Stunts, possibly a game every oldgamer knows. Its about racing, stunting and designing your own stunt tracks. That is probably the most interesting bit in the game, creating your own tracks and let others race it and laugh about their mistakes. I’ve played this game a million times, together with friends or your brother, or anyone. I started out with this game on our XT, it already run on that pretty well, but it went ofcourse a lot better when we had our 286. Nowadays it runs like a charm on DosBOX and you dont need a very powerful computer either. There are lots of supported graphic modes, Hercules, CGA, EGA, MCGA 256-color and Tandy. Same goes for the sound, PC Speaker, Adlib and Roland MT-32. Although the sound isnt too interesting, you have to do it from the gameplay.

The graphics are in 3D polygon style, no sprites are being used, apart from the dashboard view, so everything is “true” 3D. The viewing range limit is maybe a bit too near, so you have to react pretty fast when a sharp corner is coming up, or the road is blocked with .. uhm .. blocks. They seam to just pop into view, it can frustrate once in a while.

There are two different race types, race against an opponent or race against the clock. Racing against an opponent is always a computer player, so its never with two people. Thats something I think lacks in the game, playing against a human opponent, it would be awesome if you could race with two players, or with more players networked. Its really a bit you miss when you play it a while. The computer players are ranging in AI from newbie till professional, allthough you can win on some tracks pretty easily from the pro AI player. The AI makes a lot of driving errors and you can easily take advantage over that. Yes, a human is more clever than the AI most of the time. So you usually and up being the first one to finish, when the AI decided to run into a blockade and crash. It makes you giggle though and you think .. “What a stupid error to make”. Racing against time is the other option and that is more fun when you’re playing in turns with a friend, just to see who is better on one of the default tracks or on the self made ones.

When you go for a race, you can choose from a variety of different cars, theres a Ferrari, a few Lamborghinis, a few Porsches, a Jaguar, an Audi, a Lancia and a few others, like an F1 racing car. If you’re racing against the newbie AI, give him the F1, for hilarious fun And you can choose your favorite color. All the cars have a different dashboard view and different drive styles.

Yeah, you heard it right, self made tracks. The game comes with a fairly simple editor, to make your own tracks. You can choose from a variety of pre-made objects, roads, bendy roads, muddy roads, icey roads, bridges, jumps, loopings, scenery, etc, and place them in one of the few different landscapes. You can make super short tracks or highly complex circuits and you can then use them in both the racing against opponents and racing against time game modes. The AI always knows the shortest route though, so when you’re making multiple branched tracks, then the AI is always the most clever one in finding the right route to the finish. But when racing against time with your friends, you’re always in for a good laugh when your friend takes the long route, or the difficult one when there is an easy road till the finish. Fun guaranteed.

Overall a pretty fun game, it will last forever when you’re playing in turns with friends and make the oddest and wierdest routes and going for the best time. Already told you the goods and the bads of the AI, so you can judge that for yourself, but I hardly used that racing option. The music is only available in the menus, so you only hear “exciting” racing sounds while driving and I think the MT-32 racing sounds arent too bad either. Its just that every car sounds alike, theres no difference in sound between an Audi Quattro or the F1 car. But thats not something thats very important in this game. The track editor is probably the best thing in the game and if it wasnt there, then it probably would be the most boring game ever. But for this one, two thumbs up!

Lunar Command is a newer version of Moonbase that can run on your modern PC. I had a dig around and really, I can see no difference except for I think maybe airlocks weren’t available in the other version, but I’m not sure. Plus,it now runs on computers properly and the menu’s are in English as opposed to gibberish.

Lunar Command like Moonbase was not very popular, yet is one of the best sim games I have ever played. You create a base on the moon and then mine minerals (or create electronics and material) which you sell back to earth. You have to get producing/mining goods to sell right away because NASA withdraw their support very early on in your mission.

I’ve added the manual as a link below which I got from HOTU. I figured I could redirect you over there to get it and you can, visit www.the-underdogs.info or you can save their bandwidth and download it here.

View my Moonbase review for further information about this game.

A TV station management game, quite a novel idea that is well executed. Lots of humour (some of the animations will at least make you chuckle), good AI and a decent economics model (if that’s what yings your yang).

May be one to check out.

This game wasn’t very popular, but I loved it. It made a great change from SimCity. Its very similar to most sim games, but being on the moon has a whole new angle. You have to cope with starting a colony on the moon, making sure you can accommodate the right number of workers and tourists, as well as produce all the elements to sell on the markets. It’s a real management kind of sim game.

Like most sim games you start off with a certain amount of money, and every year you are given more money from NASA. But as you progress, you grow, and produce products to sell on the market such as LLOX, electronics, materials etc. That’s how you make money, therefore its good to keep an eye on the stock market and know when to buy and when to sell (hence the management type sim game).

When you are erecting the buildings all over the Moon, you have to make sure that everything is connected to both power and heating (must get quite cold there). You can have roads etc, and the moon colony soon turns into a big massive galactic city.

Here are some quotes I found from the back cover of the game (thanks to some fanatic’s Moonbase site):

“Select and clear a site for the Lunar colony … build landing pads … erect habitat modules … set up power stations and grids … create mining and processing facilities … supply essential life-support services to the colonists. Comprehensive socio- and economic models from KDT Industries – a NASA contractor – animate and enliven you base.”

“Explore the lunar surface for new mining sites. Process the raw materials you find into oxygen, water and helium-3, then use then internally or sell them to Mars missions. Build hotels for fat cats from Earth.”

Moonbase is a really fun game; it’s a shame it doesn’t work too well on modern PC’s. It won’t work on my Pentium 3, but I sometimes get lucky with my p200. It’s a very unstable game, so be careful! It dies at the stupidest times. I’d still give it a shot however, it’s a great challenge and you would enjoy it. It’s a good game for getting the feel of those really involved sim games.

Warning: Save your cash, you WILL run out of cash.

Important DO NOT attempt to run this game in pure DOS or allow it to create a DOS shortcut, it can seriously screw up your computer.

This game was released a few years later as Lunar Command, which will run on a modern PC. I recommend downloading this version instead.

Populous is an almost perfect mix of looks, charm and gameplay. It can be credited with starting a whole new genre (the ‘god’ game) and is indeed a true classic.

To put it another way, it fricken rocks!!!

In Populous you play a god, in fact you play a Good God. And of course if there’s a good God, it stands to reason that there’s gonna be a bad God kicking about the place somewhere. Anyway, you have followers, he has followers and you have to make sure that your guys come out on top. First of all you need a way to communicate your wishes to them, and throwing lightning bolts isn’t very concise so you need to appoint someone to speak for you, a high priest will fit the bill nicely. Right, now that you can talk to your followers you are gonna want them to do some of that “go forth and multiply” stuff.. but alas, the land is not flat enough to build upon.

But you’re a God, you can soon take care of that

So your people are settling across their newly flattened world, worshipping you and increasing your godly powers through ‘mana’ (more worshippers = more mana = more power). On the other side of the world Mr Bad God and his followers are doing the same thing, and sooner or later your two sides are going to meet and there’s gonna be trouble. So it’s upto you to get rid of him before he gets rid of you. Fortunately being a God means that you have some very nice weapons at your disposal: earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, you get the idea. You play the game across 500 worlds/levels starting at “genesis” and working through until you and your people have annihilated all opposition.

I haven’t really scratched the surface of the game yet, I havent talked about how you can transform your priest into a huge psycopathic knight who slaughters your enemies, or about the custom game mode. So I guess it’s up to you to download it and find out for yourself.

I promise you that you wont be disappointed. Populous is a wonderful game, good for a quick ten minute bash and long all night sessions.

Just do it

Woohoo.. I remember having this game on my PC, but I didn’t play it for years because I couldn’t figure out the controls. What a lazy shite I am But when I did get the hang of it, well you just couldn’t stop me.

This game is totally wicked and plays an important part in the whole world of gaming. This game was made way back in 1984, before many games were born I’d never had a game where you were in a plane and you got to take off and fly into buildings. Then to make things even more fun, you could bring in a computer-controlled plane to try and take you out, or you take them out. Whichever happens first – undoubtedly they kicked your arse. The computer controlled plane was just too clever for me, and maybe it was a bit too hard =

Playing it on your own was ok. You just had to keep the plane in the air and make it to the end of the screen. There was only one level and when you completed it you finished the game. Funnily enough the game literally ended One good thing to note was the bottom of the screen. There was an overall map of the level, so you could see the whereabouts of planes in the level. Of course some might think of this as a spoiler.

The graphics were your typical CGA (pretty in pink). The sound was the PC speaker. This game was noisy and the sound of the plane could drive you nuts after a while. But its still much better than no sound, and was heaps of fun as you could go ‘brrrrrrrrr’ and sing along with the plane

I think this game could have done with more levels. But if you are interested in way old games, and want to see the work of the forefathers, then check out Sopwith, and also Sopwith 2 which can also be found on this site.

Note: You’re gonna need to grab Turbo or some other slow down utility from our utilities page

Cool, its Sopwith 2. I actually had a copy of this game before I had a copy of the first Sopwith game. The first game only had one level, this one has 255!

Like the original Sopwith, this game involved flying a plane around the screen. You flew up and down and went from left to right as usual. You could just fly around on your own, or you could play versus the computer. There could be up to 4 computer-controlled planes. There was also the ability to have 4 human players, but I never figured out how to do that. When you see the other planes, you shoot the hell out of them with your cool flying white dot bullets!

As you got the hang of flying you could do big loops and pretend you were some kind of cool display pilot. But barns are dangerous and you can crash into them.

One thing I significantly remember from this game is the cows! WOOHOO! You could fly into them for fun. Call me a sick bugger, but I used to just play over and over again just flying into the cows. Those cows rule man!

This game had the same wicked CGA pretty-in-pink graphics and the annoying PC speaker. The sounds were ok though, even if they did make you go crazy after a while. Why couldn’t the cows make cool noises though dangit?

If you play this and you like it, then have a play with the original Sopwith. Its very similar and also a lot of fun

Note: I was playing this game fine on a P3 and didnt need a slow down utility. Its great as it works on fast PC’s!!

This game is AWESOME! I used to sit up for ages with my friend Leonie and we would try and nut out the hardest ones. For a game this has some dang hard levels! I can’t actually say that I have completed them all, and then we take into account that there were more games made in this series!

There are so many things you use in this game, such as cats, mice, goldfish bowls, boxing gloves, trampolines, monkeys and electric fans. You get the idea. You are given an array of objects, and a task to complete. For example you can be given a bowling ball, pair of scissors and a balloon. Your task is to use these objects to pop the balloon. Of course this is a very basic idea of what you could be faced with. It gets to the stage where you have a whole heap of objects, a small screen and you have to make the cat fall down, pop 5 balloons and also make the 5 mice run and the fishbowl shatter . It turns into a real brainteaser.

As you complete tasks, they get harder and harder as you progress through the levels. But there are so many levels! If you complete all the tasks/levels (and if you do I salute you), then you can go into freeform mode, and just go hard with all the wacky parts and create your own monster levels. Very, very cool . I of course had my work cut out for me with the levels and challenges in the game, but to make some really strange things was so much fun. Hitting the cat with the bowling ball was fun . Yes, that’s right, you can live out those fantasies of hurting that cat that just wouldn’t cooperate when you were trying to do a level in the game! Make killer levels for your smart-arse friends that think they own The Incredible Machine

This game is great for making your mind work really hard, and also for coming up with the wackiest contraptions. You almost feel like MacGyver playing this, in fact I’d suggest getting the MacGyver theme song and playing it for inspiration while you play this game. Also the music would be a great improvement on the music that is in the game. The music is umm.. awful? Yeah, that’s a good word for it. The music is really bad =

The graphics must have been where all that part of the budget or the time went. The graphics are excellent! All the little parts have been drawn so well, and the animations as fans turning, rockets launching, guns shooting or the monkey riding the bike are so cool too. Everything is drawn really well in the game, and the menu’s etc are all really cool too. A huge thumbs up for the graphics!

This game is great. It will keep you occupied forever. You can just keep on playing it, because there are over 100 levels. By the time you have completed them all and made some fun things in freeform, you can play it again. I can’t remember the solutions to many of the levels; I could go through right now and end up just as psyched out as when I first played it.

A puzzle game like no other, have a play. Torture the cat and kill that goldfish. Tease the monkey while at it

For the most part I don’t like flight simulations.

For me the idea of having to learn 200+ keys just to know how to scratch my arse is not fun (the one exception is Battlecruiser 3000ad, if I ever add it to the site you’ll find out why ). I think perhaps it’s an indication of extreme low inteligence on my part but hugely complicated simulations just don’t float my boat.

ThunderHawk has many keys to learn but it does not feel at all complex or daunting, which is probably why I have always liked it so much. Once you get the hang of the (very simple) mouse controls and learn how to switch weapons and targets you are pretty much set. The graphics are functional (they were great for the time) and the missions are varied and well thought out (I particlarly like the briefing sequences before each mission, very cool!). My only beef is that the intro is missing the cool speech that was present in the Atari ST version (you have no idea how amazing it was to hear your computer talking back then… *sigh*).

A fun, light um… simulation. Easy to get in to and higly addictive.

Great stuff.

Well what can I say, this is one of my favourite games of all time, mainly cos it rocks. But I suppose you want a more detailed review thing… slave driver

Transport tycoon is a game made in 1995, created by Chris Sawyer (the creator of lots of great games including Roller Coaster Tycoon). If you have played any of the “tycoon” series then you should know that the basic premise is to have a tycoon and make like lots of the green stuff, moola, cash, quid, stuff that makes you go wheeeeee. You start off with a landscape that covers a sizeable area. The area will have a good amount of industries that produce goods (e.g. a Iron ore mine makes iron ore), your job is to build links from one industry to the next using either road, rail, ship or air. You also have to make sure your taking the right stuff to the right place, e.g. iron ore to the steel mill and then the steel mill can make steel so the steel needs to be transported to the factory which can make the products and can be transported to towns surrounding towns. You can have disasters such as a little flying saucer that will come along, fly around for a while n crash land on something (usually a bus). The government will also supply subsidies for taking certain stock from one place to another. You get 4 modes of play to well, play as . the basic one that was used in transport tycoon, then a mountain terrain, desert terrain and a toy land terrain, all with there own different vehicles, graphics and industry’s

But its of course a little bit more involved than that, being part of a tycoon means you must be able to control your surroundings by using money right? Incomes the money part, you can do things like Buy shares in your Opponents (or if your thinking really adventures you could just buy the company out), give money to the towns to give you exclusive transport rights to that town, fund new industries n stuff like that.

This game also has support for network play which is loots of fun (iv spent hours upon hours playing over the network I have here at home with my brother). I admit the graphics are not the best in the world (seeing as this was made in 95, they could have been a lot better) but I guess they are pretty smooth n hell once you get into it you don’t notice. The music is pretty funky (think jazz ) You also get a world editor included with the game, very funky indeed .

I personally love this game to bits and I urge you to download it at least as its part of your heritage dammit hehe

A whole new dimension to the world of car racing! This game is great to release all that pent-up stress It was the first game that bought together big giant guns, and a new way to win a car race.

I remember playing this game on my 286. That damn Melissa cow would always get ahead of me in her crappy red car ROAR. Then I would get my biggest missile out and blow her clean out of existence! WOOHOO! Take that! Hehe, I loved this game so much. I never really was one for car games, but Deathtrack is just so much fun!

When you first start you can chose between three different cars, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some are faster, yet some have heavier armor and can kick harder ass. All are rather funky and threatening though. You then can take your car to the shop and buy weapons or parts. There are some serious weapons, such as missiles, caltrops, mines, machine guns and terminators etc. In the parts shop you can get faster engines, wheels, armor etc.

There are 10 different tracks, in 10 cities. Some of them are at night, some during the day. I liked the variety, as there were enough different tracks, but also not too many, which allowed you to learn them rather well. The more you win, the more money you get. The more money you get, you can buy weapons and car modifications. You NEED to buy weapons, so that you can blast the other drivers off the track, and also defend yourself. Because the less drivers alive on the track, the less people that can fire a missile at you.

When you play this game you will definitely need a slow down app, this game runs way too fast on anything higher then a 286. (You don’t want to try playing this on a p3, mark my words hehe).

Afterburner is an arcade air combat game (I refuse to use the word “simulator” because if planes were this easy to fly i’d have carpet bombed anyone who looked at me funny by now).

You fly a plane, your enemies fly planes. You will shoot at them, they will shoot at you. There’s really now a whole hell of a lot to it than that.

Just don’t get killed and shoot lots of bad guys, you’ll do fine

I can remember playing this game many years ago on the SEGA Megadrive (Genesis machine for you yanks). I can’t say i’m really a big fan of sub games or simulations in general but I found 688 attack sub to be a very playable and enjoyable game.

The plot is simple fare, you are the captain of either an American or Soviet sub and must play through a series of increasingly difficult missions. Graphics-wise the game was quite good for it’s time, some of the fractal effects especialy were impressive. Those who like to tplay things at a slow, tactical pace will especialy like the game, and with many ways to complete each mission it’s likely that you will through the game again when you finish it.

Overall an enjoyable game, although maybe not one that will appeal to everyone.

17th century trading game. Similar to the Tycoon games. Plan routes, trade stuff, look after your cash and sail the high seas!