Some licensed games barge in like a rampaging T-rex; others skitter around your ankles like hungry Compsognathus. Ocean Software’s Jurassic Park for MS-DOS somehow does both, depending on whether you’re wrestling the 3-D raptor corridors or trudging across jungle screens stuffed with pixel ferns. Is it bizarre or classical? (Yes. It’s a shape-shifter.) Underrated or overrated? (Depends […]
Every retro library hides at least one box that looks harmless, until you boot it and realize you’ve voluntarily signed up for a three-hour physics exam proctored by cartoon Norsemen. That, in a cracked nutshell, is The Lost Vikings on MS-DOS: a puzzle-platformer so simultaneously sensible and surreal that I still can’t decide whether it’s the spiritual ancestor
The Lost Vikings (PC) – Review – Norse Comedy Meets Brain Gym Read Post »
Every medium-sized generation gets its rite-of-passage fantasy kid. The ’80s crowned Atreyu on a luck-dragon, the 2000s produced Harry under a staircase, and wedged neatly between them lurks a ginger teenager in a robe two sizes too big whose most devastating spell is weaponised sarcasm. That, fellow retro spelunkers, is Simon, reluctant hero of Adventure
Simon the Sorcerer (PC) – Review – Pixel Fantasy, Full-Voice Irony Read Post »
Cue the ski-lift music and buckle that neon windbreaker, because we’re going back to the days when “multimedia” meant a Sound Blaster 16 that squealed like a happy modem. Winter Olympics: Lillehammer ’94 is, paradoxically, both the Platonic ideal of an IOC-licensed cash-in and a lovable mutt that keeps chasing its own tail down the bobsled run. Underrated? Some
Winter Olympics: Lillehammer ’94 (PC) – Review – From Bobsled Rockets to Sprites on Skis Read Post »
Is Warlords II a by-the-numbers sequel, the strategy-game equivalent of plain oatmeal, or a sublimely odd artifact that taught early-’90s teenagers to weaponise e-mail attachments? (Rhetorical question. Self-answer: somehow both, plus a pinch of black magic.) On paper it looks sensible, slightly sharper AI, a convenient mouse interface, a smattering of new unit art. Yet
Warlords II (PC) – Review – One More Turn, One Less Friend Read Post »