Category Archives: Reviews

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil uses N64 memory expansion to fullest

Acclaim’s Iguana team has pulled off yet another great blood-chilling, action-packed, first-person shooter as the sequel to last year’s highly praised Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. This one will leave you nothing less than impressed. Turok 2 is the first of many games designed to work with Nintendo’s new 4 megabyte expansion pak, a hardware add-on used to enhance graphics, sound and gameplay of titles designed for its use. This new expansion pack takes Turok 2 to a higher plateau of gaming as it increases resolution, enables smoother animation, heightens artificial intelligence and tweaks the sound of the game. Though Turok 2 … Continue reading Turok 2: Seeds of Evil uses N64 memory expansion to fullest

Roberta Williams does it again

As far as I am concerned, this is the best King’s Quest yet, as well as one of the best adventure games ever created. The puzzles in King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity are tough, yet solvable. The interface is easy to use, the plot is well thought-out and the graphics are very good. In fact, this game gets my highest rating yet. The part that I most enjoyed is that even though the gameplay takes place on different worlds, I never found it necessary to go back through and get something I missed on the first run. Given, I was … Continue reading Roberta Williams does it again

Rogue Squadron will woo Star Wars fans

A few years ago LucasArts released Shadows of the Empire as one of the flagship Nintendo 64 titles. It was a mixed bag, consisting mostly of mundane corridor shooters. However, there was one stage which stood out among the rest: the snowspeeder battle at Hoth. Critics such as myself wished that Shadows could have been more like the first stage, nothing but exciting ground-level flight sequences. LucasArts took our ideas to heart, and incorporated German based developers Factor 5 (known primarily for the Turrican series on the 16-bit systems) to create Rogue Squadron. Rogue Squadron takes place right after the … Continue reading Rogue Squadron will woo Star Wars fans

Settlers III will grow on you.

Settlers III is not a game that will leap out at players as the most fascinating thing they have ever played. In fact, looking at the online help book can be quite daunting. But once you start to understand how to build your settlements into thriving colonies, Settlers can become quite addictive. The premise in this latest installment of the Settlers series finds your tiny hamlet on a vast unexplored world. This is not unlike the hundreds of other resource gathering and conquest games out there, but the beauty of Settlers is in the details. Settlers III has the most … Continue reading Settlers III will grow on you.

In the Valley of the Giants…

Music and art make Cydonia a memorable experience. Mars. Exciting and new. (I would continue substituting lyrics to the "Love Boat" theme, but none of us really needs that, do we?) Mars has been a lofty, and sometimes thought of as an unattainable goal for us meager humans for decades and decades now. And now, with Pathfinder still in our thoughts and the International Space Station actually underway, an adventure game that takes place on Mars seems only logical. Cydonia more than fits this bill. Cydonia is set in a somewhat-far-ahead-but-it-could-happen-to-us-if-we-don’t-watch-out sort of future. The Terran League [the governing body … Continue reading In the Valley of the Giants…

NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC is a brick

Now I love basketball as much as the next gamer. But what I don’t love is a completely re-hashed, re-done, re-packaged version of a game we’ve seen a thousand times before. Everyone wants to be like NBA Jam. NBA Showtime: NBA On NBC represents one of the worst trends in console gaming today — take a successful idea (NBA Jam and arcade-style basketball play), make a game that looks, feels, and plays just like it, slap a famous name to it (does NBC and Shaq ring a bell), produce it on every game system you can (the game will be … Continue reading NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC is a brick

Thief: The Dark Project will steal your heart

It is so refreshing to find a 3D shooter that offers something different. Sure, Unreal and Half-Life are great games that have collectively sucked a lot of time away from my busy schedule. But at their core, they are all about getting to the biggest gun first and then blowing away anything that moves. Looking Glass Studios’ newest offering Thief: The Dark Project is different. If you try to play Thief the way you normally play Unreal, you are going to die quicky and painfully. After all, you are playing a thief in this game, so you better act like … Continue reading Thief: The Dark Project will steal your heart

WCW/NWO Revenge will bodyslam the competition on N64

Last year THQ bought exclusive rights to the WCW license until January 1999. Since then they’ve produced two top-seller wrestling titles. "WCW Nitro" for the Playstation and WCW/NWO World Tour for the Nintendo 64, both helped put THQ on the map in terms of gaming. Now with their contract almost up with WCW, THQ has been hard at work trying to push out more killer titles into the wrestling world. The newest member to the THQ wrestling library is WCW/NWO Revenge for the Nintendo 64 platform, the sequel to WCW/NWO World Tour. Packed with 128 Megs as opposed to its … Continue reading WCW/NWO Revenge will bodyslam the competition on N64

Colony Wars: Vengeance is beautiful, but too hard to play

It’s no surprise to anyone who has been reading my articles that I am a big fan of space combat shooters. Look at my past reviews for Wing Commander: Prophecy, Descent: Freespace, Tie Fighter, etc. They are considered by me as the best in their field. However, they are all PC-based. There is another space combat series that I have played before, which is Psygnosis’ Colony Wars for the PlayStation. The original game really impressed me with its gorgeous detail and intense, yet not too difficult gameplay. So when I heard that a sequel would be coming out, I was … Continue reading Colony Wars: Vengeance is beautiful, but too hard to play

Zelda levels console market, aims at Metal Gear’s dominance

Zelda 64 is the most anticipated game on the N64 platform. For months we’ve seen it plastered in all the major gaming magazines and read about its progress at the most popular Internet Web sites. Its ratings have even earned it a segment in NewsWeek. There have been what seemed to be hundreds of canceled release dates on this title. N64 fans have tossed and turned in their beds for over 40 days and 40 nights. We’ve stared blankly at our clocks from sunrise to sundown waiting for some sign of it’s arrival. Tick…Tock…Tick…Tock. They tried to send us "Quest … Continue reading Zelda levels console market, aims at Metal Gear’s dominance