CyberGenic Ranger: Secret of the Seventh Planet

The Good
The RealSound sound effects through the PC speaker are neat.

The Bad
Cybergenic Ranger bears my dubious title of "game that should never have made it into production". I'll jump right to the point: The controls really suck.

Just how much do they suck, you ask? Well, instead of monitoring keyboard scan codes like every single game ever made for the PC since 1982, this game takes keypresses from the BIOS, just like your average word processor. (Yes, that means that in order to run, you hold the key down and, after a second, the keyboard repeat kicks in and you start running.) Of course, the end result is that you cannot run and jump, run and fire, jump and fire, or pretty much press any two keys together without the second key cancelling the first one. I have witnessed (and come to expect) this in throwaway BASIC games from 9 year-olds, but in a commercial game? That was actually on store shelves? Did anyone on God's green earth playtest this game?

I guess the developers assumed that the neato digitized sound, neato digitized graphics, and included neato comic book would eliminate the need to actually play the game. But even this worked against them; the character sprites were digitized, but never edited. They lack significant detail.

Control issues aside, the first level alone is enough to make you tear your hair out in large clumps because it's impossible to navigate without hitting dead, floating corpses all the time. Each time you hit one, the game pauses to play a sound effect, then takes away some of your energy. But every 3rd or 4th corpse, you get a power pod that restores your energy just about to the level it was before you started. This is what is ultimately frustrating -- not the fact that you keep getting hit by floating corpses, but realizing that because of the energy pods that keep helping you, the entire sequence is completely unnecessary and lacks any purpose whatsoever.

The Bottom Line
Instead of playing this game, track down the developers and beat them over the head with a rolled-up newspaper.

I can honestly say that Cybergenic Ranger is one of the few games to actually offend me.