Reviews

Step inside the shrine of serious computer wargaming and a grey-bearded acolyte will eventually press a single 3½-inch disk into your palm. Boot it, he whispers, and dare to marshal a million cardboard corps. That disk is Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, a design so devoted to authenticity it makes you convert Soviet railways one hex […]

Some protagonists arrive in glossy power-armor, some lug plasma rifles the size of bass guitars, and some, well, some are sentient eggs wearing boxing gloves. That alone might pigeon-hole Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk on the “bizarre” shelf, yet its design soul is as classical as a Greek myth (if Zeus had scrambled offspring). Underrated or overrated? If you

Some videogames knock politely; Doom kicks the door off its hinges, stomps in with a shotgun the size of a Buick, and redecorates the foyer in EGA crimson. Is id Software’s 1993 opus bizarre or classical? (Both: picture a Bach fugue scored for chainsaw and MIDI bass.) Underrated or overrated? Ask the “it’s just Wolfenstein in space”

Is DinoPark Tycoon an eccentric relic or a straight-laced classic? (Trick question: it’s a lemonade-stand spreadsheet wearing an inflatable T-rex suit.) Underrated or overrated? If you grew up on RollerCoaster Tycoon, it looks downright prehistoric; but for a generation of U.S. school-lab kids who met compound interest courtesy of a smirking cartoon hadrosaur, it’s basically the Rosetta Stone

Right before Doom detonated the rules of first-person carnage, another experiment slipped onto shelves and asked players to swap claws for cunning. ShadowCaster for DOS (October 1993) doesn’t give you a shotgun; it hands you a living wrist crystal and a bloodline of extradimensional forms, then dares you to survive labyrinthine dungeons where identity is your only ammo. Classic