Icom Simulations 1987
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Driving a car at a stormy night can be quite dangerous: Accompanied by your little brother, you're on a quiet and lonely road through the open country when suddenly an unrecognisable figure appears before you. Trying to avoid hitting it, you pull the wheel aside and crash into a tree. Everything goes black.

U.S. Gold 1990
Genre: Action, Puzzle
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Sometimes them game-programmers really demand a lot of imagination - who would think of a human body and virii looking at this game? In Vaxine you are the last line of defense protecting important cells against agressive virii. Such a virus appears in 3 possible colors and can be eliminated by shooting at it with a little ball of the same color. To make this clear right now - at first you will think you got a cool fast action-game here. You will be frustrated soon because you won't survive very long. The game will just get faster and faster if you want it to and you won't be able to defend your cells since you will always miss the virii you try to shoot. You need to think of some basic strategies. Most important things are the black gates. Just drive through one and everything will freeze for one minute (remember to drive through one again before the minute runs out). Now you can search for the next virus and get into a good shooting position before you shoot at it (which will unfreeze everything). While this is enough for the first level you will need to eliminate the virus-producers (flat cells moving around on the floor) first in the higher levels. You will hear a special sound-effect each time one of them appears and that means you have to find the next black gate fast to have time to search for that little bastard.

Graftgold 1995
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Virocop was one of the games which really got a lot of attention before it was released - at least from the readers of one specific German Amiga magazine: Amiga Games. This magazine published a "developer's diary" over several months, then it suddenly stopped - but the finished game didn't appear. No explanation, no comment. A lot later, they mentioned they had dropped this article because they couldn't squeeze these pages in anymore. Never sounded too believable to me. More likely that there just wasn't enough happening anymore. Still, it was quite interesting to read every month how the idea developed, how changes to the concept were made (it changed from "Tanky" to "D.A.V.E" over time), how the graphics changed from hand-drawn sketches to actual screenshots.

Mindcraft 1993
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Siege & Ambush At Sorinor & Walls Of Rome: A series of games very similar to each other. The screenshots look almost identical. And all the games are quite similar in fact They're all pioneers of the RTS genre. That means much action is in them. But in contrast to current titles, the strategy- component is stressed. This becomes clear when you discover that you can give orders to your army when the game is paused.

Millenium 1991
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Druid in its third round. War rages again in Belorn - how original. Lone magician (this time not called 'druid', but 'warlock') battles his way through and ends the threat.

After the relatively fresh and original Enlightenment, Warlock is a complete turn towards the original again. No more complicated spell management and also no non-linear levels anymore. In fact, the best description is this: New levels for the original Druid.

SSG 1990
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Warlords is a very basic game. Some parts of Empire mixed with a little bit of Risk and finished with a fantasy touch. Up to eight different fractions are struggling over supremacy in Illuria. Illuria is a relatively small country with 80 cities which is completely flat and apparantely has some kind of impenetrable borders - this is where the map just ends.

Strategic Studies Group 1993
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

In this game, you are in charge of a nation (faction or whatever), and will try to take over the world. The other players will surrender when you conquer more than half of the castles. You can refuse this surrender, but after that the opponents unite and will try to wipe you out.

MB 1982
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Vectrex

Definitely the Vectrex game with the best graphics I have played so far. It even has music, as well as sound effects!

You are an intergalactic animal collector. You are trying to collect all 20 species of creatures, all the while avoiding all those nasty alien star-shaped drones and , of course, the dragon that will attempt to shoot you with a fireball if you miss too often. Once you have captured a creature (does this sound like Pokemon? It sure isn't.) you still have to find the way out of the intergalactic webspace you're trapped in and take it to your trophy room (great animation).

Arbeitskreis Spielkultur 1999
Genre: Puzzle, Strategy
Rating: 4/6
Language: Deutsch, English, Nederlands
Licence: Freeware
System: PC

If a game comes along with a producer like "Arbeitskreis Spielkultur" (sounds like some typically German dry official office), you should be careful. If the plot revolves around Norse mythology, the expectation of some completely non-understandable crap made by roleplaying geeks.

Enix 1994
Genre: Adventure, RPG
Rating: 4/6
Language: Japanse, English (unofficial)
Licence: Commercial
System: SNES

Based on Pinocchio and with a simple AI as main character, Wonder Project J consists on raising Pino, a robot that looks like a kid, to make him become human like.

All is done with a controller different to the usual one in a console game, as you use a mouse, on of those add-ons that only one or two more games made use of. It moves around a fairy robot that can carry objects, to put them into your inventory or getting them out of it, order Pino to move or stop, and scold (and doing it again, hit) or praise him.