Capcom 1989
Genre: RPG, Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: Japanese, English (unofficial)
Licence: Commercial
System: NES

Mamiya Ichirou created a series of frescos that attracted many people to her abandoned and lost in the middle of the forest house. A place that obviously is damned and owned by her victim searching ghost.

Gremlin Graphics 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Plus/4

Back in the Eighties, Sword Of Destiny was one of the first computer games I played. After putting the cassette into the slightly damaged drive, you had to push down the play button and the cap all the time to avoid a crash during the process of loading. The longer the screen glimmered like a rainbow gone mad, the more the excitement grew. Finally it began: Down into the catacombs!

Avalon Hill 1985
Genre: RPG
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

"Ah yes, my young fellows, I still remember when I first climbed down the stairs into this vile dungeon. All I had was the sword of my father and no clue how to use it. And then they came! Zombies, Skeletons, Orcs! I fought them all - barely made it out alive with the few coins I was able to find in the corners of the tunnels. Bandaging my wounds I made it to this very tavern and spent the night. But when the morning sun rose I knew I had to go back in there. I could not leave that dungeon unconquered. And so I travelled deeper. My skills got better, I got faster - soon I was starting to fight of demons and dragons - and the deeper I ventured into the caverns the deadlier they got!

Tiger Media 1992
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

The Case of the Cautious Condor was one of the first CD-ROM only games and it was released as early as 1989 for the (then) groundbreaking japanese home computer FM-Towns which came with a CD drive by default - long before this got into mainstream on the PC four years later with killer applications like Rebel Assault.

Melbourne House 1982
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: ZX Spectrum

If you think text adventures, you probably think Infocom and PC. However, even with all the freeware text adventures as a result of a huge fan base, the Spectrum is still the primary platform for text adventures. With over 1,400 commercial (or semi-commercial) text adventures for Spectrum alone and countless more that ware made thanks to the simple programming language, the Spectrum was a heaven for all adventure fans. In hindsight, it's not surprising. In the early 80s, PCs were still very expensive, Apple II had too good graphics to bother with text games and the rest of the crowd were consoles, only few of which had a keyboard. Spectrum was perfect: with a 3.5MHz processor it was pretty weak for high-res graphic games, yet because it was also a programming platform, it had a highly functional keyboard, perfect for text adventures.

Sierra 1992
Genre: Puzzle
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Now that you became Dr. Brain's assistant you've got your first job assigned to you: going to Dr. Brain's private island for recovering a battery necessary in an important new creation.

Imagitec / Gametek 1993
Genre: Strategy, Puzzle
Rating: 4/6
Language: English, Deutsch
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

This review is part of The Review Roundup - Round 1: Games Related to the End of the World

Norse mythology has its very specific version of how the world is going to end. The world will fall into a deadly winter, and all kinds of natural catastrophes will occur. Monsters will rise from the depth in which they hid. The monsters will ally with the giants, facing the gods and heroes. In this final battle between good and evil, everybody will perish - including the chief god Odin.

Electronic Arts 1992
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English, Deutsch, Francais
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

A young actress has been brutally murdered right behind the theatre. It looks like Jack the Ripper has found his first victim outside Whitechapel: the poor woman's throat has been cut and there are more wounds which could only have been inflicted with a scalpel all over the body. Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard is leading the investigation - and he asks the world's first, most famous and only consulting detective for help: Sherlock Holmes.

Magnetic Scrolls 1986
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Europe's answer to Infocom wasn't in fact all that similar to its american counterpart. Apart from the obvious facts of being founded a lot later and surviving longer, Magnetic Scrolls developed their games for a completely different market. While Infocom was still stuck with the inferior 'typewriters' ruling the US market (to this day), Magnetic Scrolls wrote their games for 'home computers' - with the European market in mind, where these machines were immensely popular. The Pawn, their first game, was developed for the Sinclair QL, a then brand new computer which turned out to be a very bad flop. The game was ported to the other new 16 bit machines: the Atari ST and the Amiga. These versions first showed how fresh Magnetic Scrolls' approach to the genre was: they featured a set of graphics showing the settings in stunning quality! The later ports to the ever-popular 8 bit platforms (C64, Sinclair Spectrum) had to live without these graphics again.

Softdisk 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Before there was idSoft, there was Ideas from the Deep. And before there were 3D shooters, there were Pyramids of Egypt. True to idSoft's later games, this game is an arcade that requires quick thinking and some tactical-level decision-making.