Rocket Ranger

The Good
Rocket Ranger brings together everything that Cinemaware was attempting in their unique genre: Great hand-drawn graphics, a compelling storyline, good action sequences, and greatly improved strategy without bogging down the gaming experience. Everything is in perfect balance here.

The Bad
The strategy in Rocket Ranger is one of Cinemaware's better efforts, but strays toward being too hard instead of their usual "too easy". The Nazis move in realtime, and their time inevitably seems much slower than yours (in other words, they acheive things startingly quick).

Granted, the strategy elements are simplistic to those who enjoy true strategy games, but what is presented could have used a difficulty setting.

The Bottom Line
When someone mentions a Cinemaware game fondly, this is the game they're talking about. Except for the difficulty level, there is nothing to hate about Rocket Ranger.

The Good
The control. Unlike in the borderline-unplayable Amiga version, the control in the MS-DOS version of this game is fairly responsive, making the action minigames easier to play.

Some other cruelly hard portions of the original, such as the conversations where the wrong option was an instant game over, have been taken out of this version. Your success in what would have been those portions now depends on your success at the action minigames, as it should be.

The setting. As a big fan of Indiana Jones, "pulp" adventurers and heroes interest me, and anything inspired by Commando Cody gets big points with me.

The graphics. Obviously, they couldn't do the Amiga's graphics, but what we have here is still stellar for MS-DOS, EGA standards.

The Bad
The difficulty is still as high as the Amiga version because your success largely depends on luck - crippling their efficiency rating to acceptable levels means being able to find and attack all the important Nazi facilities as quickly as possible in one go and still have enough lunarium on your jetpack to go back to the US. The odds are so far from being in your favor, it's mind-boggling.

The sound. PC speaker sound stinks, plain and simple.

The Bottom Line
Call me crazy, but I like to play video games, not gawk in disbelief at how beautiful they look in magazine screenshots. So when given a choice between a beautiful-looking game that I can't play and a more modest-looking one that I can, I will choose the latter, every time. And this is the version of Rocket Ranger I can play, so it meets my approval (and is the one that made me a Cinemaware fan).

Just lower the CPU cycles in DOSBox to around 500, get the correct copy protection sheet, and try to remember that it's from 1988 and some game design philosophies didn't exist yet. And you'll find this is the best "pulp rocketman" game (after Dark Void) you'll ever play.