Consoles and Home Computers 0-20 / 990

Wing Commander: The Secret Missions is the first data disk for the space combat simulator Wing Commander, released by Origin Systems in December 1990. The Kilrathi wipe out the Terran colony of Goddard with a new secret weapon, and the carrier TCS Tiger's Claw sets off after the strike fleet deep into enemy space, without reinforcements and with no... 11

Wizardry 2: The Knight of Diamonds is the second scenario in the Wizardry series, published by Sir-tech Software in 1982. Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead built it as a direct continuation of the first game: the original Apple II release offered no character creation at all, so the party had to be transferred from a Proving Grounds disk, ideally... 34

Ancient Fighters is a grid-based dungeon crawler released in 1994 by the Slovak label Extra Vision for the ZX Spectrum, followed shortly after by a SAM Coupe conversion. Seen from a first-person view, the player works through the catacombs beneath ancient Rome while switching between three warriors, each with his own map, his own weapon and his own... 116

Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods is the sequel to Bullfrog's god game, released in November 1991 for the Amiga and gradually ported to other computers and consoles. Peter Molyneux insisted the game be written from scratch, and moved it out of a vague medieval world into Greek myth: the player is a demigod, son of Zeus by a mortal woman, who... 57

The Fellowship of the Ring is an illustrated text adventure based on the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, built in 1985 by the Australian studio Beam Software for the publisher Melbourne House. In Europe it was sold as Lord of the Rings: Game One, and it is the follow-up to the same studio's earlier The Hobbit. The player leads Frodo and his... 96

The Hobbit is an illustrated text adventure based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in 1982 by Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell at the Australian studio Beam Software and published by Melbourne House. The player takes the role of Bilbo Baggins, travelling with Gandalf and Thorin across Middle-earth towards the Lonely Mountain, where the... 45

Deja Vu I & II: The Casebooks of Ace Harding bundles both detective adventures starring Ace Harding, originally released separately on the Macintosh in 1985 and 1988. Mindscape first packaged the two ICOM Simulations cases together for DOS and Windows 3.x in 1992, selling both for the price of one game. A reworked Game Boy Color port followed in 1999,... 50

Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas is a 1988 sequel to ICOM Simulations' debut Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! and the final entry in the MacVenture series, which had grown to include Uninvited and Shadowgate along the way. The player again takes on private eye Ace Harding, who wakes up in Las Vegas with a splitting headache and finds himself accused... 78

Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!! is a 1985 debut from ICOM Simulations and the very first entry in the MacVenture series, later joined by Uninvited and Shadowgate. The player takes on private eye Theodore "Ace" Harding, who wakes up with no memory in the toilet stall of a smoky Chicago bar, a revolver in his pocket and a dead body one floor up. It... 163

Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games is a 1996 turn-based tactical game and a standalone follow-up to the first part, developed and published by Sir-Tech Software. It runs on the same engine, but instead of liberating a single island it offers a chain of self-contained missions handed out by an anonymous employer and capped by a number of turns. Mercenaries... 27

Nuclear Strike is a 1997 action game by Electronic Arts and the fifth and final part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, this time a Super Apache, working through a list of objectives, watching fuel, ammunition and armour and carrying rescued people to safety. The new element is a set of 14 further machines the player can switch... 158

Urban Strike is a 1994 action game by Electronic Arts and the third part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, working through a list of objectives in an isometric view, watching fuel and ammunition as much as the shooting and flying rescued people back to base. This time the fighting happens neither in the desert nor in the jungle... 34

Urban Strike is a 1994 action game by Electronic Arts and the third part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, working through a list of objectives in an isometric view, watching fuel and ammunition as much as the shooting and flying rescued people back to base. This time the fighting happens neither in the desert nor in the jungle... 82

Urban Strike is a 1994 action game by Electronic Arts and the third part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, working through a list of objectives in an isometric view, watching fuel and ammunition as much as the shooting and flying rescued people back to base. This time the fighting happens neither in the desert nor in the jungle... 24

Urban Strike is a 1994 action game by Electronic Arts and the third part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, working through a list of objectives in an isometric view, watching fuel and ammunition as much as the shooting and flying rescued people back to base. This time the fighting happens neither in the desert nor in the jungle... 76

Jungle Strike is a 1993 action game by Electronic Arts and the second part of the Strike series. The player is back in a gunship, this time a Comanche, flying over Washington, the South American rainforest and snowbound mountains in an isometric view. The enemies are Ibn Kilbaba, son of the general from the first game, and the drug baron Carlos Ortega,... 36

Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf is a 1992 action game and the first part of the Strike series by Electronic Arts. The player sits in an AH-64A Apache gunship and flies over a desert emirate seized by a self-styled general named Kilbaba, seen from an isometric view. Besides shooting there is fuel and ammunition to watch, supplies scattered across... 27

Dark Seed is a horror point-and-click adventure from 1992 and the first title released by the Californian studio Cyberdreams. The dark half of its world was built from the work of Swiss painter H. R. Giger, who licensed his art on one condition: the game had to run in a high resolution of 640x350 pixels and 16 colours instead of the then usual 320x200... 23

Blue Force is a point-and-click police adventure released in 1993 by Tsunami Games. It was designed by Jim Walls, the author of the Police Quest series, who had just left Sierra and brought the same fascination with real police procedure with him: radio codes, reading suspects their rights from the Miranda card, searches and arrests. The player takes... 11

Nitemare-3D is a horror first-person shooter written single-handedly by David P. Gray in 1994 and released under his own company Gray Design Associates. The hero is Hugo from the author's own trilogy of adventure games, whose girlfriend Penelope has been kidnapped by Doctor Hamerstein. Hugo searches for her through the doctor's mansion, his laboratories,... 29