Reviews

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 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

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

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