, using John Carmack's C-based script language QuakeC. The company also popularized hardware-accelerated graphics with versions of the game supporting it released just a few months later - a legacy still felt to this day in computing. All of this mind-bogglingly could be performed on a Pentium processor clocked at only 75 MHz at minimum. My only disappointment is that the animations of enemies and some surfaces are a little rough, but the game in general runs more smoothly than Doom. The sound is similarly of CD quality. It is a tech demonstration of the most pleasing kind.

The monsters are tougher than ever, and so the weapon roster gets a makeover. The shotgun is now the number two weapon, and the pistol is retired for being no good against the baddies anymore. The in-game GUI is made more intuitive, actually grouping the weapons with the kind of ammo they use. The double-barreled shotgun reappears, and the nail gun (replacing the chaingun) now has a counterpart that fires nails twice as fast. The grenade launcher is a rocket-based weapon that fires bouncy grenades that explode on enemy contact or after three seconds, and the rocket launcher is moved to the number seven slot. My favorite of the weapons, the Thunderbolt, expends a lot of power, but electrocutes monsters almost instantaneously and can even penetrate walls, but with the disadvantage that it will kill the player if they foolishly fire it in water, discharging the weapon. Doom fans will probably be disappointed that the melee weapon is now an axe that should be used in combat only sparingly and skillfully to save ammo, and while the player does often deplete their ammo, it is easily replenished unless the player wastes large amounts. On the bright side, the game does introduce my favorite power-up: one that briefly multiplies the player's weapon damage fourfold. With that, even using the standard shotgun is impressive enough when they can turn monsters into bouncy, blood-trailed giblets. Other power-ups include armor, the biosuit from the last game, a ring from The Lord of the Rings that turns one invisible, and the Pentagram of Protection - what? Quake is a departure from id Software's other games in that it is dark, though not without ha-has. The music provided by Nine Inch Nails is not epic electronic metal, but rather sinister, occult-ish, and sectarian-sounding, the satanic themes are somehow even more tenacious, and the Pentagram of Protection is the epitome of that and the dark atmosphere. It is an average invulnerability power-up, and I sincerely like to hope that it is just high technology with simple unwholesome overtones such as health becoming 666 (or 999 rotated) when one picks it up. On the one hand, it is ironically funny how Ranger can use an abomination to whack abominations to death. On the other, it may be too transgressive for my personal tastes, although there is no shock content, the game falls short of occult propaganda, and in at least one section, it actually encourages the player to "defile" unholy alters to progress.

Quake is fast and frenzied like its predecessor, but is even more so in ways that it became the ideal breeding ground for speedrun culture. One has to look in all directions for danger, including straight up and down. If you thought the last game's monster AI was cheap, but in a charming sort of way, this game's monsters are faster and more formidable. They are not much more advanced, and they still hilariously maim each other, but it is the kind of formidable where even a few blocks of code is enough for a relatively experienced player to ponder how they are outsmarted. Scrags (replacing Cacodemons) are hard to dodge and shoot at simultaneously, and Fiends are clawed, tough creatures that quickly leap toward the player, gutting Ranger and making getting cornered a cutthroat nightmare, despite both being easily dodgeable sideways. Everything that made Doom great was carried over to Quake and made even better, including what might be the greatest networked multiplayer ever in the form of QuakeWorld. It allowed for fast play between players online via TCP/IP and even notoriously dreaded modems, made searching for servers far more convenient, and also boosted a then-niche form of competitive play known as esports. The game modes are still deathmatch and co-op, but the flexibility of the game meant that some of the greatest mods created for multiplayer provided game styles that were, for a time, unrivaled in networked gaming (think Team Fortress). Expansion packs further exploited that flexibility with better scripting, more weapons, more enemies, and new power-ups, and an all-original Capture The Flag mode, a variant of deathmatch where teams score points by carrying the flag to their own base. It is a little unfortunate that single-player mode, which is a tiny bit less than perfect, still suffers some of the same problems as other early shooters, them having a simple premise of shooting everything without any story development, but that is easily overlooked by its technical power and the mods that showcase it.

VERDICT: id Software broke its own barriers again, as it had been for the decade, but Quake might be the ultimate first-person shooter that should fill every gamer's collection, with no excuses not to. It deposed Doom as the king of shooters, and as evidence that the latter had become passé, not one developer talked about using it as their inspiration since the newly crowned game's release. Every early successful FPS after Quake, including every early FPS you have ever played, was inspired by the game or directly took its engine, and every late descendent of the genre in the evolution of FPS games has a vestigial element derived from the game. I don't think I will ever come across a game like Quake in my lifetime, a game that is so beautiful, showed such optimism and forethought about desktop computers and gaming, and so profoundly altered the course of PC gaming. Yes, it is a rip-off of id's own Doom, but from a technical standpoint, who cares? It is perhaps both the greatest PC tech demo and the greatest online multiplayer game of all time, and the modding community it was built for keeps it alive and well.

If computer intelligence were sophisticated enough to make their own decisions, what would computers be capable of unleashing upon humanity? Would they simulate a reality in which we are enslaved, perhaps unwittingly, to prolong their existence? That is what security hacker Neo discovered in The Matrix. At present, cybercriminals can write and distribute code with the intent of sabotaging hardware or stealing valuable data. Superhot takes the meaning of malware to a new level, or so it seems, where, as the story goes, a friend sends by network a supposedly leaked copy of a new game, superhot.exe, to your (in real life) computer, which is an old DOS machine as indicated by the menus. Little are you aware that you will become sucked into the game the same way as your friend, literally.

Of course, Superhot is not malware (nor related to the film), but the story considers the real-life you to have one installed on your DOS computer in the form of superhot.exe. "Malware" might not be the best word to describe the software in the story, but it is ... something. The first-person shooter is a collection of levels set in seemingly unrelated but familiar scenarios, from buildings and transport to bars and alleys, all in a simulation where everything is made of concrete in the middle of a white void. In each scenario are red glass figures intent on killing you. It takes only one hit to do just that, but what sets this shooter apart from the others is that time only moves when you move; it slows down to bullet time when you stop to analyze your surroundings before speeding back up to real time (sound familiar?). Granted, you might not have the same abilities to manipulate the simulation as Neo, but it's close enough. Most of the time, you start a level without any weapon other than your fists. You must find one lying somewhere or steal it from your enemy by stunning it. Stunning is done by punching the enemy or throwing an object at it, which, depending on the scenario, includes a bottle, electrical equipment, and office items. Stunning an enemy three times in quick succession has the same killing effect as shooting it once. All the objects in the game, including the weapons, are made of black glass and can be shattered in obvious ways. Adding to your troubles, the three firearms you can pick up: a pistol, a shotgun, and an automatic rifle, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, all have limited ammo, so, once exhausted, you may as well throw them at an armed red guy, stunning it and stealing the weapon it drops.

The world of Superhot is rather mysterious, where locales are formed orderly before they disorganize into nothingness the farther one travels from the arena. There is no real story regarding or prelude precipitating why red guys want to kill you in the game or what your aims are besides killing them first. Far more enigmatic is that something, referring to itself as "the System", is tracking your presence, warning you about the intent of superhot.exe as you dive deeper into the simulation, at least figuratively, and slowly submit to the matrix. My giveaways of the plot - which focus on the premise - end here, but you can second-guess how the story will unfold and what further resemblances to the movie you will spot. To add to its lore, every level comes with a secret in the form of a terminal, which you can then use to unravel hidden facts about superhot.exe and the System. At the end of each level, you are rewarded a replay of your last playthrough entirely in real time. It's cool rewatching it since everything actually goes so fast that it would be almost impossible to beat the game if not for the ability to slow down time to dodge bullets as the player calculates their next move, and even cooler since the game encourages us to consider uploading clips that we think are worthy of other people's time with a few button presses, just as I have. The developers were considerate in how they animated and programmed the red guys. Although they cannot jump, pick up throwable items, or discard their weapons like the player character, they can do everything else. The player can tell when an enemy is getting ready to fire their pistol as they raise it at eye level. When they are not scripted to stand still or move from point to point, they are free to roam around the arena and pick up a weapon. They sometimes aim their guns in front of the player, anticipating that they will step in the projectiles' way. When they do, they are shown to point their guns slightly away from the player, allowing the player to know which way to dodge. When an enemy is shot in the limb or head, that part of the body shatters like glass before the entire thing fragments as it collapses to the ground, and its body can still be shot and further shattered, so you had better conserve your ammo and shoot a live target you intend to kill instead of a new shard of glass blocking it.

Bullets and pellets leave behind temporary red trails so that they do not look like nearly invisible black dots. Besides guns and throwable objects, there are also weapons with which you whack your opponents, the best of which being the katana. It swings very fast, easily hacks enemies in half like butter, and can even slice airborne bullets. Gun projectiles are also capable of colliding with each other, but the katana is the surest, coolest means of defending yourself. Eventually, you are granted the hotswitching ability, which you use to leave your body and assume control of one of an enemy by pointing your crosshair at it and pressing the hotswitch button. When activated, it is made unavailable for a few seconds in real time before it can be used again, but it is a very strategic means of escaping danger. I have used it a lot when I needed to avert my demise but still wanted to keep my weapon. To do that, I would throw my weapon at an enemy, hotswitch into its body, and grab the weapon I just threw. If I needed that enemy's weapon instead, I would stun it and then hotswitch into it since hotswitching forces the body to discard and destroy what it was carrying at the time the player switched into it. This type of game appeals to players who do not expect fast-paced action, which is perfectly fine with me because I am one of those players. However, after you complete its levels, you are encouraged to play it again within a time limit. Beating campaign unlocks challenges, featuring the same levels but with a handful of different gameplay variations, including the ones with the time limit, all harder or much harder than campaign. There is even a challenge mode where the levels must be beaten within a time limit in real time, so players looking for some fast-paced action are not totally left out. Beating campaign mode also unlocks endless mode, where the goal is to destroy as many enemies as possible before being destroyed. This mode also has three variations: destroying 20 enemies as fast as possible in real time, destroying as many as possible within a 20-second limit, and doing the same thing within a 60-second real-time limit. In every case, your personal bests are recorded, incentivizing you to replay them. Because of those game modes, your play time does not last just three hours. I estimate that you would spend at least fifteen hours before you lose interest, which justifies its initial $24.99 price tag.

Back in the game's DOS prompt, you have other nice extras to look at, including a text-based mini-game about chopping up a tree on the correct side quickly, which actually isn't half bad. Other than that, once its campaign is beaten, Superhot encourages us to share it with friends and family with the message "Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!" Unfortunately, I have to turn down the opportunity of declaring it. I am not saying that it is not an innovative shooter, not by a long shot; it approached the FPS genre in ways no shooter in recent memory had done before. However, I think it was too soft on innovation. The basic gameplay consists of killing enemies, dodging sideways, taking cover, and finding weapons, and given the room for all the possibilities that can arise out of the player's powers, and the various strategies needed to survive, I am left a little unsatisfied and thinking I have not seen everything. I thought some of the challenges were also a little too easy. Granted, I had to adjust my strategy for some of the harder levels, but other than that, it ends up being more or less the same. Once you know your strategy, you stick to that strategy, and it undermines the game's important element of strategic thinking, rendering it a generic shooter.

VERDICT: Reluctantly, I cannot call Superhot the most innovative shooter in years, even though it is original. As much as I want this strategy-heavy shooter to be, the developers seem to have missed pushing its innovation in such a way as to force players to get creative in their strategy, and it need not be accomplished by adding more variety, just by rearranging the level structures a bit. Then again, it coming from an independent studio who priced it at medium, I could have asked for something much worse, and I must not be overtly judgemental. Superhot is the shooter that comes closest to playing like Neo from The Matrix, and even if you have never seen the movie, you at least have not heard of a shooter in years before it that comes close to giving the player such powers within a virtual setting. It should inspire other studios to develop shooters exploring the concept of time, including time manipulation.

When LucasFilm's first film in the highest-grossing franchise since 1983 was screened, enthusiasm had already gathered around it to make it the best-performing movie of 1999, but filmgoers were in for a bumpy, roller-coaster ride. However, it was not quite the ride they were looking for. The track they rode on that was The Phantom Menace, the first of the three episodes set decades before Luke Skywalker's rise, had its highs and lows, the highs being the action sequences and visual effects, and the lows including attempts at humor that too often backfired, a few questionable actors reprising the roles of important characters handpicked by George Lucas, and at times the screenplay. Oh well, who is to say that movie legends last forever? At least Revenge of the Sith partly learned from its older siblings' missteps, but with heavy promotion came video game tie-ins. I confess they were not always great, but even critics grudgingly respect some good coming out of the prequels and influencing titles like Battlefront. Star Wars Episode I: Racer is the only game I can think of based entirely on a scene from one of the prequel movies that counts as a better-than-good game.

The version for Windows is what I am looking at. The game is based on the famous pod-racing sequence from the first film, one of its loop-de-loops (the other, of course, being the Duel of the Fates scene), and a real roller-coaster. From the moment it starts, everything seems to be in place. John Williams' score for The Phantom Menace returns in high fidelity, the backdrops look convincingly like shots from the movie, one of Sebulba's pod tailgating Anakin's and two of the pod hangar, and five main voice actors return to reprise their roles. After creating a profile and configuring the controls, you are ready to race in the tournament. You are then taken to a cantina that has a holographic projector used to view the game's 23 playable racers (or 25 if you count the cheat-activated model swaps) and 25 tracks. The projector is then used to select them both. At the pod selection screen, you have a good view of the characters, their pods, and their statistics, which include traction, handling, acceleration, top speed, braking, engine cooling, and the rate at which they can be repaired, the last important since the vehicles will sustain damage in ways I will explain later. The next screen is course selection. Three circuits from easy to hard are available and can be partaken in any order, although only one track is open and must be finished in fourth place or higher in order to unlock the next. A fourth circuit comprising four tracks is unlocked only after one of the other circuits is completed. You then decide the course, and you also set how the prizes are distributed among the racers who finish in the top four. One of these distributions is "winner take all", but let's be realistic. In the event you do not finish first, you can easily restart the race without any consequences. Okay, let's say you do want challenge. You can simply forgo all upgrades and still claim the championship because it turns out they are not necessary for game completion, although they do make winning a lot easier.

All of the racers and their pods from the movie do reappear, including Sebulba's with its illicitly equipped flamethrower intact, and your first track choice will probably be the Boonta Training Course in the Amateur Podracing Circuit, based on the one on which an enslaved Anakin darted to the finish line against all odds. At first glance, it looks underwhelming compared to the movie, considering that it is straightaways and turns with a few obstacles thrown in. Then again, it is a shortened, easy version of the full Boonta course that includes all of the obstacles from the film, including even the Tusken Raiders. The next track in the circuit - the shortest of all tracks - similarly have plain straightaways and turns. The third track is where the courses become less linear and more interactive. This track splits and merges and also features shortcuts, which are cool, meaning that there are a handful of paths to take all leading to the finish line. The remaining courses, which are set on one asteroid and seven planets ranging in climate and theme from ice and temperate to industrial and water, follow that track design. They feature more hazards, anti-gravity tunnels, and ramps that will send your pod aloft, and become increasingly tighter. At the end of each race you win, you earn truguts, the game's currency, and may unlock a racer. You then spend some truguts on upgrades for any part of your pod, which are bought either in perfect condition at Watto's shop or damaged but discounted in its junkyard. They can be sold back for the same price they were bought for, so there is no buyer's remorse. Consider also spending your winnings on up to three additional pit droids, who after winning a race will repair the parts of your pod, which sustain damage each time you injure your vehicle's engines or overheat them when boosting, not to mention crash. The engines can only be scraped against walls so much before they must be repaired with the hold of a single button. It is a neat detail that an engine about to fail will immediately fail if one tries to boost instead of repairing it, resulting in a wreck.

Visually, I cannot say that it is the best-looking game from 1999. I have seen prettier games from its time, and the graphics are largely identical to the Nintendo 64 version, albeit with fewer constraints. The artwork isn't rushed, though, and the pod models and physics are appealing, what with how the cockpit wobbles. The pod sounds are of cinematic quality and even exhibit the Doppler effect. Most important is its focus on speed and the racer's ability to maneuver across the courses. The super-vehicles can go above 400 mph and upwards 600 mph when boosting. When fully upgraded, some can go upwards a staggering 1,000 mph. The game is never keen on forcing racers to a grinding near-halt just to pass hairpins. Instead, the pods are given the ability to drift frictionlessly to avoid meeting the walls when turning. They can also rotate sideways to make oneself narrow for tight gaps and be made to glide in midair long enough for gaps or touch the ground soon enough to avoid outer surfaces of entrances. It all leads to a gameplay that is consistently fast, perhaps faster than any game before it, and where the risk-vs-benefit ratio increases on both sides, and only a honed sense of hand-eye coordination can achieve lap times of under two minutes for such courses that stop at nothing to crash the player's pod.

Of course, it would not be a full game without networked multiplayer mode. As many as eight players can participate in a race at a time, leaving open the possibility for grand social gatherings. It is an unfortunate mistake to cap the number of participants at eight instead of leaving it at twelve as in single-player. That is far from my biggest grouse of the game. It takes no more than three hours to beat the tournament, and after everything is seen and done, there is nothing much more to see, apart from the levels now having the setting to be mirrored, giving us the illusion of more content for a total of 50 tracks. You could just race in Free Play, where the number of AI racers, their speed, and the number of laps can also be set, but the experience is familiar, and the only real incentive you have for racing again is to beat your own lap and three-lap records. Incidentally, there are a few bugs that very occasionally crash the game or where the game interprets apparently minor changes in track angle or elevation as a wall that one can slam their pod into, destroying it. These bugs are insignificant enough to be simply annoying. It is an ingenious concept, but I think LucasArts overlooked the potential it had to become one of the greatest video games of all time.

VERDICT: There were not many futuristic racing games where the player races frantically across courses that literally toss their super-vehicle in the air and constantly face the threat of crashing, and there still are not. There was no equivalent to F-Zero or Wipeout in the memory of almost every PC gamer, Windows or Mac, until Star Wars Episode I: Racer. With that, these users experienced for the first time what console gamers felt years before. This game pulls it off, both by allowing players control over their vehicles in ways that are understandable but hard to master, and just being the franchise's answer to the racing genre by being based on and set in one of the most beloved Star Wars scenes. The only threat to the game's longevity is that the fun ends all too soon once everything is seen and explored, and there is not a lot. Then again, what other recent racing game for PC has the same futuristic, heart-pumping, topsy-turvy premise as Star Wars Episode I: Racer? It was quite a ride, and we as a whole are guilty of not exploring the racing genre beyond simulated and kart racing enough.

When Doom entered the arena of games, the world was never the same again. It looked like nothing people had seen before, what with super console graphics, a real sense of immersion, and a multiplayer mode connecting up to four blood-crazed players over a network, all on a system with a historically poor reputation for gaming. Its ending left millions of gamers on a cliffhanger, all while id Software preoccupied fans with the ability to create their own WAD levels and assets. As that happened, a mere ten months later, the awaited sequel was released. Doom II was not intended to be the company's radical leap forward, unlike its masterpiece it concurrently worked on and published two years later, Quake. Instead, it was a new game with new levels that changed only what had to be. Let's find out whether id Software took all opportunities to do just that.

The game continues where the series left off after the events of "Thy Flesh Consumed" from Doom, where our hero finds upon returning to Earth that it has been overrun by the same alien race he battled in Hell. On Earth, the monsters hold the entire population captive with nobody to free them unless it's the only human who made it out of Hell alive, logically. If a thousand hellspawn cannot kill Doomguy, instead being the ones killed, what can? Frankly, the monsters do expand their assortment of fighters, and we see for the first time zombies with chainguns, Flying Spaghetti Monsters (I made that joke last time) that spawn airborne flaming skulls, monsters that resurrect their slain allies, and arachnids armed with plasma guns. The only real weak enemy is the pale counterpart of the hulking Baron of Hell: the Hell Knight, but everyone else poses a reasonable threat, including the chaingun zombie, who surprisingly can shave off a player's health points as a good diet pill would pounds. However, Doomguy is blessed with another weapon he can add to his arsenal. If the chaingun were good enough for players who could afford more bullets, then a shotgun with two barrels is good enough for players who can afford more pellets. It is true the double-barreled shotgun has a slower firing rate than the regular shotgun and is better suited for short-range targets, but it expends more shells per minute and has almost three times the firepower. Okay, the expenditure itself may not be appealing, but you cannot deny lining up the enemies, pulling the trigger at point-blank range, and watching as many as four die at once, and I bet you can score more with weaker foes. This leaves rocket missiles as the only kind of ammunition that can be fired by only one weapon. Everything else from the last game is intact.

Apart from a new health power-up and the fact that the levels are no longer divided into episodes, meaning that the run is a long, continuous chain of 30 levels plus two secret levels between which the player never leaves their favorite weapons behind, there is not much else new to talk about Doom II. I thus have plenty of writing space to write about my experiences with the game, which are quite similar to its predecessor. I can write about watching my sorry fiends collapse and fall over ledges. I can talk about the two game's emphasis on speed and the fact that they both resemble a stop-motion black comedy sketch series with characters made of clay (that is how their sprites came to be) I can also write about two new monsters I did not mention: a skeleton who fires missiles and menacingly makes the player feel small, and an obese guy to whom, in spite of his dual flamethrowers, being large is clearly a weakness. Of course, I should be writing about what is better or worse about the sequel, which starts with its levels. Although I had little against the original's, I find that the sequel's level design has improved as a result of gaining more experience from id Software's own level editor. The levels are larger, but more importantly, they all just seem more carved and less flat. The secret areas are useful because the player can find powerful weapons very early on in the game if they know where to look based on visual or structural cues or simply on a whim. Even the secret levels feel more rewarding as secret levels, and are clearly a homage to another great piece of work. The story also seems more developed. While it is still bare as the game heavily favors action, the idea of rescuing the world population and then the world itself sounds more interesting than simply surviving a laboratory disaster and trying to contain its aftermath, and more reminiscent of one giant Die Hard film, where instead of a dozen or so terrorists taking hostage a skyscraper, it is the deepest depths of the Earth capturing its whole surface. If you were bored of the boss fights from the first game where the most convenient strategy involved "circle-strafing" and shooting the bosses, you will find that the climactic fight with this game's boss requires tenfold strategy. It is chaotic, monsters do not stop spawning, and Doomguy can only kill so many with what limited ammo and health spheres he has and must find a way to destroy the highly memorable boss before he is overwhelmed.

By refining only the superficial parts of the game, the core of the gameplay is left as great as it was the last year. Unfortunately, it also means the bad fundamental parts from the first game crept their way into the second. The levels all have similar 2.5D architecture where rooms are never stacked one above another, and the game still suffers from being based on the shallow premise used by other old FPS games of shooting enemies for the almost pure sake shooting them. I may be judging it harshly because I grew up with more story-oriented shooters like Half-Life, but the schadenfreude I reap from the grisly carnage I cause my opponents becomes a brief bore when the killing is dragged out, which often happens after the first few hours in a period. For a standalone sequel, not much has advanced technically, and that itself is a regression. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any new good feature other than what I described. There is still no looking up or down; the game automatically aims the player's gun toward the closest enemy in the center of the screen, but, with the levels larger and seemingly more vertical, I wish I could see further above or below or manually aim at my foes since autoaim cannot always detect those far away. To throw in a few suggestions that would have made the game a more meaningful upgrade, the graphics could have been scaled up to Super VGA and its multiplayer expanded. As disappointing as that sounds, I actually prefer this game over Doom personally. As much as it is not an all-new game, with what few improvements, Doom II strangely feels like an all-new game. I cannot pinpoint why it does. Is it the super shotgun, an expanded cast of monsters, or the boss fight? Maybe it's the combination of all of them that somehow fundamentally alters how I perceive those improvements justifying it being a full game. Whatever the case, all I know is that the WAD community responded positively to the increased variety by developing more levels for the second game.

VERDICT: Doom II is a step forward in id Software's early anthology of games, albeit not a dramatic one like Quake. It as a full standalone game, I bemoan the weaknesses of the original game creeping into this one, as well as the lack of substantial improvements to the Doom engine and, to a lesser extent, the gameplay. Because little has changed technically from a game already considered one of the greatest, I decline to rank it on the same tier as Doom. However, having a double-barreled shotgun as a common weapon that packs quite a violent kick is a nice addition, meeting new enemies keeps the experience fresh, the levels and the story are better developed, and, because of the additions, Doom II itself deprives players of practically any reason they would want to design WADs for the original game. It is a surprising feat the guys over there pulled off changing so little from the original and still meeting our minimum expectations for a sequel, and my rating reflects upon that statement.

Nintendo taught a crumbled North American console market what made its games great when it flooded stores with its NES, bundled with a platformer that articulated that it was no ordinary console and what opportunities the market was missing. It brought platform video games to a new level when it bundled the SNES with its Super Mario World, and again outdid itself when its Super Mario 64 for the N64 made the most prudent use of the third dimension it could. Between those events, 20th Century Fox distributed my favorite Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard, about a cop who is caught in a tower takeover by terrorists and is their hostages' only hope out. Id Software had just begun to gain serious momentum when it unusually took players to a first-person perspective in a shooting game called Wolfenstein 3D. I like to think of it and its two other shooters, Doom and Quake, as id's answer to the Super Mario series, with Wolfenstein 3D being like Super Mario Bros. And Doom Super Mario World. I consider Quake my favorite as I do Super Mario 64, as both made equally prudent use of 3D graphics. Doom was in the middle, but as it has received the most attention out of all of id's shooters, it is past time to ask ourselves whether the game about a thousand-or-so hellspawn against a single space marine is a Christmas game in the same vein that we would of Die Hard as a Christmas film. After all, the game was released in December, and we do not even know whether it is set in a December.

As the story goes, on the moons of Mars, experiments by an interplanetary conglomerate involving interdimensional space travel spiral out of control. Its Phobos base is overrun with unknown forces, and Deimos disappears. Space marines stationed on Mars are sent to the Phobos base to contain the fallout. All infiltrate the base and die trying to clear the enemy, except Doomguy, who was initially ordered to secure its perimeter. With no one nearer than 50 million miles away to come to his aid, Doomguy is left with no choice but to fight his way through the most abominable creatures imaginable to man. The first thing the player sees is a nice title screen that looks like the cover of a jewel CD case, which, in the tradition of id Software's games, is followed by demos of what to expect from it. Among those things are killer metal music and fake Halloween gore. The level of violence in the game was unusual and ahead of its time, garnering controversy even as the public grew accustomed to violence in films, but in retrospect, the gore is lighthearted and nowhere close to gratuitous. Most of all, on a graphical level, floors and ceilings have textures, and the environment varies in elevation. Maps are no longer confined to towers where the ceiling and floor are of equal distance apart. Even more so, they are given much more geometry, along with interactivity that I will soon explain.

Once you step into the entrance on Phobos, you assume control of Doomguy. You start with only a pistol, but the learning curve allows you to familiarize yourself with the enemies and the mechanics. You soon pick up a shotgun with enough punch to its firepower to compensate for its slow firing rate, but then you learn that the maps you are in can be interacted with in ways not possible in Wolfenstein 3D. Some floors such as nuclear waste are hazardous to touch, switches can do more than open doors such as raising or lowering platforms, and crossing certain areas may activate traps such as teleporting monsters. Because of that, the helpful secret areas are more cleverly hidden. Explosive barrels and some ceilings that crush anything beneath them can either help or hurt the player. Even the brightness of an area is set high or low for good or poor visibility, and can be changed. They are not revolutionary in themselves, but they are a significant leap forward for first-person shooters.

You learn some basic enemies in the early levels such as human zombies with rifles or shotguns, imps that hurl fireballs toward Doomguy, and pink, hairless, ape-like demons who run and bite with their large jaws. Later appearances include the cacodemon, AKA a Flying Spaghetti Monster with a huge mouth who burps electric balls, and flying, fiery skulls that charge in straight lines. They all make gargles, grunts, and animal sounds so distorted that I am convinced only a synthesizer can produce, at least in the physical world. To add to the eeriness, the demons have partially invisible brothers, and a few rooms will flip their lights off and release more monsters. The action rises as you find a chaingun, a rocket launcher that can maim several bodies beyond recognition in one blast, a plasma rifle, and its bulkier cousin and the granddaddy of weapons, the BFG 9000. There is no looking up or down, which I can tolerate, but the weapons will aim at the monsters you point them at higher or lower than you. A nifty introduction is an automap that makes navigating mazes less irritating, and it even has a power-up that reveals all the undiscovered locations, including secrets. At the end of an episode awaits a fight with a boss, such as the delightfully loathsome Cyberdemon and eventually the one who ordered the invasion of the moon bases. A cliffhanger left millions of players anticipating the inevitable sequel, followed by a new free prequel episode a year later.

Recognizing their game would be played endlessly and leave an everlasting legacy, id Software thoughtfully tinkered the game so that players can create levels with their own textures, sounds, and music, all stored in a single file. After all these years, it is impressive to see a community of fans still uploading new levels. It only made sense once the Doom engine, id Tech 1, was open-sourced that the fans have upgraded and made mods for it. The last bonus is a feature that proved extremely popular: a networked multiplayer where up to four players participate and either fight each other in real time in a mode for which id Software coined "deathmatch" or team up against the monsters in campaign.

Doom is usually touted as the first FPS with a convincingly 3D environment, and was advertised as a 3D game by id Software. They are right, at least for the most part. It is not an issue here that there are sprites in place of models, which made sense for the time period. You see, the Doom engine was not without limitations, perhaps the most notable being that architecture with floors stacked one above another is impossible. Indeed, there is no standing on barrels or running over or under hostiles, and while it is true weapons cannot hit enemies if they are out of range, monster melee attacks and explosions can still do damage to themselves and players who are technically in reach but of radically different elevations. The worlds are thus better described as 2.5D instead of purely 3D. The reasons for the limitation obviously relate to the fact that a fine line needed to be drawn between weak computers and prettiness. In retrospect (and I would argue even then), I think the line was drawn a little too close on the weak computer side. To their benefit, perhaps they were right to make it accessible to weak computers, which could have left millions of players on the sidelines, and its legacy might have been harmed because of it. Players can still jump from platform to platform across structures that resemble actual buildings, caves, and outdoors.

One issue I take with Doom is something that other early first-person shooters also suffered from: the premise. I should stress that the story alone is not flawed, being a horror-themed sci-fi thriller about abominations from Hell who invade the bases of Mars' moons and then Earth, which, quite frankly, is original. There is definitely joy to be had out of being impossibly outnumbered by those abominations, only to obliterate them all in quick succession and make it out alive, and even more so out of them purposefully injuring each other after accidental friendly fire, making them dumber fighters than the Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D, but after a while into the game, slaughtering thousands of monsters nonstop becomes a bore and the gameplay shallow and senseless. Other famous first-person shooters before Half-Life followed a similar formula, and their gameplays also became shallow and senseless, although some had it better than others. Admittedly, it is not as if one would never touch the game again after becoming tolerant of its euphoric rewards. Maybe there are secrets one missed, or one may need to up the difficulty to Nightmare, which will certainly hold the player's attention for a time. Or one could look at the impressive multitude of user-generated maps and mods or join one of the community-run servers still active today.

VERDICT: Doom flooded the DOS community much as DOS flooded the personal computer market. It bolstered its reputation as a gaming computer by being briefly the biggest title of a sparse genre that utilized its underappreciated capabilities and looked impractical to produce even for traditional consoles. It recently hit me that Doom is the game that proved that the operating system it was built for, the then-12-year-old DOS, was inherently more powerful than the creators of the first multimedia personal computer, the Amiga, in their right mind ever dreamed of making it. The game by no means caused that computer's demise, but, when combined with the woeful incompetence of the bumbling fools in charge of the system, it struck the last nail in the coffin for the brand for which death was the only way out of the hands of its negligent caretakers. The point is that DOS was ahead of its time, its potential only realized because of Doom, and even that game was surpassed by other, more stunning titles for the same platform. It includes id's own masterpiece, Quake, but with a legacy Doom left and a story that has since evolved, it spawned a franchise still beloved and played to this day.

Philosophers have clashed over where we humans derive our knowledge. Two classical opposing views separate the rationalists like Pythagoras, who summarized that "all is number", from the empiricists like John Locke, who held that all knowledge is derived from our senses. The issue of epistemology remained unresolved for millennia, but in 1991, a Swiss startup company called Think! Ware believed that it had settled it. Philip Jespersen and Michael Stopp created a brain-teaser under the prototypical name Think!, as evidenced by the name inscribed in a handful of levels. It was released as Supaplex for Amiga and DOS for £25.99, inspired by the long tried-and-done concept of First Star Software's Boulder Dash, with its emphasis on the intellect.

My playthrough of the game mostly makes a case for empiricism instead, where I found learning from my mistakes necessary to pass. The player controls Murphy, a ripe tomato ball who is exploring inside a computer gone berserk, using his debugging genius to fix it. As he does, he chomps on objects in his way with his large jaws opening and closing. Sound familiar? This guy does not eat fruit or ghosts, but he does eat base and infotrons, the latter of which are necessary in order to use the level's exit door. As you can probably tell, I am already not a huge fan of this game's naming conventions. Some of the names are standard, and some of them at least make sense semantically (infotrons are the "emeralds" of Supaplex). The remaining few are given names that are either forgettable or seemingly arbitrary. Sand is now base, fireflies are replaced by scissors called "snik-snaks", and boulders are now zonks. I am not sure what "base" refers to or where scissors fit in the theme of computing. Maybe I know, but I don't care. And zonks ... are spheres with an equatorial groove that I can only assume are so designed to look as menacing as the Death Star from Star Wars, which, like the boulders before them, they are to one's progression. At this point, it is worth noting that the developers in the manual called their game "the coolest action game around". Although a peek at my score for Supaplex will suggest that I think "coolest" is subjective, the developers were clearly proud of their work.

As always, the game asks for one's player name, and it starts off as merciful, not wanting to overwhelm the player with what awaits them ahead. The first levels start off like tutorials to familiarize oneself with the elements of the game. One of the things the player may immediately notice is that Murphy and objects move from one square to another in a smooth manner, taking up two squares in the process rather than "snapping" to the next. This makes a difference physically, not just visually, in ways the developers would exploit in later puzzles. The speed of the game is comparable to Boulder Dash, and the player still has a good grip on their character. Murphy can still chip away at base and take infotrons without taking up their space, as well as shove zonks left and right. These two objects slip sideways on rounded surfaces. Everything from the game it is based on seems to be there spiritually, with larger levels and obvious visual differences. However, it has its own cast of elements. There are no amoeba or walls that convert zonks into infotrons and vice versa to worry about. Instead, it has three differently colored explosive floppy disks, buggy traps that look like base except when they are glitching, and doorways only Murphy can use that typically restrict movement. As for the disks, the red ones can be collected and planted anywhere on the map to destroy walls and objects. The orange ones can be pushed and will explode when they fall onto a surface or an object is dropped on them. The yellow ones are not gravity-bound and can be pushed anywhere, but like zonks, none of them can be pulled. They are only detonated once Murphy finds and uses a terminal. Interestingly, both scissors (replacing fireflies) and electrons (the butterflies that explode jewels) now travel only on the left side of a wall, and they only kill the player character when both touch the same square they are on.

The presentation admittedly isn't the most impressive for an Amiga game first marketed at full price. The graphics are a little crude, and the only two sound effects are for explosions and level completion. The DOS version has the missing sound effects, but with the tradeoff that, unless the player had a Roland SC-55 or some other decent sound module installed, they were better off hearing David Whittaker's song on the Amiga Original Chip Set than on a SoundBlaster. At least the single-track music is tolerable enough to be played many times apart. None of it is as important as my telling you what playing the game is like. It is best described as a throwback to the aged concept of Boulder Dash with twists to keep it alive for a few more years. Here, it has no time limit, and passing a level is like solving a favorite puzzle on a Sunday newspaper. Supaplex tries hard to suspend the player's interest with maps that become increasingly more open-ended, hoping they would come back to replay the whole game to beat their own record. I am reluctant to declare that it is feverishly addictive, but before I tell you why, the levels do become increasingly difficult. Surprisingly none of the 111 levels themselves feels redundant if time is no object. Some of them that involve pushing yellow floppy disks are reminiscent of the old video game Sokoban, and some levels even have the player character bound by gravity, allowing for even more possibilities with what few cast of elements it features. Some of those levels with gravity have doorways the player can (or in many cases must) use that toggle it on or off. Whether one is frustrated or stuck on a level, the design of the levels is worth appreciating.

Now for the part no one wants to hear, but must. I tested a "cracked" version of this game on an Amiga emulator, but for your sake, I promise that I did not use cheats, save states, or any other convenient means of speedy progression that were initially unavailable upon release, so the frustration I felt is genuine. Put simply, Supaplex leaves a countless number of possibilities for the player to make mistakes, but only several possibilities to succeed. Every level must be beaten without any blunders made or be restarted. Vital to progressing are patience, coordination, and rational forethought, but sometimes that also requires foreknowledge of the level's structure and elements, which can only be acquired by prior experience just from the game; no preview of the entire map is shown at the level selection screen, and the camera is always bound to Murphy. It is then realized that the clock that begins and resets at the start of a level is useful for knowing how much time is at stake of being wasted, but despite it having an hour mark, a level's size constraints thankfully mean that it should never take nearly half that long. Sometimes, it takes several seconds.

Unfortunately, it can take hundreds of failures to pass even a single level. This game has exposed me as a stereotype of humans as fallible creatures who are prone to impatience, miscoordination, and fallacy. I cannot tell you how many times I have boxed in my tomato Pac-Man with zonks or simply miscoordinated my movements. It does not get more anticlimactic when I forfeit minutes-long runs to things that I would say result from brain cramps. Hours sunk in, and the average time it takes to complete a level increases. Throughout, I gape at close calls and facepalm over my fatal stupidity. It seems ludicrous how a game like Supaplex could possibly sustain our interest, let alone keep us addicted, but this game has taught me to not snap as dramatically and maintain a peaceful state of mind. It still should have had saved positions or checkpoints to save the time lost unnecessarily to pressing the wrong button or repeating the same thing, but at least I was rewarded a sense of immense joy after fleeing the maze and its troubles. I persevered to the end, clocked in at 43h:32m:29s, and was given a screen containing a developer's message congratulating me for beating their game, as well as their own record of 5h:39m:15s. I will not call it out as a bluff by someone who promised us that the game is beatable, but knowing how well I performed feels like a slap in the face.

Its price of £25.99 would suggest that this rocks-and-diamonds game blows all others out of the water. It doesn't. It's just your average good. If the developers were serious about delivering the ultimate experience, they should have considered a level editor, multiplayer, and perhaps another element, to name a few suggestions. Else, it should have been at least sold at a low price, especially since it is not much different from the hundreds of clones that litter the public domain library.

VERDICT: Rating this game was no easy task. I had to isolate all of my frustrations from all the times Supaplex has impressed me. First off, it is not a particularly special addition to the old genre of rocks-and-diamonds games, and it should have been at least marketed as a budget title. I still question how the playtesters overlooked adding checkpoints or other means of saving hours lost to trial-and-error. That said, I did enjoy the game's take on the traditionally adventure-oriented genre by considering many combinations of puzzles using only a few elements, and the levels themselves were creative about it. There is just enough variety in the puzzles to keep us figuring out what to do in the next level, and I can see someone replaying the game again to break their own and perhaps the creator's record. By the end of the day, it is not the solution to the millennia-old debate on epistemology, but it is something that could have been a lot worse.

In 1998, Sierra On-Line published Half-Life, a sci-fi thriller first-person shooter by Valve. It has since been called one of the greatest games, as it was an FPS whose story was actually narrated like a novel (for once, the press rejoiced), and was also known for the sheer beauty of the graphics, its ability to maintain a tense mood throughout, and supplanting the basic framework Quake laid for shooters to follow for years to come. Then in 2004 came the inevitable. A sequel was released, and for the same reasons it is also considered one of the greatest games. It was powered by the Source engine, whose might it could communicate better than any other title before or since, although it was not the first game to run on it. That game was Half-Life: Source, from the same year. It was essentially Valve's straight port of its 1998 classic to its newer Source engine, and, although it had some improvements such as level selection and water reflections, its critics saw it as a non-worthy upgrade that only served to divide the Half-Life community. However, it also inspired a team of upset fans to take their off time to embark on their own Source-based remake, built from the ground up and seeking to suture the communal rift Half-Life: Source created. For a long time, only the climactic levels of the game, the Xen world, were left out as unfinished, but after sixteen years of development, they were finally added in 2020. Was the wait well worth it, or did Crowbar Interactive squander all those years in what could be the most spectacular disappointment in at least a decade of gaming?

Black Mesa is an attempt to displace, or rather improve upon in its favor, Valve's own Source conversion. The remake starts off as in HL:S, with a splash screen, the in-game main menu background, and the familiar menus themselves, but with a difference: the splash screen is of Crowbar Interactive, the menu background is a level preview, and the menus' user interface is altered. The moment the game is begun, the player knows what to expect from it. While on board a train car, everything is larger, upscaled, and better contoured, the tone of which is felt throughout, and up ahead await Half-Life 2-based physics and puzzles to exploit and solve. Also noteworthy is the game's shift towards more roomy architecture, less so simple halls and tunnels, while still maintaining a linear gameplay.

There is not much else to say about the design changes, other than that there is more world scripting and interactivity and the characters are given more dialogue. Everything that made the original Half-Life great remains intact, only properly updated to take advantage of Source's capabilities, so I am getting to the point. The enemies' behavior is more sophisticated and their design made to match the style of the sequel. Some of the assets, such as the headcrab and the barnacle, are directly ripped from the sequels. On the behavior side, they are similarly comparable to the sequels, but some of their attacks are given an upgrade. The bullsquid, which used to spit acid in straight lines, now spits it spread out a little, the acid affected by gravity. It takes more than a little strafing to dodge its attacks, and if I am not mistaken, the player can even take damage from the acid splashing off nearby walls. An HECU soldier's grenade can actually be picked up by the player and tossed back at him. As a disclaimer, I only tested the game on the Hard difficulty setting, the actual difficulty of which seems comparable to the original, if not a tad tougher, to the best of my memory. The alien controllers, as first encountered when Gordon waits to jump into the portal to Xen in the Lambda Complex, make a shrilling sound that combined with their better clarified behavior is actually twice as terrifying, or at least the least bit so, compared to the original's screeches. My only quibble is the absence of leeches, small creatures that dwell in the water along with the much larger ichthyosaur. I did not think they were detrimental to the game's quality. Even a security guard says he will stay behind and not expose himself to sewage water laden with leeches, which apparently exist somewhere.

And now the moment of truth. Were the Xen levels worth waiting 16 years for? The answer is definitely. The moment Gordon breathes into the Borderworld, the player is in for a surprise. Everything is rebuilt from the ground up, and the presentation is an absolute spectacle, surrounded by flora and fauna, many landscaped islands, and distant stars and nebulae of space telescope quality, with evidence of human colonization in the Xen universe in the form of scientific bases along the way. These levels change my perspective on Valve's own Xen world. The old Borderworld was rather desolate and consisted of simple floating rocks, a few stations, pieces of Vortigaunt civilization here and there, and of course the grunt factory. I only just realized that the levels were short, and so the fun of exploring Xen ended all too soon. In Black Mesa, the Borderworld is an enormous oasis guaranteed to keep satisfying. I could go on about what I love about it, but to give a concise impression of the world, think of anything that has ever existed, or could ideally exist, from the bottom of the ocean, to a mineral-rich cave, to a jungle, all with a Half-Life spin. That's this world. I find it reminiscent of Star Wars. For one the buildings in the Vortigaunt village look like those on Tatooine, and for another the lushest areas look like the planets Dagobah and Kashyyyk. Another thing I notice is alien character development. Whereas players in 1998 were introduced to Vortigaunt slave life without much insight into how it worked, the characters in this remake are reintroduced with more clarity. The Vortigaunts are portrayed as humane, unlike their savage counterparts sent to Earth. They display a neutral and sometimes helpful affection towards Gordon throughout, only attacking when under the influence of an alien controller. They even have their own laboratory with artifacts collected from Black Mesa. When the action picks up, the levels almost look and play like a Doom reboot; simple but futuristic, fast, and explosive with much improved and better scripted boss fights. Apart from putting up with a crowd of Vortigaunts jibber-jabbering, which can become annoying, it is one of the rare moments where I think the fan recreation is actually better than the original developer's recreated, though to be fair, the fans were not subject to the same system and engine constraints as Valve in 1998. As a footnote, the old multiplayer deathmatch mode is still there, as are new maps for it, and sharing mods is made easier by Steam Workshop.

For all of its beauty and close attention to detail, Black Mesa seems to come at a cost of interactivity with the environment. The world seems to be more indestructible, as evidenced by the presence of fewer breakable objects mainly because objects like soda vending machines and trash bins can no longer be destroyed, enemy meat being harder to chop up into gibs, and even the absence of roaches to squash - things I liked about Half-Life but miss in this remake, along with instantaneous loading times and a few silly bugs, some of which occasionally crash the game. There is actually more interactivity overall, but there seems to be a higher ratio of things that cannot be used, broken, or moved. Another thing against this game is something that the small enthusiast team who tried (and largely succeeded) to right Valve's wrongs could not help, but is still relevant. The Source engine debuted in 2004, six years after the original Half-Life, and Black Mesa was finally fully released in 2020. By then, Source's success has been overshadowed by vastly technically superior games. To name just one of the many things exposing Source's decrepitude, the graphics and the resolutions of their textures are comparable to Half-Life 2, as opposed to a 2020 megahit, and my old GeForce GTX 1050 Ti can process all of the data at the highest settings quite well, never dropping below 30 frames. Even its gameplay is starting to resemble an early 2000s shooter. Sadly, switching to a modern engine like Source 2 and suitably redrawing the graphics and optimizing the code while still delivering the full game on time was impossible for a small group of fans who only built the game in their spare time. The project began in 2004, and Crowbar Interactive could not keep pace with the rapidly expanding technology. The result is what looks like a relic of the game's past self that aims to please modern audiences. The development of Black Mesa is an ugly allegory reminding us about the ever-increasing expenses of AAA game development that namely only corporations can afford.

VERDICT: Although Black Mesa relies on aged technology and does little to rejuvenate the gameplay beyond a simple nostalgia trip, it comes across feeling like a proper remake built using Valve's own standards thanks to the dedication, patience, and enthusiasm of Crowbar Interactive - something desperately missing in Half-Life: Source. In the end, I still prefer the old Half-Life, but, apart from the obvious, the Xen levels offer a real, meaningful reason anyone would ever prefer the remake. It was made by dissatisfied gamers for dissatisfied gamers, who can now rest happy that Half-Life has been given a modern overhaul.

If there is one thing about a video game giant that tends to be overlooked, it is Rockstar North's first game, a side-scrolling shooter for Amiga called Menace. Yes, that Rockstar, the same company founded in Dundee, Scotland, as DMA Design, and the same people behind megahits Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto. Published by Psygnosis, another young company with a massive future ahead of them based in Liverpool, under its new budget label, Psyclapse, both Menace and Blood Money would serve as the Scottish developer's easy entry into the video game market, for which their lemmings would later invade millions of people's computers and their gang-related activity would show up on the screens of millions more. In this review, I bring Rockstar's foray into the gaming world back into the spotlight.

In Menace, six ruthless dictators from galaxies from which they were exiled wreak havoc across space, using worlds they have destroyed to create Draconia, a planet "of fear and death." Inhabiting Draconia are the most abominable lifeforms to ever exist, also created by the dictators in their image. As a large-scale attack is estimated to cost thousands in casualties, it is decided that one fighter craft should be sent to penetrate the planetary defense systems undetected. All the odds are against the one pilot, but they, the player, may have a shot at spelling doom to their reign of terror. As the game runs, transforming the Amiga into a miniature arcade cabinet, the player is accompanied by a soundtrack of thrashing, syncopated electronic metal and graphics that make even the same year's venerable Super Mario Bros. 3 look antiquated. Ignore the standard story for a moment, and we are off to an already excellent start. Besides, the story is not what is front and center.

With a joystick ready, the player selects out of two difficulty modes: rookie and expert, with expert doubling the player's score. One will probably select rookie out of instinct, as I had, that it will probably require playing it more than once before beating it, on which they would be correct. Presented before the player is a column of six zones to blow up in order: sea, technology, macabre, jungle, classical antiquity, and a rocky plateau containing Draconia's nerve center, literally. I will not spoil the description of that boss or any others, but to have an idea of what enemies one will be battling across the zones, the assortment includes jellyfish, ships and drones, cave bats, arachnids, dragonflies, and pterodactyls; flying projectiles like bubbles, disks, rockets, bones, bricks, and meteors; and bizarre creatures like underwater seed pods, jellyfish, Cyberman heads, goblin heads, armed (likely nonhuman) astronauts the size of the player's ship, and what-even. Throughout the levels, only one kind of the enemies appears at a time. The player's ship starts off with a simple energy gun and can move across the screen in any direction the player points their joystick while facing rightward. Destroying enemies rewards points. Blow up all of a single kind in a segment, and one sees a piece of space debris in the form of a power-up. It appears as a 1,000-bonus-point power-up, but it can be shot to cycle through six other types of power-ups: cannons, lasers, maneuverability, up to two turrets, an invulnerability force field, and full shield restoration. The latter six are necessary for beating the game, as proven by the later zones. Collecting a cannon or laser power-up once, will mount a dual-cannon system or laser gun to the ship, respectively, and collecting them again will charge up those weapons. I like how my fighter looks almost like an X-wing when the lasers and cannons are mounted.

As for the zones, they all have their own background and still scenery that includes underwater seedpods, coral, and other marine flora; rockets, power generators, and other space installations, some with pipes; slithering snakes and a ceiling of inner small intestinal wall with hanging bloody skulls; trees and overgrown plants and vines; Greco-Roman architecture with deathly symbols slightly in ruins; and rocky hills, pillars, and arches. It is amazing how much level of detail was put into the visuals, and that is just judging by 1988's standards, comparable even to Shadow of the Beast, another Psygnosis game released the very next year. Touching anything harmful does not crash one's ship or destroy it, but rather drains one's shields. The game ends the moment its shields are depleted and the ship scrapes any hazard, which will crash it. Perhaps they were good enough to make it to the top 8 high scores. If so, they can input their name like a typical arcade shoot 'em up. Also like an arcade game from the late-1980s is the option the player has to continue the game with all of their fighter's upgrades removed and the score reset. I should note that when continuing on the latter half of the levels, the player should execute their run with a great deal of precision (with an extreme amount on the last zone). While not impossible, one does need to find an opportunity to kill all enemies for a power-up, acquire the right one, waste as few shields as possible, and also pay attention to how the enemies behave, as well as the order in which they appear, for even one mistake may guarantee that "you have proven no match for the defences of Draconia". Once one has flown to the other end of the level, the player then encounters a boss ready to pulverize their ship. Although they will inflict pain, they are not as fearsome as they seem. If the player has sufficient power-ups, they can easily shoot the boss's eye, core, or heart out within mere seconds, and the player is rewarded a fireworks display of the monster disintegrating while their score climbs rapidly. It should be noted that the bosses are not willing to put up with long fights, as they will try to hasten the ship's demise after a while of stalemate.

Okay, six bosses destroyed, six defense systems disabled, and now I return to my starship as I watch the wretched world behind me crumble and explode before my fleet. It is all over now - except that it is not. The Draconians will come back for revenge and rebuild the planet, and one will need to destroy the six zones again in the same order as before. My upgrades from my previous mission are kept, but so are my shields in critical condition. I replay the first level and crash my ship somehow. At first, I could not figure out what could have caused that to happen, but I did input my high score and name in second place. The next thing I did was to replay the game in expert mode, the harder difficulty level that doubles the points. At first, I could not see the difference between the two modes besides the point multiplier. The enemies are no deadlier or tougher, and my health and weapons remain the same. However, I noticed that my ship was taking damage from an unknown source. I was confused, but quickly found that the source of my trouble was the terrain. The terrain, which I had assumed was simply decoration themed for each of the zones, was added to come to life when the player selects expert mode. Okay, that is stretching it since the scenery is still static, but it is a whole other level to fight through the heart of Draconia and not let the terrain scrape one's ship. I honestly did not expect that, which is why I was more enthusiastic than I probably ought to have been. It is indeed a lot harder than it looks, but it justifies doubling the points. It turns out that the landscape becomes harmful to scrape in rookie mode after one beats the game the first time, although there is no point multiplier. I deduced that that was the cause of my ship's crash the first time I beat the game and tried to increase my score. In case anyone is curious, I completed the game in expert mode to see whether anything related to the gameplay changes afterwards, and it is the same, with the point multiplier still intact.

There is not much left to write about this game. Menace is an arcade shoot 'em up whose performance relies on eye-candy and aggressive synths and guitars and less so on the gameplay and concept, both of which are standard. There are many shoot 'em ups like this with similar gameplay and concept. It is definitely not the first of its kind, but neither is it the last. Its lack of individuality means that if one gets hooked on to this game the way it did me, it would be a matter of hours of trying to beat the final boss and maybe again on expert mode before moving on to another game. One will more likely get briefly hooked than not. After all, a gamer in 1988 with an Amiga would be foolish to forgo the game's assets and not visit an arcade with games of comparable quality, and it being a budget title, one could have done a lot worse then.

VERDICT: Rockstar North embarked on its career spanning decades with a game good enough to attract notice from a handful of Amiga owners in the United Kingdom and expand its budget satisfactorily. Menace is technically a good shoot 'em up, but it is as good a shoot 'em up as any I had ever seen. The lack of individuality precludes the likelihood of weeks-long replayability, although to gamers who had to put up with a narrow selection of games with such superior visuals and audio in the desktop world compared to arcades or even console gamers, I cannot rule that out as impossible. I suppose it is not impossible for those today who play these sorts of games for the purpose of retrogaming. Nevertheless, we should appreciate the fact that as Rockstar's first game, it helped it gain a presence in the gaming community to which the studio would introduce megahit franchises, including one still produced to this day.

The Commodore Amiga is enjoying its peak popularity. Developers, predominantly in Europe, are recognizing the brand of computers as the desktop gaming platform, with more still joining the scene. One of them is a newly founded company based in Wakefield, England, called Team17, formed from a merger between publisher 17-Bit Software and Swedish developer Team 7. For the year 1991, Team17, which will become one of the oldest-living independent game studios in the United Kingdom, enters the Amiga scene to develop hit titles for those computers. Its second project, Alien Breed, will prove to be the company's best-selling franchise for years to come until Worms in 1995, spawning sequels and reboots.

Alien Breed is a science-fiction shoot 'em up game released originally for Amiga. It is best described as "Alien meets Gauntlet". Set in the future, two peacekeeping space marines in an unstable galaxy return to their space headquarters via the lightly-armed IPCC Miraculous for a break after a routine six-month patrol, but are ordered to first examine another space station - a high-security research center - that had just cut off all transmissions to the federative headquarters, where surprise awaits them. Okay, it is not an exact ripoff of the Alien franchise, specifically the Aliens film, but the game does have a horror theme, with enemies ranging from aliens with long, cylindrical skulls to tailed crab- and worm-like lifeforms, all reminiscent of the various stages of the Xenomorph from the film. Other assets are also borrowed heavily from the franchise, including the visuals and the motion tracker, which for this game has been repurposed as a purchasable navigation system for each deck of the space station. No graphic violence, though. Its gameplay, on the other hand, largely imitates Gauntlet. Across maze-like structures viewed from the top down, enemies spawn endlessly, and one must fight one's way through to reach point B, collecting resources lying on the ground along the way, in this case ammo, keys that can unlock any door but be used once, and credits. And yes, the enemies do charge at the player character in single file and disappear if they touch him, inflicting damage.

The similarities between it and Gauntlet end where Alien Breed stresses survival and using resources sparingly to escape the station. It is mid-paced and short. It starts off easy, but rapidly ascends in difficulty. Some rooms have Intex terminals the player can access. These valuable computers all dispense weapons and items in exchange for credits the player has picked up and have a built-in radar of the current deck and the player's position. The player is already equipped with a machine gun, which is useful in its own right, but my favorite is the one that fires lasers, easily killing the enemies and bouncing all over the place. I do wish that the weapons were more balanced since I find some cheaper guns like the plasma shotgun to be more effective than the flamethrower, which I wish I could say is one of my favorite weapons. As far as the items, they include the device containing the map of the deck, an ammo clip, a first aid kit, six keys, and an extra life. The map is very handy for an item that is the cheapest to buy, because one can see details of the entire deck such as which doors are locked. In addition, unlike the terminal's radar, it also displays where one's objectives are, and can be pulled up any time. Interactions with both devices are not in real time, and the terminals are the only means of acquiring a weapon and almost certainly a necessity when ammo or keys are depleted.

One of the things Alien Breed succeeds in capturing is its dark, gritty atmosphere. The entire space station is seemingly devoid of humans other than the one or two mercenaries who returned to the station, only infested by endless hordes of aliens lurking deep in corners. There is no time limit for the most part, but vital resources are limited and can easily be exhausted, especially if squandered, and one must know the way to the elevator to escape the blast of the self-destructing deck once the sequence is triggered. Even the Intex terminals' and the electronic map device's somewhat fuzzy displays have a creepy impression to them. The main menu music plays each time one sees the game over screen (which beginners can expect to see many times hours into the game), but the combination sounds awfully ominous. The constant threat of death or making a deadly error seems to convey a sense of genuine fear. It is not a real horror game, but it nonetheless keeps the tension high.

Adding to the fear is the game's difficulty, because of which I was hooked onto this game for days. Find plenty of keys, stock up on ammo, and shoot in the direction you move. Sounds simple, except it is not. Enemies from all directions do not stop spawning off-screen. Aliens may pop out through openings in places one would least expect or feel safe. Ammo must be conserved, and it is sometimes better to flee overwhelming forces than to fight them and risk letting one grab the player character by the arm. Traps and one-way passages abound. It is usually worth exploring rooms that are entirely optional but contain resources, credits, and maybe an extra life, though not without danger up ahead. One is better off leaving many doors locked to save keys, let alone controlling their impulse to unlock them. Speaking of doors, there are fire doors of which it is actually an easy mistake to make to lock oneself on the wrong side. Pay too little attention to your resources depleting, and you can expect to encounter significant challenges. These mistakes are often fatal, accounting for many game over screens received by the careless player. It is great because the game demands that the player defend oneself against hundreds of deadly aliens _and_ use their resources economically. In this Doom-like scenario where everything that moves is an enemy, the experience can be lonely, but thankfully a second player can join the first at the start of the game to take part in the carnage. While two mercenaries means double the firepower, their inventory is not shared (except for credits if that option is turned on beforehand), and the two must save some resources for the one who needs them more.

Alien Breed has only six levels, which is partially compensated by its difficulty. It indeed took me days to finally complete all of them, and I was incentivized to come back each time I lost the game. However, after finishing it, the incentive is gone. I explored most of every map there is. I can predict the remainder of the rooms I had not explored and the experience to be had there to be familiar. The only thing left I could do is to replay the game for a higher score or play it with a friend. Once one familiarizes oneself with the six levels and where one needs to go, it takes less than an hour to beat the game. It is short, as in really short, and it would be a while before the player returns to beat it again. Moreover, there are some minor but annoying bugs such as clipping into a wall and staying stuck there, leading to a loss, but these bugs are so rare and even rarer the more severe they get that they should not interfere with the long-term enjoyment of the game.

VERDICT: Alien Breed is not the most original game that exists. Far from it. There have been many science-fiction thrillers before and since, including the Alien franchise it shamelessly borrowed from. The Gauntlet subgenre of shoot 'em ups had already been tried to death. Its derivative concept is easily forgettable and overshadowed by more original works. However, it was just one title that fully demonstrated what Amiga was made to be: a machine with console horsepower that produces games with semi-photographic visuals, realistic or digitized sound, and it did so while delivering an experience not easily replicated on other platforms at the time. It is a game by the greats of Team17, and while the thrills of decimating the alien breed last too short to make it replayable in the long run, the horror series' chaotic, havoc-wreaking gameplay was the team's selling point until Worms, its other chaotic, havoc-wreaking franchise.

The Sega Genesis was a few years old. The 16-bit console already shipped with an original Sega title, but Altered Beast failed to jumpstart the console's sales. Sega surmised that its console's pack-in game should be replaced with one that would not only capture a much wider demographic, but also push the console's Motorola 68000 processor to the limits. No game communicates the console's capabilities as effectively as Sonic the Hedgehog, which seems to be premised on that, and it does so without any slowdowns, frame skips, or apparent compromises in its graphics or gameplay. As a presentation, Sonic clearly catapulted the Genesis to the status as the second-best-selling console of its generation. Read more to see how it fared as a game.

After the owner inserts the cartridge containing the game into the console, the first thing that flashes is a splash screen for Sega and its name sung out before cutting to an unfamiliar name, Sonic Team, its developer. Then, the title screen appears as a blissful vista of a sea with waves and distant grassy landscape under a cloudy blue sky, an impossible number of layers of which scroll smoothly at different speeds as the camera pans rightward. Floating in the middle is a winged semi-heraldic emblem and the titular character emerging from its dark field to wag his index finger. The game's story is that a mad scientist named Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik is snatching creatures on an island and powering robots with them stuffed inside for the evil purpose of who-knows-what, and only one person - a hedgehog with a proportionally small round body named Sonic - can thwart his plans and free the animals. Little happens until after Sonic completes his objectives. A familiar plot, but a start for a long-running series.

The game starts off with the hedgehog, sporting gloves and a pair of red sneakers, ready to speed rightward on the aforementioned island, in a grassy area called Green Hill Zone. It is a paradise rich in vegetation, waterfalls, loops, ramps, totem poles, and, before Dr. Robotnik's invasion, creatures. Now, however, the entire island is populated with his dangerous robots that Sonic must battle through as he chases the portly villain all the way to his lair. As he does, the player is initially accompanied by the zone's cheery tune so recognizable that the Genesis's instruments are virtually impossible to separate from thoughts of the franchise.

To understand its gameplay, in many ways, Sonic the Hedgehog trails behind the heels of Super Mario Bros. Touching anything harmful kills the protagonist. Pounding enemies in one jump grants point combinations. One hundred of something - in this case gold rings - awards an extra life. Each zone has a boss fight at the end. However, there are no mushrooms or fire flowers, the world has slopes and is not blocky, and even the sole human and the animal characters have reversed moral roles. The slopes prove to be a key element to the gameplay, but first I must explain Sonic's powers. He jumps, runs, and can coast the level structure by rolling like a ball, but more importantly, he alternates between his ball and normal forms. He switches to ball mode every time he jumps or rolls, and reverts to normal mode every time he lands on the ground, comes to a standstill after rolling, or takes a hit. Only in ball mode can he break open item boxes and smack enemies. It takes merely a D-pad and one "jump" button to perform these actions. Equally important is that besides rewarding end-of-level bonus points, possessing at least one gold ring keeps Sonic safe from harm, save for bottomless pits and crushes by two solid walls, but they are dropped each time he touches a hazard. Brief immunity to further damage is conferred to Sonic, and the rings can be picked back up before disappearing.

Back to the experience. Progression across all 19 levels in six zones is linear, but the levels have many paths to take, scattered rings to collect, and secrets to find - and scenery worth gazing. There are no sewers, but Sonic does cross a dilapidated dungeon, a pinball park with bouncy bumpers, a booby-trapped temple, and highways atop a shiny city under a starry night. The alternative paths often lead to the waypoint at the end of the level that Sonic must pass by, but sometimes lead to short dead ends. The enemies consist of Dr. Robotnik's metal crabs, bees, piranhas, large caterpillars, pigs, and other contractions, including some that are too prickly for a vulnerable Sonic to touch. Destroying a robot frees the creature used to power it, resembling a pig, a rabbit, a penguin, a chicken, or a few others. Only one contraction, a proximity bomb, has no creature encapsulated. Every other area has one or more terminal-like boxes displaying what item is inside, being 10 rings, a shield that can take one hit and saves the player's frustration over losing so many rings, invulnerability to most hazards, an extra life, or a pair of Power Sneakers. The sneakers are excellent for reaching sonic speeds, bypassing many obstacles, and recovering momentum more swiftly, and they still have good traction. Every last level of the six zones has a boss fight with Dr. Robotnik, usually in his one-man flying vehicle. The fights are short, but they establish the series-long fact that, for all of his intellectual prowess, he cannot outsmart his archnemesis.

As one plays, they come to appreciate the game's level design. Everything seems structured and positioned to allow for at least one speedy solution to a level out of all slower others: springs, platforms, boxes, and even enemies to exploit. The player is incentivized to complete levels for a time bonus, including a hefty one if done extremely fast. Only some levels allow for such speedy completion, sadly, and the player is sometimes more rewarded just destroying as many enemies and carrying as many rings to the waypoint as possible. The slopes and ramps come into play here. They stress momentum as a significant gameplay element. Momentum is built as Sonic accelerates. Sonic can use the momentum to extend the length and height of his jumps, especially when climbing up ramps. He can also slide down a slope in his ball form to travel even faster. This all allows for many possibilities taking advantage of the physics, and the game extensively does that for areas and items that are otherwise impossible to reach. The levels are also rich in hidden bonuses, from boxes hiding in trees to walls that are actually secret passageways to difficult-to-reach areas, some with a high risk-versus-benefit ratio. Carry 50 rings to the waypoint, and a giant gold ring will appear through which Sonic can hop, taking him to a special, rotating stage with a hundred or so rings to collect. It becomes apparent that the goal of the stage is to collect a gemstone called a Chaos Emerald and not fall off. The Chaos Emeralds seemingly have no effect on the actual gameplay, but after the player defeats Dr. Robotnik in his lair, crumbles his robot army, and receives a sweet ending, they are shown a screen of the villain either comedically infuriated or boasting all of the Chaos Emeralds that they missed while a text appears reading "TRY AGAIN". It turns out that the who-knows-what purpose of his robots was to help him find the six powerful Chaos Emeralds holding the island together with which he would conquer the world.

The fluidity of the gameplay and the controls is worth noting. Sonic jumps or bounces higher the longer one holds down the jump button. He can change directions while in midair. As he coasts in his ball form, he can also brake or pounce on enemies without loss of momentum. Controlling Sonic is thus fairly easy, but the charm of the gameplay is maintaining a speedy yet elegant momentum. One needs to find the right moves for different situations and then coordinate them. When the player does, they can reap huge point combinations and larger end-of-level time bonuses. As said before, there are more incentives to doing the same thing but in shorter times, and even Sonic will stare at the player impatiently if he stands idly for about five seconds. My only gripe is that when one loses momentum (usually as a result of human error), it is a little work to build it back. When the player presses left or right, rather than immediately bolting off from his stationary position, Sonic more gracefully accelerates to top speed in about two seconds. It is less than ideal when, say, Sonic takes several seconds to build enough momentum to retain his inertia when smashing through a weak wall. Fortunately, Sonic Spin Dash mechanic in the very next game in the series fixed that.

The camera is set to be as centered on Sonic as possible without panning over the level's boundaries. The player has a relatively shortsighted view of their surroundings, making running into things too easy. Without strong prior experience of the levels, it is also too easy to miss or forget cues to certain situations, including minute but crucial details such as hazards and falls. Until these cues are memorized, it often requires that the player tread more cautiously, which somewhat detracts from the spirit of the series. It is the game's only design blunder, and one that impedes long-term playability.

VERDICT: With Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega had found a winner. It aimed for a fast game about a fast character who runs fast across, wasting no effort in the process. It is fast, but it misses some marks in saving the effort. It is more work than I would like for the player to know what is up ahead and maintaining momentum, let alone recovering it. This game is not perfect, but it is easy to see how its concept inevitably spawned countless works continuing on the previous and persisting to this day. Sonic came close to taking the throne of King Mario as the greatest platformer, but the ambitious hedgehog dealt a blow in a fierce competition that threatened the latter's standing for a decade.

There are many real-life experiences to which many of us have little or no access. The solution is normally to simulate them, and how the simulation is done affects how accurate the experience. Some simulators take for granted details that are important yet so small as to be ignored, sometimes inadvertently. Others that are more conscious about those details rely on the work of physicists and other experts in relevant fields. Celeris' and Interplay's Virtual Pool falls under the latter category, and it is as close to being the ideal pool simulator for DOS as it is one for the real experience.

Virtual Pool introduces us to a still photograph of the pool table on which the player will play, along with buttons on the left and right sides. The left buttons take us to watch any of the full-motion videos, ranging in subjects from a short animated history of pool; to the rules of the four variations of pool found in Virtual Pool; 8-Ball, 9-Ball, Straight Pool, and Rotation; and to learning the techniques of shooting and taking tips from pool champion "Machine Gun" Lou Butera. The right buttons are for playing the game, configuring the pool room and table cloth color (although the latest full version I tested, version 1.66, comes with a single room and four colors, and I was unable to verify whether players could create their own rooms), and of course exiting. Note how the tutorial buttons are on the left side instead of the other way around. It is a good presentation for intermediates and new players, as well as everyone who played real pool recreationally, but did not actually know some of the basic rules and terminology. I can relate to that.

As you start the game, you will realize that the graphics are not as detailed as the menu photograph, but that is okay. This is a DOS game, and Virtual Pool knows how to strike a balance between quality and speed. It did not take an expensive computer to run the game then, but Virtual Pool features truly 3D graphics that can be displayed up to resolutions as high as 1024×768, while still using 8-bit color. Even the balls are convincingly 3D, where their colors revolve realistically around the center when moving. After selecting one of the four games, the experience begins where the cue ball is automatically placed halfway between the head spot and the head rail, though if the player has the ball in hand, it may be moved anywhere in the kitchen or, in some games and under circumstances, on the table. The camera is positioned over a cue that is lined up ready to strike the center of the ball, as if one were taking a stance for shooting. One can zoom in and out, look from above or horizontally, and even get a top-down view of the current table. The table can be viewed from anywhere and from any angle, and one can also move the center of the screen in order to see the rest of the table without adjusting one's aim. Some shots are particularly sensitive to even the slightest changes in aim, so Celeris kindly gives us the ability to fine-tune our aim. Other details can be adjusted to achieve massé shots, such as the height of the cue butt and the position of the ball's contact point with the cue tip to apply spin to the ball by the term's definition. When that is done, a key is held down to begin shooting, and one then hits the cue ball as hard as they thrust their mouse. The goal is to win a preset number of games before the opponent does.

I have studied the ball physics for days up to this point, and I am still intrigued by it. It works as a ball simulator that is just one virtual equivalent to an office toy, albeit of educational nature. Just like real pool, Virtual Pool has a steep learning curve that can take days or weeks before one can achieve better precision. Learning it is improved by both the ability in practice sessions to undo one's shots and the fact that there is a replay mode that plays back last shots from speeds x1 to x1/8. The latter is useful for shots that are so well executed that one will review them as something to be proud of, and for shots that are so poorly done that one needs to review them to accept that mistakes were made. Another factor is the ability also in practice mode to view the trajectory lines of one's shots and adjust them according to how much force is required to make the shots. The significant thing about the physics is the ability to perform massé shots, as stated before. A trained player could use those shots to escape fouls. The game even takes into account the "throw" aspect, where the spin or angle of the cue ball "throws" the object ball off of the impact line between the two. If a game takes a long time to complete, it can be saved and loaded later. One can also use this to save pool tables set up for specific trick shots in practice, where the player can move, spot, and pocket any ball on the table.

Granted, it should be noted that people who play Virtual Pool do not immediately become good at real pool and vice versa, and unfortunately neither it nor any pool simulator that I am aware of can help that because these two games require different motor skills to do the same thing: one using the mouse and the other a real cue. Playing one game does not improve our coordination used for the other. This does not necessarily render Virtual Pool entirely useless. In fact, the game has things that are not found in real pool. As noted, the player can see the trajectory lines of their shots in Virtual Pool, but can only imagine them in real life. Secondly, in addition to local multiplayer, there is also a mode where two players compete on separate machines over a network. Players can send chat messages, and the host can even load save files so that they can resume where left off upon reconvening. Finally, the computer makes for a formidable rival to anyone who has no one else willing to join them. At the start of a match, one selects a difficulty that based on my observation ranges from a novice who seems only good at simple shots to a professional who rarely makes any mistakes. Of virtual and real pool, what is lacking in one version is made up for in the other.

Using the rule books of the World Pool-Billiard Association and the Billiard Congress of America, I did thorough research on the general rules of pocket billiards and the four games of Virtual Pool, and for the most part, I am quite impressed. Never mind the fouls of pool that are recognized here. The game goes down to details that a hobbyist might never assume have existed. These include the head string not being part of the kitchen and object balls being spotted in numerical order. It also includes other details such as even the one where the breaker has the highest chances of pocketing the nine-ball in the namesake game when shooting from a kitchen area that lies outside of the break box. It is jargon, but the point is that the game enforces these seemingly petty rules in a way that only the most observant would notice (unless one reads the video game's manual), and makes the gameplay consistent with the official rules of real pool. A few things make me grudge, though. For one, the WPBA and the BCA set forth a rule where the player who has the cue ball in hand must first either shoot an object ball outside of the kitchen or cause the cue ball to cross the head string before returning and hitting the in-kitchen ball. This is not the case in Virtual Pool, where the rule is absent. The system of miscalling shots in eight-ball and straight pool could have been better implemented, too. It seems to only exist for players who understand the concept of calling and prefer honesty over winning. For everyone else not knowing better about the rules, it simply benefits the opponent. At least the computer knows how to use it.

The physics, however fascinating, are not entirely flawless, either. Remember what I said about being able to perform massé shots and spin the ball to change its trajectories? You might have noticed that I made no mention of performing jump shots. Sadly, it is not possible to cause any ball to jump. All of the balls are tethered to the playing area until they are driven onto the pockets, where they immediately disappear. There is one physical aspect of the game that has my attention: that the cue stick cannot be obstructed by anything, meaning that it can slide through object balls without apparently even grazing them or the rails of the table. Think about how much that makes sense. Having only four games and a practice mode can become old. On the bright side, Celeris did create a spin-off called Virtual Snooker.

VERDICT: Besides these shortcomings, a few simulators could claim the title as a potential source of study. Of course, limitations to what simulators can teach us are always expected, and Virtual Pool is no different. Obviously it cannot teach us fine motor skills such as how to hold a cue stick, much less how to shoot properly. One is arguably better off playing on a real pool table. However, because the game strives to serve as a digital conversion of pool, it can teach us about the many known factors influencing the trajectory of the pool balls. It also serves as a reliable referee that reminds us about and enforces the rules, and there is that useful full-motion video library. We can then apply that knowledge to the mechanics of real pool, and that is why I agree with the package's assertion that it will improve one's skills in real pool. Virtual Pool is also good as an inexpensive alternative and for when one does not have enough room in their house, though you may want to check out its sequels.

It takes creative talent to program a game severely limited by its hardware by today's standards that makes the most out of what little it could have, and what little it does have. Chuck Sommerville showed his talent with Chip's Challenge, a top-down puzzle game that is deceptively simple, but is surprisingly frustrating if you are looking for casual play, which surprisingly for a puzzle game you will not be able to find here.

A schoolboy and computer nerd named Chip wants to join the computer club of Melinda, another nerd and schoolgirl, but he must first cross her clubhouse, a mysterious world where just about everything outlandish is to be expected. Chip must collect along the way computer chips while also making use of resources available to him to progress. The standard plot might not entail a sense of pseudo-thrills to be had from danger-ridden adventures like crystal caves and temples stowed with gold deposits in 1980s gaming, but it is compensated for by the game's equally minimalist elements, so it will do. You may be most familiar with the Windows version of the game since it was included in one of the Microsoft Entertainment Packs in 1992, but it was originally released for the Atari Lynx in 1989. My favorite versions are for Windows, DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST, the first because of the graphics and mouse support and the rest because of the graphical style faithful to the Lynx version and the animation of the graphics, which the former is missing. It should be stressed that using the mouse for movement has limitations, as Chip can be commanded to move anywhere on the screen as long as no more than two directions are involved. Any more will cause him to bump into a wall and stop there. The second pitfall is that the commands do not factor in hazards. Lastly, using the keyboard does not cancel out mouse commands, so if one frequently alternates between the two devices, similar trouble may ensue. It is quite frustrating since the mouse serves as a stressless alternative for what is best used with precision. At least using the mouse is not obligatory to play the game, and one uses the keyboard more often than not anyway.

In Chip's Challenge, creativity is making the most out of what little there is. Even with 144 levels (and very few cleverly secret ones), there is only one goal being to reach the exit under the two possible conditions of collecting enough chips and beating the clock, as well as only four colored door keys; items with which to cross tiles easily and safely; nine enemies referred to as monsters, each with their own properties and one of which is oddly frightening for reasons I will let you find out; pushable blocks; four colored buttons performing functions; and other obstacles. All of the game is confined within a board of 32 squares by 32 in an environment where the only controls are four keys for perpendicular movement. There is no looking ahead beyond four squares from the player's viewpoint, except when Chip is close to one of the board's sides, at which point the camera will not move further. I get impressions of playing something a bit more clever than Sokoban and Boulder Dash-two other even deceptively simpler games from the same decade. Blocks cannot be pulled and so may obstruct Chip, but he can push the blocks into the water to expand the floor. The monsters' behavior can be manipulated by digging sand. Even blocks sliding back to Chip will crush him, as does everything hazardous when stepped on. This game takes those elements and enhances them with more variety, leading to puzzles that involve cloning blocks and monsters, bombs to clear, and slippery ice to slide on.

I learned that patience and perseverance form the core of Chip's Challenge. Some puzzles involve lengthy tasks such as mazes and pushing blocks. The process can become mundane, but to be fair, the tedium normally occurs when one has already become good at the game and so would find earlier, unchallenging levels boring. And despite the gameplay being simple to learn and there being only four keys of movement, the game could not get any more callous. In fact, the clubhouse is filled with so many traps and hazards, running into any of which will kill Chip, and I can guarantee that anyone will die a ridiculous number of times before they complete the game. Under a few blocks are items or chips, and under a few others are booby traps. Arrowed and icy floors may drag Chip into imminent doom. Walking over thieves causes Chip to lose his gear with which to cross obstacles without trouble. You will gasp the moment a monster suddenly emerges from one of the sides of the screen and you quickly rush to stay out of its path. You almost certainly start off as unlucky, but as you fail and restart, you always come closer to discovering the way to complete a puzzle. It is not supposed to be a particularly intense experience, but it seems to be chaotic enough so as to not make it casual either.

And once you have completed all of the puzzles, you may be tasked with trying to find the secrets and Easter eggs or, for replay value, try to improve your personal bests by running Chip as fast as possible, which in retrospect is very ideal for speedrunning. Better yet, there exist community-made levels and level editors. I calculated how many theoretical levels there could be, which is at least (32²) ^ 92, or nearly nine thousand nonagintillion. As for the number of actually solvable levels, it is far much lower, but I am sure the number is still impossibly high, and if you go down that route, you are only beginning to discover the true size of an otherwise tiny game like Chip's Challenge.

The most grueling aspect I find about the game is one that hurts it the most. Every level must be completed without making any mistakes. There is no saving in-game, nor are there checkpoints or even a simple undo button, and with death inevitable at dozens or hundreds of points in anyone's first playthrough, it gets as good as it would suggest. Some of these mistakes result from me being simply dumb and not seeing the solution that is in front of me, but the rest involve walking straight into a hazard either by accident or by bad luck. It does strictly count as my fault, but human nature does not guarantee that we will not press the wrong button. Indeed, there are levels that can last as long as 15 minutes as one tries to find the solution. I have made quite a few such mistakes, and the time waste has been consistently irritating. At one point, I actually had to get out of my seat and walk around for a few seconds before returning to, and eventually completing, one puzzle. The bad luck part is sometimes caused by monsters occasionally occupying squares and being impossible to avoid after Chip uses a teleporter or slides on ice. In my entire playthrough, I do not recall ever seeing a monster *randomly* occupy one off-screen square instead of another and sliding on ice just to die to it, so technically it can be worked around. Still, it begs the question as to why there were no measures taken to cut the time loss and prevent parts of levels the player knows how to solve and has been solving from becoming boring. Redeemably, should you need to restart a level so many times that it is giving you grief, you are given the option to skip it.

VERDICT: It was difficult to assess the game's real difficulty because of the frustrations I experienced on the harder and longer levels, which does greatly affect my scoring, and occasionally pressing the wrong button as human nature does not help. However, I have determined that a lot of these frustrations can be avoided by maneuvering Chip more carefully, and the experience does get better when we are patient. Those looking for straightforward gaming probably will not find it here, and may never take the opportunity to complete the game, but if they are patient enough about completing it, there is a great sense of relief and satisfaction to be had in the end, and a good deal of fun and personal enjoyment along the way.

If you thought you could not further ingest truly 3D mines you had dived into, you will find out that was only the beginning. Now you are plunging deeper in space and deeper in tunnels with more danger to entertain you, and for longer periods of time. Just as you come back to claim your reward from the largest mining bureaucracy after cleansing the Solar System's mines of murderous robots infected with an extraterrestrial virus, your employer informs you that you must clear more robots located deeper in space. You are forced to accept the quest with the threat of lawsuits and forfeiture of your reward should you have refused. You also have familiar orders to find hostages in the mines and whack your ship into them. Obviously they need to be rescued. It is a simple story, but as you take over the controls of the mercenary Material Defender, you will soon see why this sequel shook its rivals.

The core of the sequel remains the same, but it does boast many features and much-needed improvements. Its engine is more powerful, graphics are more clear-cut, and digital sound gets a fidelity upgrade. Some official patches even allow it to use hardware-accelerated graphics, and just like the original, Descent II officially supports virtual reality. To be realistic, it has some of what the present's standards would call 1990s clichés (minimal plot, shoot everything that moves, find keys to unlock doors, reach the exit), but Descent II is ahead of its time and sometimes feels like an actual modern first-person shooter. Even the lighting has been improved to the point where lights can now be shot out. While one can alternatively listen to the six standard MIDI tracks or no music at all, we are clearly meant to listen to the built-in digital CD soundtrack featuring industrial metal, some of which is composed by artists such as Skinny Puppy and Type O Negative. The latter better fits the mood of thrashing enemy after enemy and other objects deep in outer space and in a fairly destructive environment. As an interesting feature, while it may no longer be relevant for modern PCs, it is possible to load audio CDs and play their soundtracks instead.

The wireframe automap is still readily accessible and justified, but can still be confusing to use for viewing complex structures of the map. Fortunately, we have the most important addition to the series: the Guide-Bot, a tour guide and the only robot throughout the entire game not corrupted by the nasty alien virus. This robot is not cumbersome to use, and while combatively passive throughout, firing only flares to light up dark rooms, it is quite knowledgeable about the mines. In each level, the Guide-Bot is trapped in a cell normally not far from the entrance which must be located in order to release it. The player can then command it to find things such as a shield, a robot, a hostage, or a player-dropped marker. The default command is finding the next objective, which is locating either the next colored door key or the mine's reactor or boss robot to destroy. The Guide-Bot will come back to the player if the two go far apart, and ultimately it makes navigating the mines faster and more straightforward than using the automap. The Guide-Bot does have minor shortcomings, such as accidentally firing its flares at the player's ship and not factoring in the player's limited arsenal, leading it to find weapons the player cannot collect. At least its camera can be used to see what it is seeing. I would also like to note that, based on my testing, the Guide-Bot cannot collide with the player and seems to only take damage from the blasts of explosions; non-explosive weapons do none, interestingly.

I notice that the Descent II levels are more detailed and appear to make more use of elevation, whereas the original's levels are relatively more horizontal and give me impressions of flying through a little more than simple networks of tunnels and jointed boxy rooms. The rooms and tunnels in Descent II are less boxy and more cavernous. I say "more cavernous" instead of describing the levels themselves as larger because, while I could not conclude whether the levels outsize the original's, they do seem to be less claustrophobic. Now it is time to share my experiences with Descent II, which are very similar to the first Descent game. It is packed with surprises, literally. While the robots' AI is not drastically different from the previous cast's (some of them will still remain inside door-sealed rooms after losing the player), this game's cast of enemies no longer only directly attacks the player's hull with an even wider range of weapons. Instead, some of them will try to explode on contact with the player ship or will do their best to deprive the ship of all of its earned weapons, items, and energy for its laser weapons. The items the tough and agile "thief" robot can steal range anywhere from headlights (one of the new power-ups) to even invulnerability, and will have the careful and disciplined player make sure to check all of their six sides while still remembering where "up" and "down" are. All of this makes it a tenser experience than the original could provide. I always like to find secret areas as my personal "tertiary" objective. They are aplenty, more clever, and almost a necessity to complete levels on the hardest difficulty level. It was good in Descent, and it is even better here since this game's secret levels now have their own special rules. The secret areas are so common that a player should be able to find at least one within their first hour of playing the campaign straight. The arsenal has also been doubled. It is largely just upgraded derivatives of the older arsenal, but I found myself using all of them at various points of the game. They include guided missiles, short-ranged omega cannons used to zap enemies, blinding flash missiles, and literal earthshaker missiles, the last of which is as good as it sounds.

And Descent II keeps multiplayer and its four game modes: a deathmatch mode called Anarchy, team Anarchy, Anarchy with robots, and cooperative. The eight-player and cooperative's four-player limits are still there, although robot deathmatch now allows up to eight players instead of four. I believe I critiqued the previous game's multiplayer as lacking variety, but Descent II almost manages to make it complete. New to multiplayer is Capture the Flag, a two-team variant of Anarchy in which points are primarily scored by retrieving the opponent's flag and returning it to one's base. Also, the administrator and server has far more control over how to configure their games and their rules, as well as more control over managing their servers. They can decide more conditions for ending a level, the option to display all players on the automap, which weapons and power-ups are allowed in the game, and even the ability to use markers as surveillance cameras. As far as the commands are concerned, hosts now officially have the option to kick or ban bad players, everyone can even handicap themselves to make matches more competitive. As a bonus, if you have the Vertigo Series expansion pack, you will receive two additional game modes called Hoard and Team Hoard, yet other variants of Anarchy in which points are scored by destroying enemy ships, picking up green orbs, and bringing them to green-lit areas. The hoarding is due to the fact that holding more orbs at once multiplies their value near-exponentially, so if one player who has many orbs has their ship destroyed to another player and their orbs stolen, that player now has the foothold. Unfortunately, the lack of servers and opportunity to start one inhibits my ability to tell you what multiplayer is like, but I recall having positive experiences with my brother years ago in Descent 3's cooperative-the mode we always personally preferred. I am certain that if he and I were to reconvene with other pilots, we would see that Descent II is one of the best multiplayer games for DOS.

It is true that there are hours of content to keep us busy and even more hours to study in between and afterward, and with increasing difficulties, it is a learning experience that is here to stay, keep us preoccupied, and draw us back into action from time to time, but, while it is less repetitive, something still feels amiss about that. Hours into the campaign, the simple primary objective of shooting up enemies eventually becomes exhausting. The only secondary objective of rescuing hostages for bonus points also eventually becomes too familiar, and so does multiplayer mode. I may just be an unwitting sucker for taking the violence for granted, especially in the context of early FPSs, but I have not been convinced that we were meant to repeat supposedly various cycles of tasks with one of the tasks taking up most of the time. I think that is the problem with this kind of repetition, where it is not that there is too much of one thing, but rather too little of others. I do like shooting up the enemies, but I also wish I could do a little more than rescuing the miners and finding secret areas. It is important to know that there is not much left one can do to add more variety to the game while still keeping it simple, but if I had worked at Parallax or Interplay, I would encourage them to add more unique secondary missions and perhaps another multiplayer mode whose *primary* means of scoring involves less shooting.

Descent II learned from older sibling and what it could have been, and while still slightly repetitive, it wisely took steps of making technical upgrades to the engine, helping players navigate in more complex mines with the Guide-Bot, increasing variety, expanding multiplayer, and making the experience tenser while keeping it adequately simple. The possibilities of Descent levels and mods have just bounced far forward, and with modded engines, one could do far worse than to grab their joystick and go down again.

One of the largest icons of the Star Wars franchise is the lightsaber, the weapon held by every epical Jedi. It fascinated most adults and children, but divided the two groups on how they would like to experience it. Toy replicas exist, but our childly ability to pretend already has or will have diminished by adulthood. It was not until 1983 that Parker Brothers, the developer of the marvelous The Empire Strikes Back, allowed the public to start swinging the weapon in video games, meaning anyone could fight like a Jedi ... somewhat. Star Wars: Jedi Arena has us defending ourselves from a training remote and using our lightsabers to aim the ever-moving floating ball towards and fire at our opponents. You read that right; if that did not sound awkward, this game was based on one scene in A New Hope where Luke Skywalker deflects lasers from a hovering remote on board the Millennium Falcon.

In Star Wars: Jedi Arena, two trainees stand face-to-face on opposite vertical sides of the screen. The two are protected by a force field composed of three rows of simple bricks that each can be struck down with a single laser projecting from a training remote that constantly moves side to side in erratic ways. The goal is to win a total of three rounds, each by striking the opponent's rectangle once with a laser bolt. It is an arcade game that is reminiscent of Atari's Warlords, but it is more sophisticated than it probably ought to be. There are two controls: a paddle and a button. The paddle controls how the player character holds their lightsaber, and is used to absorb the remote's lasers. By "absorb", I do mean it; they simply stop dead in their tracks for a split second without bouncing off the blades, *sarcastically* just like the movies. The button is a different story. It instructs the training remote to fire lasers towards one's opponent's side. The paddle is used to control one's lasers' direction, which matches the angle of their lightsaber's blade. One thus has to defend their own rectangle, aim and fire at their opponent's, and always alternate between them.

I must disclaim that I used an Atari emulator called Stella to play the ROM. I used a computer mouse to swing my lightsaber, and I probably could have performed better by using a paddle-like controller or even something as simple as a slider, but as long as I can competently test games, what do I care?

Anyway, it is important to know that Jedi Arena is both a single-player and multiplayer video game, so the second player may be a computer or another human. The second important thing to know are four variations of playing. The first three variations control the training remote's speed from slow to fast, and if played in single-player mode also affect the AI's attack rate and defense dexterity. The fourth is rather interesting; it plays like the "medium" speed setting, except that the remote is invisible, so the human players will have to fire its lasers to know its precise location. The AI has the advantage of always knowing where the remote is, as if the game were played on medium. Quite crafty it is, but another important feature to know is that moving the difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 helps or handicaps the corresponding player's force field, where position B adds a fourth row of bricks to the force field and position A removes it. Being an arcade game, it does add one further element that ascertains that no match lasts forever. Here, the training remote charges up and will charge slightly faster the less it is used, and once it has fully charged up, it will sporadically fire lasers towards the two Jedi in random directions. It is also noteworthy that the player can fire only one laser at a time and that blocking the other's lasers very momentarily disables that player's ability to fire further lasers, so one cannot rapidly fire lasers at the opponent's lightsaber, adding an element of strategy. The computer difficulty is genuine for any arcade game. Easy is fairly easy, but hard is hard enough that while I could not defeat my ridiculously fast and careful opponent, I did manage to win a single round the entire time I tested it, meaning that it is possible to defeat it. "Invisible" is also beatable, as I was able to flawless beat the AI on my second try.

All of this makes Jedi Arena a playable, fast, and potentially promising game, and the introduction of lightsabers ought to hype the expectations. Sadly, the quality goes in a downward spiral from that point on. I think we all can relate to the fact that Atari 2600 has suffered technical limitations by 1983's standards. Since its release in 1977, one can find a handful of games made for newer consoles and computers featuring better technology. They were sharper and more colorful, and we could hear more than just primitive sound effects such as BEEP-BEEPs, DOOT-DOOTs, and sequences thereof. Thus, Jedi Arena probably would have looked a little better on a Commodore 64 or even a PC running on MS-DOS, and while I do not think Atari 2600 was the best system selection because of its dated technology, it is not necessarily Jedi Arena's fault that the graphics do not stand out, now is it? Actually, it is. The technological advances during that year's six-year timespan were only modest, rather than drastic. The graphics look just as good as the year when personal computers almost obliterated the console industry--that's right, the North American console crash of the very same year Jedi Arena was released in. The arena itself is a wide oval whose walls simply lit up whenever the training remote's lasers strike them. On opposite vertical sides of the screen are two generic human sprites in their rectangles defended by three layers of wall bricks that are destroyed by the seeker droid's lasers. While the Star Wars game is considered the first to use lightsabers, the "lightsabers" held by the two humans are more than curious. Anyone can easily make an adult joke out of them, but crass humor is not in the spirit of my writing family-family reviews (besides, I doubt IMDb tolerates that type of reviews anyway). To keep it family-friendly, the lightsabers look like giant phosphorescent bendy straws made specifically for the sarlacc species. The two humans are holding the top part with one hand and turning the main part with the other. There is no way the blade of a real lightsaber could curve outside its straight path. The only thing that I can say looks "remote" from dull is the training ball. Rather yellow than white for a remote, the details drastically different and a little two wide for a true sphere, it does have a lovely appearance of spinning and will spin faster as it charges up. The sound effects are average, and while they are easy to understand and may serve as correspondents to visuals we do not have time to look for (e.g. we know our wall is hit when we hear a low-pitched DOOT sound and theirs with a higher-pitched one), they will simply fly by one's head by tomorrow.

Also, have you seen the gameplay of Jedi Arena? I feel that my feelings against it can never be expressed in fewer than ten thousand words, especially since images of it will suffice, but unfortunately as a critic, I must analyze my feelings about the bizarre nature of the game as concisely as possible. What it is supposed to be I doubt that even Parker Brothers could retrospectively answer. I think the development team became impatient as they were stuck in phase one, trying to figure out what to do with two competing Jedi, each holding a lightsaber, and a floating ball. They probably thought they would find out as they rushed to phase two, but they would be wrong. It comes out apparently being based on Warlords with regards to gameplay, and from there on, it also improvises what to do with the training ball. The result is that the same paddle controllers have the double function of aiming at the opponents. As strange as that sounds, come to think of it, I think those lightsabers are not giant bendy straws after all; they may be pointing devices controlling the remote's weapons. The idea is bland, and the double functions of attacking and defending at the same time do not transition well. And placing two players on two vertical rather than horizontal sides where the top has reversed controls is not a good design choice. It does not truly make the game balanced to switch sides every time a round is completed, especially since the first player (who appears at the bottom of the screen and without reversed controls) is one round ahead of the second in that regard. I do not blame anyone at all for tilting their televisions or monitors sideways to fix that problem. I cannot grab myself into calling the game Star Wars-themed, where the only thing that bears resemblance to the franchise is the few-second introduction music based on the theme song. It is simply branded it so that the scanty rest is left to our imagination.

VERDICT: It is hard to see how Star Wars: Jedi Arena could have turned out for the best. For me, it could have simplified the controls to just the lightsabers, and the ball would simply be firing bouncy lasers towards the opponents. For what Star Wars is recognizable for, a game based on Luke's training remote was rather unexpected. I am not saying that its potential form would be outstanding for a Star Wars game, due to the lack of actual lightsaber combat, but something like that would have made for a fairly remarkable arcade game. We all know how the graphics should have happened. Concerning the redeemable qualities, I can say that it does meet all the criteria for a two-player arcade game: fast, competitive, and above all, functional. It does attempt to play as a quality sports-like game. It is just a bummer that Parker Brothers performed better with The Empire Strikes Back, which did play like a genuine Star Wars game for the Atari 2600. For what good there could be found, I give Star Wars: Jedi Arena 30%.

What do you do when you turn on Windows and the Internet is down? You play an old Microsoft game, of course! What would your first pick be? I have to admit it, but quite honestly, it would probably be Microsoft Solitaire or Minesweeper, but if you want an unexhaustive sense of adrenaline, then 3D Pinball: Space Cadet is almost certainly your choice. It is a Cinematronics computer game licensed to Microsoft that most people who have ever used a Windows 95, 98, or XP computer remember playing, but what a few know is that it was a demonstration for a later commercialized title called "Full Tilt! Pinball", also by Cinematronics. That game featured enhancements such as improved graphics and three tables, including the famous Space Cadet.

I am not much in the way of a pinball enthusiast, but I can tell you that 3D Pinball: Space Cadet is perhaps the most famous digital pinball machine ever. Even if it is not, it certainly has a cult status, and for good reasons. We know it for the table that is viewed from a fixed and perspective angle. We know it for the space theme, and we know it as a game of skill. Armed with three balls, you have two places to launch the ball to: the top and the middle of the table. If you choose the latter, try to light up the right number of lights for the most points. In play, you are often too focused on attacking anything anywhere on the table that looks (and is) beatable for the sake of points, but when you are not, you can think about where you would like your ball to travel, as well as the ball and flipper mechanics. Consider the ball velocity and the arcs formed by the rotating flippers, because if you do not, your ball could travel anywhere on the table, including the out lanes. Fortunately, those out lanes can launch the ball back into play, but only once, after which they need to be reactivated to save the ball again. You can also send your ball to "wormholes", compartments that when activated will send it to other wormholes, but you are more likely to focus on upgrading anything conceivable, from ranks to the multiplier field to weapons to fuel. These upgrades always lead to more points. You may earn an additional ball along the way, especially if you manage to improve your upgrades in a timely manner. All the while, it feels like boxing on the table, just as any pinball machine should.

If you want to give yourself a task for gaining more points, 3D Pinball: Space Cadet does just that. Again, controls are mainly using the simple flippers to control the movement of the ball, but you can select which one of the three available missions to complete before entering. You have arrows and mission instructions on the bottom right to help you know what to do. Missions consist of simple tasks or a sequence thereof, depending on the player's rank, and completing them moves the player up in rank and multiplies future points. Be sure to maintain your fuel or keep your ball out of the drain, which will inhibit mission completion. I said earlier that the controls were mainly using the flippers. Perhaps the most dramatic feature is the tilting mechanics. Just like the real world, you can actually nudge the table to subtly change the movements of the ball to get it where you want it to travel and avoid hazards. It is a difficult process that requires an understanding of real-world pinball physics (basically the ball traveling to the side of the table being bumped), but if you master the nudging physics, you can save the balls and earn a fortune. Otherwise, you will risk overtilting the table, locking it down and losing the ball.

And when you feel like goofing around or taking a look at the mechanics, you have cheat codes ready in your favor. They are not essential to the game and will therefore not in this review. Some of them are cheat codes that lead to extra points or balls or promote the player to a higher rank, but my personal favorite is dragging the ball with the mouse anywhere I wish on the table, which is incredibly useful for studying the game rules.

The only thing left 3D Pinball could use is having more tham just one table or at least support multiple tables. There does not appear to be a way to mod the game, although its sound assets can be changed. It would have made coming back seem less repetitive, but fortunately, we are too busy trying to get points and keep the ball out of the drain. Another thing is that I like to play it in fullscreen, and it suffers from the unfortunate effect of pixelation when the screen is scaled from the original 640x480 resolution. Nevertheless, it would not be fair to use today's superior standards to criticize an old 1995 game. It worked flawlessly on those old computers, and even on 64-bit computers, it still works without significant bugs.

CONCLUSION: 3D Pinball: Space Cadet may feature only one table, but it is a replayable quality table, and both that and the tilting mechanics make this Microsoft classic a collector's item.

Somewhere in the mountains lives a hillbilly who makes a living out of racing. Hikers climb mountains, racers drive cars, and this homie does both. He makes a living by treading the hills, just by treading them, and he will stop at nothing to continue his tireless journey-even if it means breaking his neck the number of times equivalent to the age of the Universe in days.

At the start of the game, you start off small. Immediately available are one vehicle and one track, but there are dozens of them waiting ahead. You take control of Bill Newton, the protagonist, as he hopes to drive the farthest he can. Of course, your car drives terribly, but it is almost impossible to miss coins, the currency of Hill Climb Racing. Every car is essentially roofless, and those that do have roofs only have them as Newton's shield before being destroyed. Your shaggy driver is like a bobblehead, but this head you do not want to smack. Everything about the game is silly, from amateurish graphics to the fact that the fictitious car manufacturers appear to neglect the safety of the driver. The latter said, it should come as no surprise that the player must watch Newton's head from hitting the floor, the ceiling-pretty much anything. If you fail to keep him safe, you get what you deserve: a snapping sound of his neck. The car's fuel gauge serves as a timer for when fuel is depleted, so you'd better not slack off and keep driving if you want to find a fuel container.

The spirit of Hill Climb Racing is the physics. If I may, I will just call them Newtonian physics, after Bill Newton, so whenever I use "Newtonian", just do not confuse that to mean Isaac Newton. The physics here are cartoonish and "fun", and the fun is that it is smooth, bouncy, and floaty. It is also playfully shrewd in its attempts to flip the player car over, but when mastered, those attempts may be thwarted to perform stunts like flipping over or staying in the air. The stunts reward the player coins, and while levels become increasingly difficult, it is satisfying that the value of the coins to collect also increases. Just as a note, the fictitious manufacturers were thoughtful enough to engineer the vehicles to be indestructible (although parts of some cars can be broken off), and it is only the fuel and Newton's head that needs to be worried about.

And just as if it could not get better, see yourself spending the coins on upgrade. As I said earlier, your car is sluggish, but you are experiencing only the shell of the Newtonian physics as you struggle to keep your car even, and it does get better. You have choices to either purchase a locked vehicle, a locked course, or an upgrade. Vehicles are anything from conventional motorcycles and monster trucks to quircky police cars and what almost looks like the car that few from The Jetsons to just plain silly stuff like the Santa's sleigh, and some of them have special surprise features that I will not describe here. I told you all of the game is ridiculous. The same could be said about the courses, which include the conventional grassy hills of Countryside, the Highway, the Moon, the Nuclear Plant, trees in the Forest and Christmas to drive over, the Boot Camp, Rooftops, and hilariously, Rainbows. Some of those levels are designed to feel like a platformer instead of a racing game. You drive off from one which is very original on the part of the developer, Fingersoft. The cars and courses have their own physical properties, and some of them are more suitable together than others. And of course, the upgrades will improve your vehicle's performance and are certain to enhance your experience. If you have the patience, you will find yourself driving a powerful beast, flipping over and collecting millions of coins. We do have a few road cones to watch, however.

Newton must be living by himself, as he's got no one to compete against. In fact, there is eerily no one other than Newton himself. There is no multiplayer, but there is the consistent game mode of driving without stopping, so the only person Newton wants keeping his vehicle going and his head safe is whoever on Earth might be on the other side of the screen. As players, we could play separately and compete for the farthest distance, but I think the bigger flat tire is having a single game mode with a single objective. Ultimately, no matter what you race with or what you race on, the cycle is drive-flip-upgrade-new record. After a while, the repetition exhausts you and you feel like pitting for your fuel. Once you gas up, you either feel like doing something else, or you have enough fuel and patience to repeat the cycle. Even if you choose the former, you will probably race again because of the fun physics and the silliness.

CONCLUSION: After a while, you would pull your car key out of the car and look to something else to do, but if you enjoyed Hill Climb Racing's goofiness and the physics, you are almost certain to put it back in. -- 85%

A long time ago in a galaxy we live in, there was an American writer called George Lucas, who conceived the idea of and made true one of the most important fictional galaxies in the history of cinema and science fiction. Everything that was right with what used to be titled simply Star Wars paved an inevitable way to two sequels. The trilogy would go on to form a trinity and inspire others to develop titles (Jedi Knight, X-Wing, the Thrawn trilogy, etc.) that would break equal grounds, all under the guidance of Lucasfilm and LucasArts. After having personally finished Star Wars, Lucas became convinced that a prequel trilogy was to be written, and this is where he, his next film's director, faced challenges with achieving the glories of the trinity trilogy.

1999 saw the release of The Phantom Menace, which would go on to be a huge financial success and sometimes seem to be just as historic as the trinity trilogy, because it's Star Wars. It's from the same people behind the originals; nothing could go too wrong, right? As it turns out, the challenge Lucasfilm faced was not 20th Century Fox's doubts that it would become a blockbuster, like the 1977 film. Rather, it was the intense decisions that George Lucas, the film's director, had to make to ensure that nothing flops. With the film composed of a portfolio of good and bad decisions, here are the highlights that everyone should know about.

We are introduced cinematics that should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has the slightest hint of the franchise, which includes a prelude, an outer space background, and the John Williams theme song. From that point on, you can tell that the technology used to produce this film means enhanced graphics, sound effects, and more control over the aspects of the film. You would think that Lucasfilm would utilize the late-1990s' technology to make the trinity trilogy look like something of the past. In this case, the Force was not quite strong with them. There are occasions where you wonder how experienced Lucasfilm was in working with the late-1990s' tools, as the scenes appear to gradually alternate from dull standstills to adrenaline-packed actions. It's a very awkward pace in my opinion, but I guess it could have been worse, e.g. where the film is all standstills and no action.

Story-wise, The Phantom Menace is arguably innovative in the Star Wars saga (and in retrospect, more so than the Disney sequel trilogy). It introduces ideas and tries to be anything but overly derivative of the trinity trilogy, and to the film's credit, it did lead to works that we did like (e.g. Pandemic's Star Wars Battlefront). However, The Phantom Menace, along with Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, stays interconnected with the trilogy, as it introduces a handful of the same characters such as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Palpatine. The prequel trilogy's premise is how Anakin Skywalker, another character introduced, became the villainous Darth Vader, and The Phantom Menace is about Skywalker as a talented boy on Tatooine and his venture to Jedi training.

The plot involves troubled relations between entities that need to be negotiated. Along the way are characters like Qui-Gon Jinn--a wise, humble, charismatic Jedi whose actor is perhaps the most talented in the field of dialogue--and several escape sequences that are eye-candy to watch, in part thanks to the late-1990s' technology Lucasfilm used. It also featured some of the most watchable plot moments involving racing, the acrobatic Darth Maul, and the climax. Needless to say, there are areas that could use major cleanup.

You may know, or at least you may think you know, what I am thinking, but I will try to resort to only rational objections and not clichés or conspiracy theories that I always see on the Internet. We are given several important plot elements such as politics, Anakin Skywalker, and Jar Jar Binks. When we watch Star Wars, we expect a decent level of action, not extensive or detailed political debates. Government corruption is an acceptable plot point, and that should be it. As for the characters, some of them make us question their actors' ability to star, and to be an excellent star, one must demonstrate passion, creativity, and natural born talent. The actors of Anakin and Binks clearly had some degree of passion, but that's it. For a film about a child protagonist, Jake Lloyd could have been talented and the Macaulay Culkin of Star Wars, and Jar Jar Binks could have actually made a remarkable comic relief character. It is just a shame that Binks is memorable for all the wrong reasons, as he is not comedically witty or cleverly clumsy, just goofy.

In short, I still like to watch The Phantom Menace occasionally, and while the film could definitely be edited to remove the problems (and it may even need a reboot), it would not be fair to say that it has no redeeming qualities. Of the first six films in the saga, the film I would consider the worst is Attack of the Clones, with a thin plot and so little to offer that even though it still is fun to watch, you may very well be okay skipping it and instead watching Revenge of the Sith, clearly the best of the prequels. Still, even for casual TV watchers, it does not hurt to turn the prequels on. The Force hasn't completely neglected them.

Minesweeper, the one game you would love to come back and play (along with Microsoft 3D Pinball) on your Windows 95/98 computer. It uses a desktop. It uses a mouse. It uses mathematics. Yet why is it the one game that has an endless replay value? It is because it is easy to set up, easy to understand, easily casual, easily simple...easy everything.

The basic gameplay of Minesweeper is to find all the landmines in a given field. The player is given a grid and the number of squares with mines to avoid. The grid is blank, and the player must uncover squares for clues, where each of the squares uncovered contains a number describing how many mines are adjacent to the square, including diagonally. The player must then determine the location of the mines based on the information and logic. If you are fortunate enough, you may reveal an opening devoid of mines that brings much information on the neighboring mines. If not and you start by uncovering one square only, you may have to take chances to reveal another one. If you click on the wrong square, the mine detonates, and the game is over, revealing all the mines as well as any squares that are incorrectly flagged.

The reason to play this occasionally is simply because it is easy to transition to and fro.

The only downside that sometimes puts me off is the fact that I occasionally run into situations where I must find one or multiple mines and multiple answers based on the available information from clicked squares are equally practical. For example, I may have a square on a corner comprising 9 unclicked squares and more than 5 but fewer than 9 mines to flag. The information that I happen to get may all be closer to the middle of the minefield, the numbers being 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, and 2, assuming that there are no neighboring mines. Okay, so I know where the five mines are, but what about the remaining mines? There is no telling of where the remainders may be without reluctantly but compulsorily selecting one square at random. A game of Minesweeper can occasionally switch from being a game of skill to a game of chance. Another thing that can throw me off is my occasional accidental clicking on an unintended square, though you could say it is my fault.

The bottom line here is that Minesweeper is a collectible that the most casual of gamers should consider playing off-hand. I recommend playing a game of Minesweeper where there are not so many mines that you get too little information to determine the affected squares. Having that as a bug stinks, but it will reduce the risk of frustration of facing a dilemma or from losing a game by chance. Other than that, it is conveniently playable at its finest.