Reviews

What do you get when you trap an entire medieval castle inside a cosmic snow globe, pepper the surrounding void with eight pocket universes, and then hand the player a rune-bag, a broadsword, and an inexplicable craving for roast lizard? (Answer: a 1993 PC game so forward-thinking that modern GPUs still raise an eyebrow.) Ultima Underworld […]

Is Ween: The Prophecy the eccentric cousin of early-’90s point-and-clicks or the secret keystone in adventure-gaming’s shaky Jenga stack? (Rhetorical curveball; self-owning answer: somehow, gloriously, both.) Published in Europe by Coktel Vision in late 1992 and shipped to North-American DOS shelves under Sierra’s banner the following spring, this fantasy head-trip feels like Myst got kidnapped by a French comic strip, force-fed

Picture this: you stroll onto a seedy orbital lot, buy a second-hand starship that looks suspiciously like a humpback whale, and the salesman waves goodbye so fast you can practically smell the afterburn of regret. Welcome to Whale’s Voyage, the 1993 DOS/Amiga curio that duct-tapes Wizardry-style grid crawls to Elite-flavoured commerce, then slathers the result in Euro-techno glitter.

Here’s a riddle for your retro-brain: what do you get when two slap-stick goblins, one kidnapped heir nick-named “Prince Buffoon,” and an inventory item literally labelled “pepper” collide inside a point-and-click puzzler that refuses to obey the laws of sensible interface design? (Rhetorical aside; self-owning answer: your mouse mat starts to smell like sizzling grey

Is Goal! a straight-laced football sim or the wobbly back-street cousin who insists every cross should detour like a homing pigeon? (Rhetorical question; self-dragging answer: a bit of both, obviously.) Released in 1993, the year Sensible Software’s stick-men still ruled the terraces and Electronic Arts was busy learning how to pronounce “ma-jell-an” for FIFA International Soccer, Dino Dini’s Goal! marched