Contributions > Descriptions by -Chris (7757)

Wall Street Wizard is a German stock market simulation. Up to six human players compete against each other or against computer-controller opponents; the game supports local multiplayer via hotseat as well as multiplayer via null-modem cable and modem. One of the special features of Wall Street Wizard is that modem mode allegedly works cross-platform, i.e the Amiga version of the game can connect to either the ST version or the DOS version, and vice versa.

Players get to define a persona by distributing points in four categories (appearance, money, health and luck), thus slightly altering play strategies. The bulk of the game is spent on the trade floor buying and selling shares of fictional companies while the clock ticks (about 12 real-time minutes per round per player!). Wall Street Wizard tries to simulate the buzz and shouted offers of a real trade floor. Once trading had ended, each player gets to invest in strategic activities such as gathering intelligence via newspapers and economic forecasts, investigating or sabotaging other players and improving one's health or appearance.

The game ends once the first player has reached the freely selectable goal, e.g. accumulated a certain amount of wealth.

The game was originally released in late 1988 for Amiga and Atari ST and ported to the PC in 1989. Also available was a separately sold editor that allowed users to alter several of the simulation's parameters as well as edit companies and their interdependencies. This editor came with a '89 scenario (the game's original scenario is set in 1988).

1992 Players Expansion Disk is an add-on that updates Tony La Russa Baseball II with all MLBPA players from the 1992 season, including digitized portraits for each of them.

The expansion includes two separate leagues: The 1992 league with all stats and players from that year, and a pre-1993 league that (according to the manual) "contains all trades, free-agent signings and other realignments (including the addition of Colorado and Florida)" to represent "all 28 MLPBA teams as they were in spring training 1993, but with 1992 stats".

Reaping the Dungeon is a turn-based, randomized dungeon crawler in the vein of Rogue and Hack.

Below the surface of Jupiter, a machine runs out of control and floods the underground tunnels with synthetic creatures. You must descend into the depths to find and destroy the machine. The adventure is split into a freeware episode of 15 levels titled The Weapon Recovery and the second episode The Machine, which contains 50 more levels and must be purchased.

The basic challenge is to explore each dungeon level and collect treasure while fighting enemy creatures in simple hit-vs.-hit fashion. Precious metals and gems can be sold in shops to buy better weapons and equipment; raw crystals gained from defeated enemies help improve your character’s abilities, such as damage ratio, sight range or performance speed. Through battles and careful exploration, your protagonist becomes increasingly more powerful and efficient.

All level layouts and contents are randomly created. Each level introduces one new creature and at least one new map element or item.

Reaping the Dungeon adds a number of original elements to the genre:

• The drop shaft that leads down to the next level relocates in random intervals. It must be found and tagged. Data chips scattered throughout the level reveal its current location;
• In addition to weapon/device energy and health, your character has an oxygen pool. Each step consumes oxygen, which makes uncoordinated running-around in the dungeon wasteful and potentially life-threatening;
• Energy, health and oxygen can be harvested from cell plants, which grow in a five-step life cycle. Good timing is essential to maximize the cell harvest;
• Reaping the Dungeon’s magic system is based on rare mushrooms that give special powers for several turns, such as improved sight range, perfect weapon proficiency, seed planting or the ability to walk through walls.

Reaping the Dungeon’s graphics consist entirely of customized 16-color ASCII characters. The sound is limited to PC Speaker noises.

In 1995 21st Century Entertainment licensed several already-released pinball tables to the online distribution company Instant Access, which bundled them in a compilation named Perfect Pinball. The pack features content of three previous games:* Pinball Dreams (1993): Ignition, Steel Wheels, Beat Box, Nightmare

• Pinball Dreams 2 (1994): Safari, Revenge of the Robot Warriors, Stall Turn, Neptune
• Pinball Fantasies (1994): Partyland

Of the nine tables, only three are playable - Safari, Stall Turn and Revenge of the Robot Warriors. The other six must be purchased and unlocked via the included Instant Access browser. The basic price is £5 for one table (~ $8 in 1995), £12 for three (~ $19), payable by debit or credit card. The activation procedure requires buyers to call a local phone number and exchange 18-digit code numbers.

While the game itself remains a pure DOS program, the Instant Access browser requires Windows 3.1 or better to run.

All tables exist in the original low-res VGA version (320x200) as well as in a high-res SVGA alternative (640x350). The CD contains two audio tracks. Perfect Pinball includes the "History of Pinball" feature, a database with facts and artworks for a broad selection of historical pinball machines.

The War College is the third and final installment in Ezra Sidran's Universal Military Simulator series of tactical war games.

The simulation's core principle is a departure from traditional turn-based, hex tile mechanics towards real-time rendering of unit movement on accurately recreated topographical maps of historical battlefields. The presentation remains highly abstract, with units represented as colored lines and combat resolved in short text messages.

The game simulates four major historical battles:

The Battle of Pharsalus (48 BC)

In the decisive battle of the Roman Civil War, Julius Caesar meets Gnaeus Pompejus at Pharsalos on August 9th 48 BC. The battle is fought with melee units only. Caesar defeats Pompejus and becomes emperor of the Rome.

The Battle of Austerlitz (1805)

The French army under Napoleon defeats the combined armies of the Russians and Austrians in the Battle of the Three Emperors at Austerlitz in December 1805. Austerlitz is a classic Napolean maneuver battle.

The Battle of Antietam (1862)

Confederate general Robert E. Lee's advance is stopped by the Union army under general George B. McClellan in the battle at Antietam in September 1862. It is one of the major battles of the American Civil War.

The Battle of Tannenberg (1914)

In one of the rare maneuver battle of World War I, the German Eight army defeats a Russian contingent vastly superior in numbers in August 1914.

The War College players control their armies with only a basic set of unit commands (movement, formation and fortification), but need to consider advanced tactical elements such as morale, experience and ammunition. While the terrain influences movement speed and combat efficiency, terrain types are not clearly indicated on the abstract maps. In tradition of the UMS series, combat formulas can be customized.

As the title implies, The War College is supposed to be an educative simulation for tactical study of historical battles rather than a pure game. With the program comes a digital encyclopedia containing basic background information on the four conflicts, complemented by artworks and period photographs. In addition, The War College features a multiplayer mode so that two strategists can compete over modem or local area network.

International Athletics is an arcade track & field game by the Spanish developer True Emotions. It was initially published by Opera Soft in Spain in 1992 under the title Olympic Games '92, then licensed by Zeppelin in 1993 for their "International" series of sports simulations.

International Athletics consists of eight events, grouped in three basic categories:

• Running - 100m, 110m hurdles
• Jumping - Long Jump, High Jump, Triple Jump
• Throwing - Javelin, Shot Putt, Discus

Rather than the traditional rhythmic key tapping or joystick rattling of the Decathlon offspring, International Athletics requires only timing, with most events mastered with only two key presses. To run the 100 meters for instance, you hit the action key once to get your athlete started, then adjust his target speed on a slider. Once that's done, you lean back and watch him race to the finishing line. Events such as triple jump and 110m hurdles require several accurately times keystrokes in order to succeed. In general, mastering the events and even setting new world records is a matter of only one or two repeats.

Practice mode lets you exercise your timing, competition mode plays through all eight events in set order. If you fail to meet the qualification requirement on one event, you are out instantly. Up to four players can compete on one PC in split-screen mode.

The game's presentation is thin, with digitized photos of the eight events as the main eye-candy and a complete lack of atmospheric stadium sequences, ceremonies or national anthems; in this respect, International Athletics doesn't even meet the standards set by Summer Games and Epyx' other late-80s sports classics.

Options include three difficulty levels, changing wind and different weather conditions, which are not visually represented but affect the achievable event result. Likely one of the most esoteric options seen in a track & field game so far is the possibility to activate doping. This doesn't mean that players can actively dope their athletes, but they may fail random doping checks after each event, which results in immediate disqualification - essentially a form of Russian Roulette.

Advanced Destroyer Simulator (ADS) is a naval combat simulation set in World War 2. It was the first naval simulation to use real-time filled 3D graphics. Its style and mechanics are reminiscent of Epyx's Destroyer (1986).

ADS simulates the H.M.S. Onslaught, a British destroyer of the O-class fitted with three cannon turrets, four torpedo tubes on port and starboard respectively, and a sonar to detect and track submarines. In ADS, the Onslaught is not part of a flotilla.

There's no campaign, gameplay is mission-based and set in three scenarios (two in the CPC version) with five missions each: The Mediterranean around Sicily, the English Channel between the UK and France, and the North Sea coast of Norway. Objectives include seek-and-destroy assignments, patrols, convoy escorts, submarine hunts, and blockade runs. Each scenario also offers an open “Delta” option where you cruise and hunt without specific objectives.

You navigate the destroyer manually, in real-time, and from a first-person perspective, though with the help of a scenario map. ADS simulates ship combat as a close-quarter exchange of torpedoes and cannon fire. In proximity to enemy land bases, Stuka fighters can attack and must be shot down with cannons. Submarines are tracked with the sonar and can only be attacked once they surface. Enemy vessels include freighters, tankers, torpedo boats, destroyers, and cruisers. Most missions are time-critical; in the course of the mission, it may be necessary to dock in allied ports for repairs, to refuel and restock on ammunition.

Universal Warrior (or The Machines, as is the official title of the PC version) is a top-down maze shooter in the vein of Gauntlet and Alien Breed, with added economic elements.

The game alternates between equipment management and the actual in-level action, in which a remote-controlled robot runs through maze-like maps and shoots mechanical enemies. With the money earned in these sci-fi contests, improved equipment can be bought in five categories, making the robot more powerful, more maneuverable and less easy to damage. On the other hand, getting damaged means you must spend money on repairs. This encourages careful and effective playing.

The game can be played solo, competitively in two-player hot-seat mode or cooperatively in split-screen mode.

The Amiga and the PC version of the game have the same basic design, but entirely different levels. For a comprehensive list of differences between the versions see the trivia section.

WarTorn is a 3D real-time strategy game with modern-day units.

In a particularly twisted kind of background story, the ruling elites of the future (2999) rediscover the war games of the distant past (Ancient Rome) as a model for sports-like wars set in the not-so-distant past (2000), which to us is now.

This was the easy part of WarTorn. The cynical controlled war in giant sports arenas scenario serves as the backdrop for a 3D real-time strategy game which pits up to eight armies against each other in a fairly complex system of build-and-blast.

The economic system, for example, has its own flow chart in the manual which describes the interrelation of no less than eight resources, four of which must be gathered on the map. The army consists of land, air and sea units which can be individually constructed from parts. The tactics system comes with its own formation editor and attack route planer. Each unit's behavior can be fine-tuned with ten different commands.

Most of this is optional though. Players can choose between strategy matches (full war with base construction) and skirmishes (baseless mini-wars with up to 20 select units per side). There's no campaign or plot, just single matches in four different modes (deathmatch, capture the flag, hunter hunted, and turn-based) or five-tier tournaments with which the player climbs up the world cup ladder.

Despite the game's competitive character, there is no multiplayer mode.

After a series of German interactive fiction games (Das Stundenglas, Die Kathedrale, Hexuma), Harald Evers and his Weltenschmiede move on to point-and-click graphic adventures. Die Höhlenwelt Saga embeds a fantasy underworld in a science fiction frame.

Starship pilot Eric "Speedy" MacDoughan traces his lost love, mysterious Maomi, to the barren planet 2S-126 in the Taurus 5 system, to discover that a network of caves leads to a gigantic cave world far beneath the crust - the Höhlenwelt ("cave world"). Down there, flying dragons and humanoid peoples live on a magical-medieval level under the despotic rule of an alien reptile race called Drakken. Eric meets the artificial being Cal (a deja vu for Hexuma players), who sends him to the cave world to retrieve a powerful energy crystal (the Leuchtende Kristall ("glowing crystal") from the game's title). And find Maomi, of course.

Die Höhlenwelt Saga is a pretty straight-forward, inventory-driven point-and-click adventure game. Once Eric befriends a flying dragon named Susi (yes, Susi), he's free to explore the key places on the cave world continent of Veldoor at leisure, though the game's puzzles are strictly linear nevertheless.

The game is entirely in German and was published in Germany only. The CD version of Die Höhlenwelt Saga features voice-overs for the intro and narrator sequences, but character dialogues stay text messages.

Bedlam is a vertically scrolling space shoot’em-up.

Space fighter shoots patterns of swirling aliens and stationary cannons, collects extras and fights boss ships – Bedlam is ordinary shoot’em-up material, stretched out over 16 short levels and spiced up with your standard two-player option.

While ZX Spectrum and C64 see a genuine space shooter with full-screen backgrounds and level variations, CPC and DOS get bare-bone versions stripped down to Galaga level.

On the one hand, Ms. Metaverse is an interactive, futuristic and rather tacky beauty pageant. On the other hand, it's an interesting multimedia plug for developer Virtual Vegas' casino website, VirtualVegas.com.

As a judge for the future’s biggest beauty pageant, the Ms. Metaverse contest, you decide which of ten sassy ladies wins the crown. The contestants, real-life girls filmed and digitized, introduce themselves in full motion video clips; you pick five from the pool and go on judging them in the categories looks, brains and talent. While moving between the judging pavilions in colorful rendered video sequences, you earn money by shooting the contestants – “their artificial stupidity programs could do irreparable damage to Virtual Vegas if allowed to wander around unchecked”, explains the manual. Understood.

While the Looks contest seems to be a sorry excuse to stare at pics of scantily clad women (there’s no nudity in Ms. Metaverse), it also serves to identify males and / or cyborgs which might have slipped into the contest. The Brains and Talent contests display coarse videos of the contestants dancing or performing awkward sketches with Ms. Metaverse host Monty Megabyte (Chris Bonno). Watching these performances costs money, which you earn by shooting girls (see above) or playing a simple slot machine. After you’ve reviewed all the ladies, you may crown one Ms. Metaverse.

Ms. Metaverse offers content downloads via the included Mosaic Direct Browser – see trivia section for a detailed description.

Featuring the English national squad in a top-down soccer game, England Championship Special represents British publisher Grand Slam's attempt to cash in on both England's respectable semi-final entry at the 1990 World Cup and the popularity of Anco's acclaimed Kick Off series.

With its 1991 release, English Championship Special is somewhat awkwardly set in between the 1990 World Cup (England made the semi finals, its best result since 1966, then lost to Germany and to Italy in the third-place match) and the European Championship of 1992, to which the "Championship Special" part of the title refers. The squad composition is based on the 1991 status quo, which means you'll go into the Euro tournament with World Cup veterans such as Waddle, Beardsley and Wright, but without 1992 players like Alan Shearer or Alan Smith, infamous substitute to Gary Lineker in the Sweden match.

While Grand Slam got the England team and manager to officially endorse the game (thus having names and photos of 20 squad members from Robson to Gascoigne), they didn't buy the Euro Championship license. You'll be playing seven out of 22 European nations for the "Champions of Europe" title in a nondescript international tournament, from group matches to finals.

Mimicking Kick Off in style and perspective, European Championship Special is geared towards high-speed play at bottom-level complexity, with only one action key for kicks and slides and heads. No cards and hardly any penalties, primitive AI and straightforward gameplay make for goals galore, and the weather system turns out to be wind velocities only, which turns out don't affect the ball at all.

Chaos at the Carnival is a collection of six arcade mini-games.

Miss Piggy has been "pignapped" by the sinister Dr. Grump; her Muppet friends come to the rescue. Kermit, Gonzo, Fozzie and three other characters from the children's TV show dash into Grump's mysterious fun fair in search for their pink companion. They must brave five rides in succession in order to take on the Grumpasaurus in the final carnival confrontation.* Tunnel of Love: Avoid objects in the waterway

• Duck Hunt: Hit passing ducks with tomatoes
• Space Ride: Land a spaceship in the correct dock using rocket blasts
• Bumper Cars: Race around the track and avoid crashing into obstacles
• Funhouse: Find a way through a small maze filled with guard dogs
• Battle of the Grumpasaurus: Tickle the Grumpasaurus so that he laughs himself silly

The C-64, Apple II and DOS versions of Chaos at the Carnival support two players, taking turns.

The versions for the four platforms differ strongly; see the trivia section for details.

Breach is a turn-based tactical squad combat game. It introduces team-oriented missions, RPG-style squad leader development and a scenario builder.

In the ten missions supplied with the retail version (and potentially infinitely more created with the included scenario builder), a squad of usually five space marines under the command of a squad leader embarks on sci-fi missions that involve hostage rescue, data retrieval or simply elimination of opponents. Squad members advance and act in turn on basis of a movement point system.

The multi-level maps consist of outside terrain and structures with several stories, connected by lifts, filled with enemies and objects. Squad members can find and use weapons such as grenades, rockets or detonation packs and tools such as Medikits, scanners or shields.

In an unique twist, the squad leader advances from mission to mission (while the rest of the team is always new), improving his basic stats with each successfully completed assignment, based on his performance. Only experienced leaders may attempt STAR-rated scenarios. If the squad leader gets killed, he is lost forever: the game deletes the corresponding leader file.

Application software experts PC Globe Inc. made an advance into the gaming sector in the early 90’s within their field of expertise: geography. With a back catalog of several installments of the then-leading world atlas and almanac software, PC Globe, the company turned snippets of country-specific info into an educational game that mixed two-player “Identify that place” strategy with a “Get to know the globe” learning effect – can you say Carmen Sandiego?

As the sinister Otto von Slinkenrat tries to pocket the world’s treasures in his private collection, renowned adventurer Bush Buck sets out to find and secure the valuable objects for posterity. In a race around the globe, you and an opponent travel back and forth between 206 cities in 175 countries in search for clues to the treasures’ whereabouts. Cities are connected by a network of plane routes; players take turns in jetting from one destination to the next. On each visit to a city, you learn some background info – e.g. about landmarks, geography, culture.

Learning to place countries and cities on the globe is essential to finding the treasures, which are all linked to a specific place on Earth. If you know that a Samisen is a Japanese musical instrument, for example, you can make your way directly to Tokyo; if not, a set of clues that you collect on your travels will point out features of the target country and town which help narrow down your options – e.g. “It’s an island country”, “It’s in East Asia” etc. The first player to visit the target town collects the treasure and has to return it to his home base for a points reward.

For each game, the computer selects 15 out of 400 possible objects; if all are found or if both players run out of plane tickets (each flight costs one ticket), the game ends and whoever has amassed the most points wins. Three difficulty levels increase the AI strength and reduce helpful hints, making Bush Buck a challenge even for experienced globe trotters.

Wreckers is an isometric sci-fi action game with strategy elements.

Robotic droids roll quietly through the corridors of space station Beacon 04523N, automated computers calculate routes for interstellar traffic. Three human officers sleep in cryogenic tanks, awakened only for routine system checks – or in case of an emergency. With a hum, the cryogenic control springs on-line as Beacon’s long-range sensors detect incoming lifeforms.

Controlling one of the on-board officers, the player has to defend the station against swarms of plasmodian spores (the “Wreckers”) showering down on Beacon and seeping into its four sections. While the spores approach, they can be sucked out of space with a gigantic hoover-like space hose. Once they settle onto the stations hull, jump into the space suit and spray infected areas with a cleansing agent. Undetected spores will seep into the station’s corridors, where the protagonist must hunt them down with a plasma shots and avoid being shot in return.

In addition, up to ten droids are under the player's indirect control. Ranging from cleaners to fighters to engineers, these automatons will act independently, but can be sent to key locations within the station -- i.e. infected areas. As the officer gains experience through battles, he will be promoted to higher ranks, enabling him to construct more efficient fighter robots in the station’s droid factory.

Since plasmodians running rampant in the station will cause system malfunctions. The main goal in such cases is to clear infections quickly and make sure that Beacon continues to function properly. To make things worse, a self-destruct mechanism will detonate the station in sixty minutes unless all signs of spore activity cease.

As rebel forces close in on the space station Gallion, you launch strikes against enemy-controlled planets in the most sophisticated techno-toy available to mankind, the space fighter Thunder Cloud II.

The game is a blend of action sequences in an Afterburner-esque pseudo-3D view. These sequences vary between ground combat, aerial combat and space combat, with different motion physics and enemy craft. There is also a strategic battle choices on a galactic map invaded in real-time.

The PC version uses speaker tweaks to recreate the game's tune on theoretically-inferior hardware.

Following Balance of Power, designer Chris Crawford stuck to the big-picture approach but shifted the focus from power politics to macroeconomics. In a grassroots simulation of industrial production and allocation, players balance a country’s military and social spending to survive in an environment of fictitious nations competing for land and resources.

Key element in the turn-based The Global Dilemma is a basic tree of industries such as coal mines, lumber mills or gunpowder factories. The entire production chain culminates in only two results: an increase in either military strength or population. Guns or butter.

The careful balancing and channelling of the industrial production, stripped down to the most basic mechanics, is The Global Dilemma’s fundamental challenge. A growing worker population is vital for the economy. A strong military is vital for conquering neighboring provinces, their resources and population.

At the same time, rivalling countries threaten the borders, and troops must be deployed to the vulnerable spots on the map. Superiority in numbers wins the abstract clashes of armies. The expert difficulty level adds a diplomacy system in which nations form short-term economic alliances.

The Global Dilemma sees Crawford refine his particular brand of socio-global simulations, reducing complex issues to basic cause-and-effects chains that have a distinctly educative edge. As usual, a well-written manual details the game’s mechanics. Crawford continued with Balance of the Planet (1990).

The A-Train Construction Set add-on for Maxis’ railroad management simulation A-Train is a map editor that allows modification of existing savegames and creation of new landscapes from scratch. The editor comes with six sample scenarios. Apart from that, it adds no new content to the game.

In 1992, Maxis published A-Train, a railroad management simulation by Artdink, a developer of some renown in Japan but virtually unknown anywhere else. A-Train was the third episode in Artdink’s Take the A-Train series, which dates back to 1986. An earlier installment of the series had been internationally published three years prior to Maxis’ A-Train by Seika Corp., under the name of Railroad Empire, with little to no public recognition.

In a goal-oriented approach, your task as a railroad tycoon is to build a trans-continental track that connects New York with California in the US scenario, and England with Turkey on the (considerably more challenging) Europe map. With transportation service limited to passengers only and scheduling options minimized, creating smoothly running train lines is comparatively easy – just make sure that trains don’t collide on the single-track lines. The main focus is on efficient track building using the A-Train, which you control directly. A limited supply of rails and geographical barriers such as rivers with few pre-constructed bridges make careful planning essential. Optional cargo trains help distributing building materials to the station closest to your A-Train. In a unique feature, days pass in an accelerated real-time day/night cycle, with track-building only possible during daylight and changes to train schedules and switches only allowed at night.

Zyconix is an arcade puzzle game.

Colored blocks raining down on a playfield, we’ve seen that before. Zyconix takes the Columns principle (align three or more bricks of the same color to make them disappear) and adds a few twists of its own:

• First, there are no groups or columns of stones, only single blocks.
• Second, several of them slide down at once, and you select and move them with a cursor.
• Third, only horizontal and diagonal lines disappear, but not stacks of the same color.

Add a few special objects from bombs to drills to a breakout ball that you can actually deflect grabbing a brick as a paddle, mix with four play modes (normal, pre-filled playfield and two time trial variants), and the result is a fast-pasted, tricky test of agility.

Two players can compete in split-screen mode, where each removed line turns the corresponding number of bricks on the opponent’s field into indestructible obstacle blocks. Soloists adjust the difficulty level by tweaking the number of blocks in a line (from three to six), number of colors and frequency of new stones appearing.

The time of Ragnarok draws near. In the final battle between Gods and Giants, the dead will rise from Hela's realm of torture and rally under the banner of Loke, the God of Mischief, who shall turn all of Midgard into a battlefield against his brother Odin, the one-eyed, father of the Gods of Asgard. As Thor drops Mjollnir, his hammer of lightning, as Freya falls from her Golden Cart and Heimdal is pierced by the horns of Loke, the fire giant Surt shall wield his ensorcelled sword and purge the land in flames, so that eons later, a new dynasty of man can arise. Thus the sage Mimer has seen it in the Well of Wisdom. It is the dusk of the gods.

Can fate be turned? Odin summons a champion, who has died on the fields of battle and is guided to Asgard by the Valkyries. This champion must find the six elements needed to forge a chain that can bind the hell hound Fenris, the Giant's best ally in the upcoming pandemonium. In addition, the champion must stop the quarrels of the Gods. Thor has lost the head of his hammer. Vidar, a son of Odin, strives to slay Hodur, who is said to have killed Baldur. Freya, the goddess of love and beauty, desires a necklace held by four dwarves. Frey is madly in love with the giantess Gerd, daughter of Surt, who demands the all-powerful Sword of Victory in exchange for the hand of Gerd. As you plunge into the whirl of intrigue, deceit and greed in the realm of the Viking gods, you travel the lands of the living and the dead, visit Aesir's underwater realm and cross the oceans in a magical pocket ship, and have a hand in all the legends from King Beowulf's fight with the dragon to the slaying of the Lady of the Hill.

Dusk of the Gods is a role-playing game that focuses on exploration of the Viking legends and conversations with various characters in a large, seamless game world featuring a day and night cycle. The role-playing system in the game is rather simple: the main character has only two basic statistics (Warrior and Sage abilities), and the action-oriented battles are based on an uncomplicated point-and-click interaction. Magic system relies on usage of runes to cast spells.

German small-town quietness erupts in a whirl of obscure horror, aggression and uninhibited sexuality as an ancient force stirs and warps minds. As Kronstadt drifts into chaos in the course of eleven days in November, a teenager bound to the wheelchair dabbles in Celtic mysticism and discovers his talent for magic. Bourgeois bliss, late-80’s youth culture, occultism and photorealistic nudity mix into a psychedelic nightmare that stands out as the most perplexing German adventure game.

The successor to Holiday Maker and Stadt der Löwen, and Phoenics’ (formerly PM Entertainment) third (and last) adventure game, Jonathan was a child of the dusk of Germany’s vibrant Amiga scene, where a maximum of finesse met a new minimum of public interest.

Jonathan is unconventional to the brink of schizophrenia, both in style and gameplay. The actual adventure actions in a colorless, messy interface are contrasted with the sumptuous high-res artworks of the frequent cutscenes. Many of these revolve around the members of the protagonist Jonathan’s clique, who are essential to the game – the disabled young man must rely on their help to do things he is unable to do.

As the game switches perspective and explores the minds of Jonathan’s friends, it focuses on their sexuality with a unabashed bluntness that should have shocked the pampered German audience, had anyone bought it.

It might be a "battle of colours", two "enemies" engaging in a "fight" to "conquer the territory" on the "battlefield". Or, despite Infogrames' martial marketing efforts, 7 Colors might just be a puzzle game with brightly colored diamonds.

In the wake of Alexey Pajitnov's block-busting Tetris, Infogrames licensed another Russian mathematician's concept for a game of logic and dexterity: Two players start from opposite ends of a board, filled with rectangles of seven different colors, and take turns in picking one of these colors. All diamonds of that color bordering on the player's territory are annexed, expanding the borders. Whoever first controls more than half of the terrain wins.

Some quirks add tactical depth: The color chosen is locked for the opponent for one turn; drawing lines from one border of the field to another fills all the space in between. In addition, boards come in various diamond sizes, color textures, and obstacle stones. A (generous) time limit exerts soft pressure.

7 Colors can be played against the computer or a human opponent, even over a local network - a rare feature at the time. Ambitious players may design their own boards with the included editor.

In an unique and interesting experiment, German department store giant Karstadt created a game that was advertisement and job recruitment in one box, and used its retail power to push it in the market at mid-price level.

Space Job is in essence a scifi life simulation; a 2350 adolescent strives for the fastest spaceship, the most beautiful girlfriend and the best career, but strictly within the confines of Karstadt's interplanetary empire. Starting as a trainee in one of four department store sections, you earn job reputation through stoic repetition of menial tasks - learning product prices by heart, sorting items in shelves, tidying up the storeroom in a Sokoban-style crate pushing subgame.

The quicker you do your daily chores, the more time remains for entertainment and private development - fitness training, gambling, movies, flirting, night school. An energy system balances your daily activities with periods of rest. Show endurance and personal progress, and promotion will unlock the full glory of department store management.

Despite its advertising character and indecent product placement, Space Job mediates commercialism with lots of tongue-in-cheek humor and light-hearted wordplay.