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.

Core Design 1994
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 2/6
Language: English, Francais, Deutsch, Italiano
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

As so often, bribing / threatening (or whatever they did) magazines into giving the disastrous Curse of Enchantia good reviews worked. Sales were apparantely good enough to warrant a sequel. And so, Universe was made. Another monster let loose on humanity or did they get it right this time?

Graftgold 1986
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

The alien invasion of Earth is afoot, and there's just no way to stop the attacking forces by conventional means. Even if the puny earthling forces manage to destroy one wave, countless more are just waiting to take its place. So the humans recognize their only chance is to go to the source and cut off the invaders' supplies.

Graftgold 1993
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

When Uridium first came out, it was breathtaking: great looking, lovingly animated and incredibly fast at the same time. As the years went by, such qualities gradually lost some of their effect, of course. Still good, still (relatively) impressive, but not a sensation anymore.

Graftgold 1986
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

Uridium Plus, released the same year as the Uridium. Not much time to change anything, but also not much need to, since the original version was very successful - never change a winning horse. So the basics remain the same: The player flies the Manta ship's assault on the aliens' huge Dreadnoughts, first taking out the numerous waves of defenders, then landing and activating the self-destruct mechanism - all that to stop the invaders' supply of raw materials.

Promotion Software / LBS 1993
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Language: Deutsch
Licence: Freeware
System: Amiga

"Victor Loomes" is a private eye in the Chicago of the 1920s. And his sponsor is..... the LBS (a German "Bausparkasse" - if you don't know what that is, visit their homepage for a good laugh)! If you're asking where the temporal (at that time, the LBS didn't exist) and local (the LBS doesn't exist anywhere outside Germany) link is, you've already understood the whole problem of the game.

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.

Firebird 1988
Genre: Action, Simulation
Rating: 2/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Atari ST

Why can't humanity meet a non-aggressive alien race just once for a change? This particular one even employs tactics of biological warfare, infecting the countryside with a virus which leaves only a dead and barren landscape. So the player jumps into his spaceship to destroy all the death-inducing invaders.

Lankhor 1994
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 2/6
Language: Francais, English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

That's the way it happens sometimes: you're told by another gamer how great (or in this case at least good) a game is and how you should really try it. You do and get bored after a few minutes. You wonder if you just haven't found the good part so far, so you continue playing. But nothing happens! It just stays boring. Because that is what the game really is: boring.

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.