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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... 12

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... 8

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,... 12

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... 6

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... 9

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... 5

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,... 11

Nippon Safes Inc. is the debut of the Italian studio Dynabyte, a cartoon point-and-click adventure released in 1992 for PC and Amiga. It is set in Tokyo and puts the player in charge of 3 characters who each got tangled up in the same case differently: the safe-cracker Doug Nuts, the boxer Dino Fagioli and the dancer Donna Fatale. Their stories can... 6

The Big Red Adventure is a point-and-click adventure by the Italian studio Dynabyte, published by Britain's Core Design in 1995. It follows on from Nippon Safes Inc. and brings back the same trio of heroes: the thief Doug Nuts, the boxer Dino Fagioli and the dancer Donna Fatale. The story is set in post-communist Russia shortly after perestroika, where... 1

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is a first-person RPG by the American company Bethesda Softworks, released on 25 March 1994 for PC DOS on floppies and on CD-ROM. The player travels across the whole continent of Tamriel to reassemble the 8 pieces of the Staff of Chaos and unseat the usurper Jagar Tharn. The world holds more than 400 towns and villages, a procedurally... 30

The Clue! is a burglary simulator made in 1994 by the Austrian studio neo Software of Hirtenberg; in German speaking countries it shipped under its original name Der Clou!, and a fully Czech edition followed in 1996 as Zlodej. The player takes the part of Matt Stuvysunt, a small-time criminal of Polish descent who arrives in London in 1953 with no... 9

Whizz is a 1994 isometric platformer by the British studio Flair Software. The hero is a rabbit in a magician's coat fleeing an evil rat in a hot-air balloon, who has to cross four worlds before the clock runs out. Instead of straightforward left-to-right jumping, the player works through maze-like levels using coloured keys that open wooden, brick,... 3

Oscar is a 1993 platformer by the British company Flair Software, created by reworking their game Trolls after the troll doll licence expired. The hero is Flair's own character Oscar, and the whole game takes place on movie sets: science fiction, western, horror, cartoons, dinosaurs, detective and a TV game show. Each world requires collecting enough... 14

Elvira: The Arcade Game is a 1991 side-scrolling platformer by the British company Flair Software, which used the Elvira licence in a completely different way from Horrorsoft's horror RPGs. The player controls Elvira herself across two large worlds, an underworld of fire and a frozen land, in order to unlock the third one, the castle in Transylvania.... 26

Starquake is a 1985 action platformer written single-handedly by Stephen J. Crow and published by the British label Bubble Bus Software for the ZX Spectrum. The player controls BLOB, an artificial being sent into the unstable interior of a planet to gather nine core elements before it detonates. The world spans 512 screens linked by teleport booths,... 3

Tajemství Oslího Ostrova (Donkey Island) is a 1994 point-and-click adventure created by two teenage students from Brno under the Pterodon Software name and distributed by Vochozka Trading. It is a Czech parody of LucasArts' famous pirate series The Secret of Monkey Island — the hero Gajbraš Trípvůd (a take on Guybrush Threepwood) is shipwrecked on... 54

Bureau 13 is a 1995 point-and-click adventure with RPG elements, published by GameTek and developed by Take-Two Interactive. It is based on the Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic tabletop role-playing game by Richard Tucholka. The player leads two agents of an ultra-secret organisation that hunts paranormal threats; the chosen characters - priest,... 76

B.A.T.2: The Koshan Conspiracy is the sequel to the cyberpunk adventure-RPG by the French studio Computer's Dream, released by Ubi Soft in 1992 for the Amiga and PC, with an Atari ST version a year later. The action moves to the metropolis of ROMA II on the planet Shedishan, where the player, as B.A.T. agent Jehan Menais, investigates the murder of... 37

B.A.T.: The Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters is a cyberpunk mix of adventure and RPG, developed by the French studio Computer's Dream and released by Ubi Soft between 1989 and 1991 for the Atari ST, Amiga, PC, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. The player becomes a secret agent of the B.A.T. organisation in the 22nd century, with just ten days to track... 44

Azrael's Tear is a first-person adventure with RPG and action elements, developed by Intelligent Games and released by Mindscape in 1996 for MS-DOS. The player takes on the role of a "raptor" - a futuristic raider of ancient sites - who breaks into the freshly uncovered underground complex of Aeternis in northern Scotland, where the Knights Templar... 51