Ocean 1989
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Chase H.Q., which first got into the arcades in 1988, is a racing game with a twist. Instead of just using the basic 'driving faster than the opponents', it adds another goal: catching another vehicle. The simple background story tells us something about a 'futuristic' police department called 'Chase H.Q.'. The player sits around in his sports car all day until he gets a call from Nancy from the headquarters, telling him about an escaped criminal who has to be caught again.

neo Software 1994
Genre: Strategy, Puzzle
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Amiga

Lured by the promise of quick money, Matt Stuvysunt arrives in London in early 1953. A meeting with his not very sympathetic, but nevertheless fascinating aquaintace Briggs provides him with a used car, some startup money and at least a faint idea where to start: a small kiosk somewhere out of town. Low gain, but also close to zero risk. Briggs himself is obviously up to something a lot bigger.

Creative Materials / U.S. Gold 1991
Genre: Action
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Metro City's new mayor, the former Street Fighter champion Haggar, has vouched to rid the city off crime. The Mad Gears (a local gang) aren't too thrilled by that prospect, so they've kidnapped Haggar's daugther Jessica to blackmail him. As either Haggar himself, Jessica's boyfriend or another random guy who happened to be hanging around at the gym, the player has to fights his way through the hordes of the Mad Gears to free her again. No real risk there, because for some reason, the evil guys won't kill her even when they're attacked...

Maelstrom / Rainbird 1990
Genre: Action, Strategy
Rating: 6/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

There are only very few games out there which actually deserve the over-used label 'epic'. Usually, games called 'epic' just go for broadness, i.e. they offer lots of stuff of the same kind. For example, such a game would have lots of levels, but all those levels require the same few activities and strategies.

Sierra 1987
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

The shortest running of the common Sierra Adventures. Does that say anything about its quality? Come on, we're talking about Sierra! As if these sillyheads had ever cared about consumer wishes or producing quality products!

Michael Zerbo 1994
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Amiga

Michael Zerbo used to be one of the most infamous authors of 'adult' (meaning violence, not sex) interactive fiction. His games always had some sort of gruesome theme, and the solutions to his puzzles were often equally gruesome. He alienated the classic target audience by utilizing commands such as USE (a mortal sin in the IF scene), yet his games were huge hits as their download counts exceeded those of more 'accepted' authors by more than an order of magnitude at times. This went so far that he even released some of his games as Shareware, i.e. expecting to make money from them (more info on that in the final paragraph).

Cinemaware 1986
Genre: Adventure, Action
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

The early and mid-90s - the wake of the CD-Rom as a games medium. Because the games themselves didn't need this space yet, tons of 'interactive movies' filled the shelves of the stores. Those were rarely more than a collection of movie clips and the players' only activity was to make a few (often pretty futile) decisions between the scenes. Many see 7th Guest as the beginning of this development.

Graftgold 1995
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
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.

Infogrames 1988
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Do you also sometimes have these incredibly positive memories about a game? Always thinking back how great it was and how you would love to play it again? Doesn't happen at all to me for the simple reason I still have all my games and keep playing them constantly - no misleading emotions.

Titus 1989
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

What a mediocre game! Walking from left to right and beating up evil guys. There's also some kind of 'story' behind it, but I have to confess I don't know it exactly. When playing it again for the review, I couldn't find the intro, no matter how hard I tried!