Icom Simulations 1992
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

In spite of its limited gameplay, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective sold reasonably well, considering its status as one of the first CD-ROM exclusive games. A sequel was only a matter of time - and it did appear quickly.

Icom Simulations 1992
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Icom's Sherlock Holmes series goes into its third (and final) round. Not much has happened in the one year since the first volume had been published; the gameplay is still exactly the same: Holmes investigates scenes of crime in London, questions suspects and witnesses and Dr Watson is of course immediately stuck in a rut.

Epyx / US Gold 1990
Genre: Action, Simulation
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Atari ST

This is one I spent a lot of time with back in the days. At first glance, it's a simple aerial shooter, but there's more to it than that. Even though it's far from being a realistic simulation, there's a certain feel to the controls and general gameplay that draws you in, and before you know it, you really ARE crack pilot Butch Slayer, codename Fifi.

Apollo 1981
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: -
Licence: Commercial
System: Atari 2600

Space Cavern is the most complex Atari 2600 game I've ever seen, with a manual three times as thick as any other Atari 2600 game. There are countless different difficulty levels you can choose from when starting a game, selecting from options such as whether to have two or four enemies above you, whether or not to have any enemies from the sides, whether the enemies above are large (easy targets) or small, and whether the enemies above shoot straight or diagonally. All of these options are independant of one another, so you can mix and match.

B Seiler 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Spacewar (or SpaceWar, Space War or Spacewar!) is one of the first computer games ever. Some say the very first, but even though the line between funny tinkering and actual games is of course blurry in those early days, that's not entirely true, because Oscilloscopes had already been 'misused' for simple 'tennis' games back in the 1950s. Stephen Russell wrote Spacewar for the PDP-1 in 1962 - more than 40 years ago! The PDP-1 was a luxurious computer for its time: it used a cathode ray tube as display and could be used pretty much like the PCs we know today (compared to the earlier IBM computers at least).

Noriaworks 1995
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Speed Haste is a moderate arcade racing game which features 2 different car models and 8 tracks.

From the starting menu you can choose whether you want to run a full championship, just a single race or practice a little bit. Here you can also select you race car (Formula 1 or Stock Car) and if you want a certain number of laps or a race against the clock.

Scott Adams 1984
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

Spiderman - the first superhero who was a teenager. He was just a normal shy geeky teenager who wanted to attract girls, but didn't know how to start a conversation with them. He had his problems at home with his aunt. He didn't know what to do with his life. Basically just the usual problems of growing up - something the readers could directly identify with.

ERE 1988
Genre: Puzzle, Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Some games are so weird that you can't help wondering what kind of drugs the designers have been taking when they came up with this. Spidertronic is such a game.

You control some kind of futuristic 'bio-mechanical' spider which - for whatever reason - is walking over isometric platforms somewhere in outer space (?). Some of the squares have a different colour than the usual blue. These have to be picked up and can be used to repair (?) the way to the next level. Only one coloured square can be carried at the same time, and the order of the colours is important.

Microstyle 1989
Genre: Sport
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

To be sincere, I was planning something else for this review. I was convinced I had the geOS disks in my C64 ROMs collection, but I couldn't find it (it gets harder and harder with a 2000+ disk collection).

Tradewest 1992
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: SNES

Super Offroad is a very simple racing game. With a jeep you drive against three opponents (alternatively another human player amongst them) on tracks each sized exactly one screen. Appropriate to the name the terrain is covered with mud, hills and rocks.