This month in... The One '93

News

Editor David Upchurch had “deserted” the mag for a couple of months which left Simon Byron in charge.

The CD32 received some encouraging news as high street retailer Menzies announced they would be stocking it in time for Christmas.

After some months of silence (on the Amiga at any rate), Thalamus was about to release “S.U.B.” (unreleased). The One wondered what had happened to “Arsenal” - rumour was the programmer had gone missing... It wouldn't see the light of day.

Domark had found considerable success with “Championship Manager ‘93” so it was no surprise they were readying a data disk for ‘94. As an aside, The One pointed out that six out of the top ten Amiga games were footie related.

There were few details, but Psygnosis provided some screenshots of “Armageddon 2” and a mystery isometric game similar in style to various Spectrum titles (but a lot more colourful, obv).

Apparently “Lawnmower Man” was the “most successful British film for 20 years”, at least according to Storm boss Jane Cavanagh. A CD32 version of the game tie in was planned (but never released), and a sequel to the movie was also in the works. Storm were expanding with a new Southampton office dedicated to CD games, and a Santa Monica office which had signed a deal with Sony.

Wolverhampton Wanderers were about to be the proud owners of the two largest video walls in Europe. Each wall featured 256 screens which were powered by an Amiga setup developed by CD Interactive Ltd.

As a promotion for their upcoming “Winter Games”, US Gold published a... bunch of facts about the Winter Olympics...

Interplay were to throw in a video tape of “Star Trek - The Motion Picture” with the first batch of “Star Trek: The 25th Anniversary”.

“Craft 1” was an add on package for AMOS from Black Legend which included a new audio system, Julia and Mandelbrot fractal sets amongst other things.

In a move that surprised most people, Virgin sold all of its Game Centres to competitor Future Zone. This follows on the heels of Branson selling Virgin Records, Virgin Mastertronic and a chunk of Virgin Interactive.

CD32 enhanced versions of Gremlin’s “Zool” and “The Lotus Trilogy” were on their way. The latter would feature all three Lotus games on one CD, with new graphics and a new soundtrack.

The One was rather snarky when it came to reporting on a new game from Hot Shot Entertainment called “Rocket Rescue” because it was promoted as new and innovative when it all looked rather old hat. It was not released.

A new joystick from Spectravideo and Logic 3 boasted nine micro switches, five fire buttons, auto fire and an extra long cable.

The Etching Transfer Company were offering a new service to etch identifying words into your monitor to put off thieves, or something.

Tabloid The Sun’s game “Snapperazzi” had found a publisher in Alternative and would sell for £19.95.

Psygnosis was to publish “Discworld” by Teeny Weeny Games, though it never made it to the Amiga.

Empire released a compilation featuring its own “Pacific Islands” and two from Microprose: “F117A” and “Silent Service II”.

Features

On this month’s two cover disks:

• “Alien Breed 2” Team17
• “Brian the Lion” Reflections/Psygnosis
• “Bob’s Bad Day” Psygnosis

Getting the Work In Progress treatment this month:

• “Heimdall 2” 8th Day/Core Design
• “Reunion” Grandslam
• “Theme Park” Bullfrog (there was also a sneak peek at “Magic Carpet” (Peter assured readers the CD-32 version would look as good as the PC) and “Creation”)
• “Fury of the Furries” Kalisto/Mindscape

PD Zone looked at:

• “Doody” 88%
• “Jelly Bean” 83%
• “Road to Hell” 89%
• “Robouldix” 89%
• “Slime”84%

Simon Byron spent a day with the Games World Live crew.

Notable Previews

• “Campaign 2” Empire
• “Doofus” Prestige
• “Genesia” Mindscape
• “Puggsy” Psygnosis

Notable Reviews

• "Alien Breed 2" Team 17 - 91% "We all knew this was going to be something rather special and I'm more than happy to report that our initial expectations have been well and truly exceeded. Once past the first level it's back into familiar alien-killing territory, albeit with tons of incredible sound effects, graphics and subtle gameplay variations, so fans of the first game are going to feel perfectly at home."
• "Perihelion" Morbid Vision/Psygnosis - 82% "It has an excellent style of presentation and works by an incredibly user-friendly interface, but as atmospheric as Perihelion's setting, sound and graphics are, the game itself leaves a bit to be desired in a few areas."
• "Body Blows Galactic" Team 17 - 87% "Compared to the original it goes far and beyond it thanks to the strange nature of the opponents. Add to that the eight-player tournament and you've got a game that's perfectly competent in all departments and is just about the best beat-'em-up available for the Amiga."
• "F-117A Stealth Fighter" Microprose - 80% "What I can say is that there’s little difference between flying this baby and flying Microprose’s former sim, F-15 Strike Eagle II, and I think I’d be pretty safe in guessing that the real planes don’t behave in the same way."
• “Star Trek” Interplay - 83% “This is a must for anyone who finds themselves strangely drawn towards things vaguely Star Trek related. The interface is excellent, making everything instantly accessible and leaving you with no worries when it comes to selecting the right object, chat-up line or which phaser to shoot.”
• “Stardust” Bloodhouse/Daze - 91% “Stardust may look pretty from the screenshots but you’ve got to see it running to really appreciate how beautiful it is - the animation is outstanding and everything moves sooo smoothly. I’ve no idea how they did it but - by God! - I’m glad they did.”
• “Globdule” Ex Animo Design/Psygnosis - 82% “At last - a platform game (or ‘splatform’, as Psygnosis are touting it) with a degree of originality. How refreshing it is to not have to hit secret blocks to reveal bonuses, or meander along horizontally-scrolling levels merely jumping on heads.”
• “Second Samurai” Vivid Image Design/Psygnosis - 87% “When you first load up Second Samurai you’d be forgiven for thinking that Psyggy had pulled a fast one and slipped you a copy of First Samurai in a different box. Specifically the two games appear very similar; despite the nice parallax backdrops, the graphics have a slightly dated look (circa 1989, I’d say), the sound appears to have been transplanted straight across to the sequel and the gameplay is just more hacking-‘n’-slashing mayhem.”
• “The Settlers” Blue Byte - 90% “To put it succinctly, The Settlers is one of the most impressive games ever to have come out of Germany. Or anywhere else for that matter. It’s been a while since I’ve played a strategy game for as long as I spent on The Settlers.”
• “Cannon Fodder” Sensible Software/Virgin Interactive - 93% “Brilliance. Sheer, unadulterated brilliance. Cannon Fodder is quite simply one of the best strategy/action/shoot-‘em-ups to appear for ages.”
• “Wonder Dog” Core Design - 84% “Okay, Wonder Dog is nothing new. The only revolutionary thing about is that you can’t kill the baddies by jumping on their heads, which has to be something of an innovation for a platform game these days. So why has it been rated so highly? Well, for starters it’s supremely playable.”
• “Liberation: Captive 2” Byte Engineers/Mindscape - 94% “Thank God - game that finally does the CD32 justice. The simple fact of the matter is that Liberation is quite possibly the best game I’ve ever played - it’s so good it makes Frontier look like a PD text adventure.”

This month in... The One '93

News

The CD32 launch hadn't exactly gotten off to a great start, with sales looking rather lacklustre. To try to turn things around Commodore kicked off a marketing push starting with a big presence at the Live '93 exhibition and an upcoming TV advert. Satellite stations would be targeted first before switching to ITV and C4 over the Christmas period. Apparently Live '93 was such a big hit that Commodore had already booked its presence at next year's event. At this stage there was around 15 titles available for the console with 25 more due in the next "couple of months".

Chris Evans and Gaby Roslin from The Big Breakfast were on hand to open HMV's new flagship "Level One" video game department at its Oxford Street store. The chain challenged other retailers to provide "the video games fan with a more exciting shopping environment." Along with a 25-screen video wall, punters could look forward to 5,000 titles on the shelves.

Millenium were to hold a "Brutal Sports Football" competition/event at "Level One."

What did CNN's Joe McGann, Children's BBC's Andi Peters, Top of the Pops's Tony Dortie and ABBA cover band Bjorn Again have in common? They had all been enlisted by Codemasters to declare their love for "Cosmic Spacehead".

With its latest release "Qwak", Team 17 had secured the top four spots on the budget chart. The other titles were "Project-X", "Alien Breed Special Edition" and "F17 Challenge".

The '94 World Cup was approaching which meant we’d soon be inundated with footie games. One of the first due to appear was Rage's "Striker 2", which they were confident would improve "beyond recognition" over its predecessor. (ureleased)

Bucking the recent trend of increasingly weird joysticks, Logic 3 was to release a "square box and straight shaft" style one.

Here's an odd one.. UK tabloid The Sun had decided to give game development a go. "Snapperazzi" was shown at Live '93 and featured the exploits of an alien news photographer. Not only would it receive significant editorial support, but related competitions were planned and they even had in game promotions for Domino's Pizza and Fizzy Chewits.

Future Zone claimed it was now the biggest gaming store chain in the country following the opening of a further three shops, bringing the total to 31 (which was one more than rivals Virgin Games).

Educational software house Lander had reduced the prices of some of its best known applications to £9.99.

Sierra Online were so confident of the quality of their games they started a new "Guaranteed Enjoyment" promotion where they would exchange any of their games within 21 days of purchase if the customer wasn't happy.

Mike Singleton's "Ashes of Empire" was to get a re-release on the Action Sixteen label.

Daily Mirror cartoonist Roger Mahoney had started a new comic strip based on "Putty". While he hadn't found a publisher yet, he was confident someone would pick it up.

Features

On this month's three cover disks:

• "Uridium 2" Graftgold/Renegade

• "Hero Quest 2: Legacy of Sorasil" Gremlin

• "Zombie Massacre"

• "Seek & Destroy" Vision Software

• "Project Buzzbar"

I had no idea the conference existed back then, but Develop! 93 took place in Islington during the same week as the Autumn ECTS. The One went along to see what was going on in the game development world. There was a growing concern over the ever increasing budgets and team sizes required for producing new games - gone were the days of the bedroom coder knocking out games in a few months. In addition to that the industry had attracted the attention of non-gaming titans like Time-Warner, 20th Century Fox and IBM. Other stories from Develop covered in this section:

• Manga artist Satomi Mikuriya was unhappy at the number of trees sacrificed to produce the comics he drew for and had come up with a CD authoring system that would allow an entire animated comic CD to be created in mere hours and cost less than £3000. This, he proposed, would allow CD based publications to retail for around £5.

• Psygnosis' Ian Hetherington predicted we would see consoles capable of updating "every single pixel on a high-resolution screen, individually rendered in millions of colours, sixty times a second... and more..." by the end of the decade. He feared that game developers weren't ready for such a seismic shift which could result in demand for traditional skills falling by the way side, replaced by "emotional realism, storytelling and editing."

• Chris Crawford (creator of games like "Balance of Power", and founder of the Computer Game Developers Conference) warned devs that "unless we spend more time developing more subtle scenarios than Kill, Slash and Score, we'll all have lost interest in games by the time we're 25 or older". Hmm. He was working on a new game and had spent over two years just on the facial animation. He expected it to be finished in a year.

• One pertinent question for Amiga fans was: given the impending launches of the Jaguar, 3DO and Nintendo/Silicon Graphics "monster machine", should I buy a CD32? Apparently almost every developer there working on CD titles was "using code that could easily be converted for different machines. So whether you end up with a 3DO machine or a CD32 may not make much difference after all..."

An interview with DMA Design which ended with them admitting that piracy meant it was no longer viable for them to support the Amiga... Though they did express interest in the CD32.

The games getting the Work In Progress treatment this month were:

• "Body Blows Galactic" Team 17

• "Rally" Europress Software (unreleased)

• "Rise of the Robots" Instinct Design/Mirage

• "Brian the Lion" Reflections/Psygnosis

• "King's Quest VI" Revolution Software/Sierra On-Line

• "Seventh Sword of Mendor" Grandslam (unreleased)

• "Fatman the Caped Consumer" Black Legend

• "Perihelion" Pysgnosis

In this month's PD Zone:

• "Artillerus 2" 93%

• "Mr & Mrs" 74%

• "Trax" 81%

• "Motorola Invaders 2" 89%

• "Mr Men Olympics" 82%

After 6 months, work on "Alien Breed 2" was drawing to close, and that meant the final instalment of the dev diary. Beta-testing was well underway with only final tweaks to be done. There wasn't much in the way of updates from the team, but the good news was that Martyn's month long post-ECTS hangover had finally passed.

There was a rather amusing "day in the life of The One" feature.

Notable Reviews

• "Frontier" David Braben/Gametek - 96% "Like Elite before it, Frontier is a game that rises above its feeble competitors like a colossus and will be talked about in awe and admiration for years to come. It's better than you could ever have dreamed it to be."

• "Wiz'n'Liz" Raising Hell Software/Psygnosis - 86% "Wiz 'n' Liz has been well received on the Mega Drive and I'm glad to say that it's survived the conversion to the humble Amiga extremely well. Everything about it screams 'sharp, cute and well presented', right down to all the nice little touches like the numerous sub-games and spell effects." (I love this game - still play it to this day)

• "Uridium 2" Graftgold/Renegade - 91% "Once you've acquired that ability [to pilot the Manta skillfully], however - and it doesn't take that long, to be honest - you'll find Uridium 2 one of the dreamiest, most satisfying blasts you've ever had the privilege of playing."

• "Donk!" The Hidden/Supervision - 80% "Donk! looks stunning, no two ways about it - the parallaxed backdrops are simply gorgeous - but as platform games Donk! holds few surprises other than how good it looks."

• "Brutal Sports Football" Millennium - 88% "It's lovely to be able to play a game where you don't get sent off every time you hack someone down, let alone hacking their heads off. The game may look as though it could get repetitive, but there are enough icons and different moves available to keep you happy for ages and ages."

• "Overdrive" Psionic Systems/Team 17 - 83% "Arriving just a month after the incredible Micro Machines, Overdrive was always going to have a hard job impressing us, especially with expectations running so high after such a long time in development. It's no surprise to discover, then, that Overdrive is a slight disappointment."

• "Qwak" Team 17 - 88% "Qwak - brilliantly simple, simply brilliant. Ah, at last, a chance to use that dodgy cliche. But what else can I say? Qwak is yet another goal for Team 17 - it's just soooo playable."

• "Beneath a Steel Sky" Revolution/Virgin - 93% "Steel Sky is a real eye-opener - once you've seen the way that background objects move just for the hell of it (after all, the odd fan rotating doesn't enhance the adventure, does it?), you'll never be able to focus on the virtually static screens of the LucasArts games again."

Charts

1. "Space Hulk" EA

2. "Championship Manager" Domark

3. "The Patrician" Daze

This month in... The One '93

News

Renegade's release schedule was looking rather impressive with “Uridium 2” first up, followed soon after by “Turrican 3” and “Elfmania”. If that wasn’t enough, “Ruff ‘n’ Tumble”, “Sensible World of Soccer”, “Flight of the Amazon Queen” and “Z”) were all due by the end of the year. The last one - a real time strategy game from the Bitmap Brothers - was particularly interesting since it’d be years before it saw the light of day.

Food company Birds Eye commissioned a survey to find out how kids preferred to spend their spare time. Given that gaming was still very much considered the niche hobby of spods, 37% listed it as their favourite activity compared to 32% for reading...

“Graham Gooch’s 2nd Innings” was a data disk for the original game that provided tougher opponents, 18 county teams, more stats and various other improvements.

It hadn’t been a great year for Microprose which resulted in the decision to close their Manchester and Leeds offices (the latter was formerly the home of Vektor Grafix). They had also laid off 50 people, while consolidating others in a new Chipping Sudbury office.

Old school hippy musician Steve Hillage had signed a deal with Storm to provide the soundtrack of the “The Lawnmover Man” CD-ROM game.

High street games shop Future Zone announced a new loyalty scheme where returning customers could earn free games.

A new expansion board for the A1200 from AmiTek would provide up to 8 megs of RAM, a 68882 maths co-processor and a battery backed clock for about £80.

Daze Marketing launched a budget line of games for £2.99.

The One had to make a clarification concerning “Trex Warrior” which had featured on its cover disks a couple of months ago. It turned out the game was only Public Domain in the UK, and subject to copyright restrictions elsewhere. Whups.

EA were getting into arcade machines, though there was no word on what titles were going to make the jump from home computers & consoles.

Channel 4 were to release a “Gamesmaster” book to tide fans over as they waited for the next series.

Commodore had earmarked £7,000,000 for CD32 advertising in the run up to Christmas. Most of this would be spent on an “eye-popping” TV campaign.

Founded by ex-Amiga games journos, Binary Asylum’s first game would be “Zeewolf”.

ICL had taken over the contract to provide customer care to new Amiga owners from Wang.

Mindscape were throwing its hat into the CD32 ring with “D/Generation” and “Alfred Chicken” getting ports, and a new major CD release in the form of Tony Crowther’s “Liberation - Captive 2”.

Features

On this month’s 2 cover disks:

• “Space Hulk” Electronic Arts
• “Alfred Chicken” Mindscape
• “Burning Rubber” Ocean

It was time for the Autumn ECTS show and Gary Penn provided a detailed report. While there was a fair number of new games for the Amiga - particularly A1200 and CD32 - there were troubling signs the major software houses like EA were beginning to focus solely on consoles and PC.

Getting the in-depth Work In Progress treatment this month were:

• “Mortal Kombat” Virgin
• “Dreamweb” Creative Reality/Empire
• “Elfmania” Terramarque/Renegade
• “Evolution: Lost in Time” Imagitec/US Gold
• “Wonder Dog” Core Design
• “F1” Lankhor/Domark

The PD games reviewed were:

• "Megaball" 81%
• "Zombie Massacre" 81%
• "Starbase '13" 71%
• "Top Secret" 80%
• "Insectoids 2" 89%
• "Super Pong" 69%

In this month's installment of the "Alien Breed 2" developer diary Andreas was improving the AI and INTEX computer system, Rico was building out the levels and ray tracing turrets, Allister was making squelching sounds and improving the speech samples, and Martyn... well, he was laid up in bed all month due to a "mystery bug" (and definitely not as a result of boozing it up at ECTS).

Notable Previews

• “Magic Boy” Empire
• “Globdule” Psygnosis
• “Jack the Ripper” Mindscape (unreleased)
• “Wiz & Liz” Psygnosis

Notable Reviews

• "Space Hulk" Nick Wilson/EA - 91% "I've never known a game that's as successful as Space Hulk at generating this level of genuinely sweaty, tense atmosphere and delivering such effective frights and scares - the game should come with an '18' certificate!"
• "Bob's Bad Day" The Dome/Psygnosis - 80% "Rivalled only by the ball from Pinball Fantasies, Bob is one of the most realistic spherical objects you'll find on the Amiga, with the twisty-turny platforms conveying a genuine sense of vertigo as you teeter over the edge of a cog-infested chasm with only the pull of gravity preventing you from loosing valuable coins."
• "Blastar" Core Design - 81% "Probably Blastar's best feature is the sheer variety in the gameplay. In almost every level the playing style chops and changes, keeping you on your toes with a new challenge."
• "Disposable Hero" Euphoria/Gremlin - 83% "On the one hand it's a fast-paced rocket ride, generally following traditional lines but spiced up in places with a few modern touches and some stunning sprites. Or, on the other, you could say it's a sadly dated format that was found, conquered and left by the roadside long ago in preference to games that require just a little more than a fast trigger finger, such as Syndicate."
• "Overkill" DigiSoft/Mindscape - 89% "Now this is really something: Overkill is one helluva blast. It's immediately pickupable and just the kind of game that you can play for either hours on end or a few minutes at a time, depending on what mood you're in."
• "Gear Works" Hollyware Entertainment/Software Business - 84% "The difficulty curve is perfect, gradually introducing you to more aspects of the gameplay as you go and slowly making the play areas that bit more awkward to get around."
• "Alfred Chicken" Twilight/Mindscape - 86% "Alfred Chicken is concrete proof that you don't need flashy graphics, parallax scrolling and 16.8 million colours to end up with a superbly playable platformer."
• "Micro Machines" Codemasters - 89% "When we got a demo of this game a month or so ago we spent a rather frightening amount of time playing it. It even got to the point where Sensi Soccer was demoted to second fiddle as far as lunchtime challenges were concerned."
• "F17 Challenge" Holodream/Team 17 - 84% "As you'd expect from Team 17, F17 Challenge is a quality game with loads of neat touches."
• "Jurassic Park" Ocean - 89% "Graphically it's a real treat; the Chaos Engine-y top-viewed sections move very smoothly even when there's a vast number of dinosaurs milling about and the 3D sections are detailed and move smoothly."

Charts

1. “Championship Manager ‘93” Domark
2. “F17 Challenge” Team 17
3. “Syndicate” Bullfrog/EA

This month in... The One '93

News

In an effort to draw some attention away from the other popular gaming mascots, Mindscape decided to enter "Alfred the Chicken" in the Christchurch by-election. Alfred managed to bring in 18 votes - two ahead of the Rainbow Alliance Party. The resulting media "circus" was certainly worth the 500 quid it cost them.

Europress teased some screen shots of racing sim "Rally", though they were from the PC version. The One reckoned there would be a corresponding 256 colour version for the A1200 & A4000... (it never made it to the Amiga)

The Live '93 consumer electronics show was to take place at Olympia in London between the 16th and 20th of September.

Codemasters had been focussing their attention on the Mega Drive but were going to show the Amiga some love again with a port of their hit "Micro Machines" and a new arcade adventure, "Cosmic Spacehead". The latter was to have a making of documentary broadcast on Central Television in October, with a November release.

Trying to brush off the recent financial problems, Commodore anticipated selling 400,000 CD32s throughout Europe in the run up to Christmas. They forecast a total of 450,000 units shifted in the UK for all of 1993, comprised of 220,000 A1200s, 180,000 CD32s and 50,000 A600s. While the numbers seem a tad... optimistic, that would only be 50,000 more than the previous year.

Teeny Weeny games signed the rights to Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" novels, though fans would have to be patient as the first title wasn't planned for release until Christmas '94. (Not released on the Amiga)

US publisher Gametek had set up shop in the UK, with the first titles planned for release being "Nascar", "American Gladiators", "The Humans" and "Batman Returns".

There'd already been three "Lotus" games from Gremlin and now they had signed a new, exclusive, long-term world wide agreement with the car manufacturer. I'm pretty sure the only release following this was "The Classic Lotus Trilogy" compilation, at least for the Amiga.

Hardware retailers SDL and Silica were squaring off against each other with some very attractive A1200 bundles.

Screenshots of a new beat'em up with fancy ray-traced graphics were released by Mirage. CD32 and A570 owners would be able to get their hands on "Rise of the Robots" before Christmas (well, assuming it wasn't delayed...)

The high street could look forward to a new games store with Future Zone looking to open 40 locations throughout the UK by the end of the year.

The One recommended owners of Public Domain disks do a bit of a clean out as the Home Affairs Commission were launching a crackdown on computer pornography.

News came from Tokyo that Taito were about to start construction on a new £30 million theme park called Cannonball City.

EA were working on an upgraded version of "Wing Commander" for the A1200.

Famous C64 coder Stavros Fasoulas was working with Terramarque on a new beat'em up that would make "Streetfighter 2 on the Super NES look like a Spectrum game", and on a regular A500 at that.

Joystick manufacturer Spectravideo were to release a joypad style controller, much to the ire of The One who like a good old traditional joystick.

Word arrived that Dominic Diamond had quit TV show "Gamesmaster".

Features

On this month's two cover disks:

• "Bubba 'n' Stix" Core Design
• "Overdrive" Team 17
• "F-177A Stealth Fighter 2" Microprose
• "Suburban Commando" Alternative Software
• "Deep Core" ICE

Coverage of the launch event for "most important development in the Amiga range yet", the CD32. Chris Evans was the host and after kicking things off, he introduced Medhi Ali (President of Commodore International) and Lew Eggebrecht (VP of Engineering). Apparently that duo managed to dampen any excitement with their dry presentations (which were marred by technical glitches), causing even Evans to actually nod off. But then it was on to the unveiling of the machine and its launch price. People approved of the price, but the few games shown didn't really impress. That said, on paper the CD32 was a compelling competitor to the likes of Sega's Mega CD. Overall the press reaction was positive.

To accompany the details of the CD32 was a round up of what the big software companies were planning to release for it.

And finally, journo Simon Bryan headed down to the Virgin Games Centre in London to ask random punters what they thought of the announcements.

Getting the indepth Work In Progress treatment this month were:

• "Last Action Hero" Psygnosis
• "Micro Machines" Codemasters
• "Alfred Chicken" Mindscape
• "Theatre of Death" Psygnosis
• "Seek & Destroy" Vision Software
• "Oscar" Flair Software
• "Manchester United Premier League Champions" Krisalis

In what seems like a recurring feature now, The One asked "Where are you..." "Ambermoon" and "Star Trek" ?

This month's "Alien Breed 2" dev diary saw Andreas ripping the scrolling routine out of "Superfrog" & digging into AGA, Rico buying a scanner and Martyn buggering off to Greece for a 2 week vacation and then lamenting the fact that he was no longer on vacation.

PD Zone reviews this month:

• "Super Skoda Challenge" 67%
• "Premier Picks" 81%
• "Fruit Salad" 79%
• "White Rabbits" 82%
• "Billy Burglar" 71%
• "Gribbit" 79%

Notable Previews

• "Gulp" ICE
• "Surf Ninja Kids" Flair Software
• "Lamborghini American Challenge" Titus Software
• "Kingmaker" US Gold

Notable Reviews

• "Soccer Kid" Krisalis - 93% "I haven't been so excited by a game for ages and I'm sure you'll share my enthusiasm when you play it. Soccer Kid is, to put it simply, in a class of its own."
• "Mean Arenas" ICE - 81% "Despite the slightly iffy graphics there's not really a lot to fault with Mean Arenas - while breaking no barriers in originality, it manages to combine a number of game ideas to make a surprisingly addictive and enjoyable game that I found myself coming back to time and time again."
• "The Patrician" Ascon - 82% "This has been an enormous hit in Germany for quite some while now and though I'm not sure if people will really take an interest in the historical elements of the game, this is a deep and competitive game offering an excellent number of 'sub games' that keep it from being repetitive."
• "Premier Manager 2" Gremlin - 90% "This really is the best bits of all the footy games bundled together and laid out on a golden plate for you, so pick a team, put your managerial hat on and assume that 'hunched over the keyboard for hours' position that all true management game players have. Good stuff."
• "Yo! Joe!" Play Byte - 84% "Yo! Joe! may not have the polish or finesse of Soccer Kid or Flashback but as long as you're prepared to spend some quality time from the start then you'll not be disappointed. Trust me on this."
• "Hired Guns" DMA Design/Psygnosis - 91% "If there's one game which is likely to alter the perception of RPGs then Hired Guns is it. If you usually shy away from adventuring then you need only spend a couple of minutes with DMA's RPG to see that this is something truly excellent."

Charts

1. "Syndicate" Bullfrog/Electronic Arts
2. "Dune 2" Westwood/Virgin Games
3. "Goal!" Dino Dini/Virgin Gams