Reviews

What happens when a Victorian-era gumshoe crashes a Christmas soirée hosted by undead rum-running pirates and automatons dressed like Al Capone’s stunt doubles? If your answer is, “Probably an E. C. Comics one-shot,” you get partial credit. To earn full marks you need Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark 2, the 1993 sequel (North-American boxes carry a […]

How do you turn a melodramatic space-opera, complete with fur-suit villains, orchestra-swell cliff-hangers, and the kind of cockpit banter that belongs in a daytime soap, into a homework assignment? Easy: you strip out the plot, yank the FMV, and hand players a cosmic Scantron they fill with laser fire. That, in a burnt-gunpowder nutshell, is

Picture 1993: flannel shirts are a legally recognized personality trait, Jurassic Park is redefining “summer blockbuster,” and my mother still thinks a gigabyte is an exotic fish. Into that neon-lit swamp of pop culture drops Wing Commander: Privateer, materializing like a battered tramp freighter jumping in with its shields flickering and a cargo hold full of “agricultural supplies”

What happens when King’s Quest and Prince of Persia share a bottle of bargain-bin mead, scribble a D-list fantasy script on a tavern napkin, and decide to go spelunking together? You get Armaëth: The Lost Kingdom, part point-and-click, part side-scroll hop-’n-slash, 100 percent “wait, did that bear just steal my honey?” Released on DOS in 1993 by Real World Software

Every so often a game barrels down history’s tracks like an un-braked steel coaster, rattling the zeitgeist while hurling our collective lunch into the shrubbery below. RollerCoaster Tycoon is exactly that brand of software ride: a seemingly wholesome park simulator that secretly teaches you advanced civil engineering, pop-economics, and the dark art of path-based crowd control