First thing I learned from this game: there is more to Solitaire than I ever imagined (or what Microsoft is telling us). Apparently, what I've played under the name of "Solitaire" all my life seems to be actually called "Klondike". There are more than 100 other variants, all of which you can try out right here and now. What all the games in this family have in common is that they are about sorting cards based on specific rules.
Dave, 17 years old, is spending is first vacation without his parents up in northern Scotland. While taking a swim in a lake, he passes through a small waterfall… and finds himself in a foreign world populated by magical creatures! Here, he is immediately drafted to overthrow the evil elf king…
Riding on the success wave of HeroQuest, Games Workshop released Space Crusade, a Warhammer "40k" variant for the McDonald's audience. So, it's basically a simplified and toned down version of Space Hulk. Unlike the computer game Space Hulk, Space Crusade's conversion into electronic form turned out to be a very faithful one.
Warhammer and its spinoffs seems to be a very popular franchise. I even met a professor at university who professed his love for '40K' on his institute website right next to the list of scientific papers and books he had written and and who used pictures of 'hulks' as the screensaver of his laptop. My first contact with this 'universe' was actually the computer game Space Hulk, and that's the very game this review is about. What an amazing coincidence!
Although there were quite a lot "simulations" of real team sports like soccer in the Amiga's days, it seemed to be nearly impossible to port such tactical games with so many players to the computer. Most companies simply didn't care and published almost unplayable sports games. But there were also the smart ones like the Bitmap Brothers who thought a bit about different concepts! The result was Speedball, the summit of team sports games.
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.
Your great aunt Hillie died and she left you 400000 DM. Just right to fulfil your lifelong dream to get into the hotel business! Or rather almost, but the bank will help you out for the rest. So now, at least, you buy your first house.
Silmarils was a very interesting development company. Many of their games escaped the traditional genre boundaries, many had a unique audiovisual style and many of their plots had a fascinating quirkiness to them. At the height of their most productive period, they made Storm Master which, unfortunately, got only little attention when the spotlight went to the much more traditional (but also much more successful) Ishar series.
Speedball, and even more so its sequel Brutal Deluxe, had been big, influential hits. Other games applying a similar style to basic (or, to give it a more positive spin, proven and trusted) concepts of the sports genre started flooding the market. One of these copycat games is Stormball which goes as far as almost copying the player portraits verbatim.
