Tiger Media 1991
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

It's been many years since you've last heard from your old war buddy Bronson Barnard. You two had been flying together over France in 1917, you even saved his life there once. After the war, your lives drifted apart. He became a successful industrialist, you joined the police first, and became a private detective later.

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).

Magnetic Scrolls 1987
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Magnetic Scrolls send you back to Kerovnia, the location of The Pawn. But instead of a confused stranger, you are an aspired wannabe-member of the famous Guild of Thieves! To be accepted to this illustrious round, you have to prove your abilities. The guild sends you to an island and you have to ransack as many valuables as possible. The castle-like mansion looks like a likely target, but you're already stopped at the entranceby the guards. The nearby bank on the other hand looks like an even harder job...

Eldritch Games 1989
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Alone in the Dark, Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice - games based on or inspired by works by H.P. Lovecraft. None of these can claim to be the best or first game of this theme though, because there is another one which is both older and still beats them all easily: The Hound of Shadow!

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.

Imagitec / Gametek 1993
Genre: Strategy, Puzzle
Rating: 4/6
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.

Magnetic Scrolls 1986
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
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.

White Wolf Productions 1991
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

The early 90s made the previously hardcore genre of hex-based wargames accessable to a much broader audience. The rules got simpler, the controls easier and the graphics less cryptic. The prime example of this trend is of course Battle Isle by Blue Byte. To a lesser extent, The Perfect General contributed there, too.

Lucasfilm Games 1991
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 6/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

My name is Guybrush Threepwood. I want to be a pirate. What, you don't know what I'm talking about? Where have you been since 1990? The only excuse I will accept is this: searching treasure on a cut-off island with vegetarian cannibals, a hermit waiting to be rescued even though he has already built a boat and a giant monkey head!

Black Blade Design / Titan Computer 1998
Genre: Simulation, Action
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Mobygames isn't omniscient. There. I've said it. Heresy? Then show me where they cover this game (ok, ok, I'm aware this might change, I'm refering to the time of writing, of course). Yet, it obviously exists.