Is Capstone’s An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the point-and-click cousin nobody invites to Thanksgiving, an underrated gem or a tumbleweed still rolling across the VGA plains? (Rhetorical question. Self-answer: yes.) The game somehow crams generous edutainment, bargain-bin jank, and occasional permadeath into a 3.5-inch diskette that smells faintly of bubble-jet ink. Capstone’s glossy manual insists you’ll “never […]

Picture the year 2000: the Y2K hang-over still throbs, Gladiator quotes are taped to dorm doors, and every publisher wants its own 3-D RPG epic, no one quite knows which ingredients made BioWare’s soup taste so good, but everyone is ready to copy the recipe. Into this scrum vaults Summoner, Volition’s maiden voyage beyond space shooters: a game that

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”