Consoles, Games and Emulators.

Ultimate Championship Golf plays a lot like other golf games, with one major exception: you can adjust some 44 player characteristics before teeing off

Jack Nicklaus did it. Wayne Gretzky did it. Michael Jordan did it. Even Tony LaRussa did it. When a sports celebrityreaches the apex of his or her sport, the next arena is the world of computer games. Unfortunately, as most sports celebrities know all too well, success on the links, ice or diamond doesn’t necessarily translate to success on the PC screen.

Greg Norman, aka The Great White Shark, fares better than most, putting his name on an above-average golf game and promoting the Florida golf course he designed at the same time. Only Norman’s signature course is included with the game, but it’s quite enjoyable, and good-looking to boot (if you have enough memory—see below).

Ultimate Championship Golf plays a lot like other golf games, with one major exception: you can adjust some 44 player characteristics before teeing off, from how you hit over water to how you hit out of a divot hole. You can also determine which type of player you want to be —streaky or steady, accurate or long, etc. Unfortunately, when you play in the arcade mode, timing clicks of the mouse to actually execute the shot, none of these characteristics comes into play. If you screw up the timing, you’ll take a mulligan regardless. It’s only when you play in simulation mode, where you simply aim the shot and the computer hits it, that yoursettingss have an impact. It’s ironic (but oddly necessary) that your selected control characteristics are significant factors only when you have little to no control over the actual shot. The game’s other unusual feature is its rich, photo-realistic graphics engine. To fully enjoy it, though, you need two things: a lot of time (the painfully slow screen redraws will put you in the two hour range for 18 holes), and 19MB of RAM. It’s possible to lower the graphics settings, though, so you can play a round with Greg without having to purchase a memory upgrade.

It’s cartoonish arcade action, filled with impossible dunks and special-power-up rewards.

When March madness ended and my beloved Wildcats had clinched their sixth championship, I figured I was due for some sleep—no more late-night tournament games, no prowling the Web for scouting reports. But then along came College Slam and the craziness picked up all over again.

This isn’t a game for purists. It’s cartoonish arcade action, filled with impossible dunks and special-power-up rewards that can send the ball flaming through the hoop or send your star forward into a somersaulting 360-degree windmill dunk. If you want detailed coaching strategy, you’d better take your ball and find another playground.

Pick any of 44 top college teams and go head-to-head or through an entire season. There’s also a 16-team tournament mode and a four-team semi-final mode. Up to four players can take the hardwood at one time. In addition, the computer can assist you in making shots and in keeping the score close if you want to use those options.

The perfect college basketball computer game remains undiscovered. But now that the tournament is over, don’t take it so seriously. College Slam certainly doesn’t.

Screamer shuns the pit stops, personnel moves, and car equipment upgrades that have become familiar to racing fans in favor of colorful, straightforward, hard-driving action.

As computer games become more advanced, and consumers more sophisticated, the trend has been toward higher extended play value through immersive, painstakingly realistic simulation. These days, comprehensive statistics and piles of information to digest seem to be the only way to Get Your Money’s Worth.

In response, the makers of this hot racing title simply say “Let’s race!” Screamer shuns the pit stops, personnel moves, and car equipment upgrades that have become familiar to racing fans in favor of colorful, straightforward, hard-driving action. I, for one, am happy to see it. All you need to do is choose your car, choose your track, and hit the gas.

All this fun is not without its weak points. The graphics are good (despite the lack of apparent car damage and some polygon cutout in the tunnels), but the game slows noticeably in SVGA mode, where it looks best. In addition, the manual transmission cars perform noticeably better than the automatics, requiring you to master the more complicated driving style to succeed. Not a huge problem, but it’s ironic considering that the game prides itself on its simplicity.

So where’s the extended play value? It’s in the variety of courses and it’s in the four modes of play: the championship mode, the time trial mode, the cone mode (where hitting cones adds seconds to your time), and the slalom mode, where you have to drive between gates to add time. Each of these can be played on three difficulty levels.

But none of this is the point of this game. Screamer is for people who don’t have five hours to spend analyzing which struts perform best in the snow on mountain terrain. They’ve got ten minutes, they’re on the run, and they want a race. Whether it’s against the computer or up to seven networked friends, a race is exactly what they’re going to get.

Origin, the other big boys in Texas, have used the canvas of a Doom-like first-person 3-D engine to paint a master work of their own in this comic-book action game.

At first glance you might dismiss CyberMage: Darklight Awakening as just another Doom clone. But Origin, the other big boys in Texas, have used the canvas of a Doom-like first-person 3-D engine to paint a master work of their own in this comic-book action game.

The interface expands greatly on the Doom model. The three dimensional world lets you crouch, as well as look up and down, skills that will enable you to find cleverly hidden items and give you proper perspective as you make perilous leaps across dangerously high platforms. Like Doom, CyberMage also pits you against hordes of enemies who come from every direction, but power-ups and new weapons are harder to come by than in most 3-D games, requiring you to think strategically and use both your conventional and magical weapons sparingly. Restocking can be tricky, as you must find standard ammunition to reload your conventional armament, and rest occasionally to replenish the drain of your magical weapons on your superpower.

On-screen readouts keep you abreast of your ammo supplies, health, magical power, and armor strength. You’ll often find that there’s too much information on the screen at once, but you can toggle through different views so that only the most important gauges are left on the screen.

CyberMage’s two most notable improvements over most Doom clones are its ability to enter and operate vehicles, and the development of story through other characters’ digitized speech. The vehicle modes are very simple, and the game designers wisely keep the action moving by not introducing a complicated set of keys for vehicle operation. Key characters in each level approach you and give you information or orders that advance the plot. Thanks to excellent sound design, these speech passages are surprisingly realistic—if you turn while someone is speaking to you the voice will be louder from the left or right speaker respectively.

CyberMage’s comic-book story tie-in is a little hard to swallow because of the conflict between the blocky nature of 3-D games and the colorful art that is the hallmark of comics. Even so, CyberMage remains a triumphant example of successfully applied creativity in an existing game genre.

Thank God for games like this and their pointless, glorified violence from beginning to end.

It’s mindless, brutal mayhem like Destruction Derby’s that gives video games such a bad name. Thank God for games like this and their pointless, glorified violence from beginning to end that sucks you in instantly. There are only two things to do in this game—race or inflict damage on other cars—and it’s at its best when you do both simultaneously, timing a slide around a tight hairpin in such a way that you send some poor schlub pinwheeling into a wall in a storm of flying metal and glass. The beautifully-rendered racetracks have their moments, but the real focus here is “The Bowl,” an open arena holding a dozen cars, all turned loose on each other. Though the cars may look realistic as they are reduced to smoking, lumbering junk, automotive physics has been cheerfully chucked out the driver’s side window in the name of smoother gameplay. Cars are confined to a 2-D plane, unable to roll or even get two wheels off the ground—but don’t worry, you won’t be disappointed after inflicting your first full-tilt-boogie 360° on another car. Destruction Derby is low-brow gameplay at its best.

The big change in SimIsle, aside from its heavy-duty, protect-the-rainforest theme, is that it’s more like a role-playing game than its predecessors.

“Trees are a poem the Earth writes across the sky. Humanity cuts them down for paper so we may record our emptiness.” -a quote from Kahlil Gibran, on page one of SimIsle’s 100-page paper manual.

The cynic would say that SimIsle represents Maxis’ effort to make up for creating a generation of developers, polluters and high-risers with their excellent and incredibly popular SimCity series of games. I say that after SimFarm, SimTower and SimAnt, they have simply run out of places to develop. Whatever the case, Maxis has come out with a new sim that manages to keep most of what was good about the other titles, and incorporate just enough change to create a new challenge for all of the SimAddicts out there.

The big change in SimIsle, aside from its heavy-duty, protect-the-rainforest theme, is that it’s more like a role-playing game than its predecessors. Where SimCity allowed you total freedom in initial creation and then forced you to face the consequences, SimIsle is more concerned with having you think of your actions as a means to an end. Each new island presents a different challenge—say, building a tourist industry or developing local cultures—and you must utilize your agents’ special skills to achieve these goals within a preset time period (although you can play in FreeForm mode, with no limits). As in a RPG, your actions are restricted to those that will help you on your way, and everything you do serves as a stepping stone to success. If you cut more trees, you can build more hotels; more hotels mean more tourists, more tourists mean more cash, etc.

The graphics keep the same colorful, busy feel as earlier Maxis titles, with little planes and trucks zooming around the island. Multimedia film clips and sound effects are included but are, for the most part, repetitive and extraneous. One exception is the game’s soundtrack, which ranges from tribal chants to metal rock with no apparent rhyme or reason.

In general, SimIsle won’t disappoint the high expectations of hardened SimFans. It may not be the best of the bunch, but, if you can handle the sick feeling you get when the first high-rise goes up on a previously unspoiled island, your free time will soon be the endangered species.

FX Fighter represents the future of PC fighting games: the fullythree-dimensional fighter.

Just as Battle Arena Toshinden has done on the consoles, FX Fighter illustrates just how visually impressive a full 3-D environment can be. Even so, as with all ground-breaking technology, certain wrinkles need to be ironed out before FX Fighter can live up to its claim as the “ultimate PC fighting game.”

This is an extremely atmospheric and versatile title, allowing variation in environment, challenge, number of players, and graphic detail. The characters are diverse, both in appearance and ability, and the worlds where the battles take place are dark and surrealistic. While the characters are advertised to have forty different attacks, you rarely utilize (or need to utilize) more than about ten. In fact, if you get too ambitious, you risk sending your character spinning out of the ring and into the Great Beyond.

In order to develop the 3-D graphics and keep game speed at a respectable level, the designers kept the number of polygons as small as possible. The result is that the characters have a slightly wobbly, disjointed, almost drunken appearance. This actually helps the atmosphere, though, and makes sudden attack moves all the more exciting.

FX Fighter’s final drawback is in the lack of challenge of the one-player mode.Only eight opponents are available, and, with minimal practice, you’ll find a move that enables you to finish all of them with relative ease. Variable difficulty levels help, but you really need a friend to beat up on to extend the play value.

In general, FX Fighter’s amazing graphics and personality see to it that this title is far and away the most inventive and interesting fighting game available for the PC today. With a bit of fine-tuning in response time and graphics, the result should be a game for the ages: FX Fighter 2.

This is an awesome experience whose completion feels a little like finishing a long novel that actually makes you think.

Despite the new bells and whistles (and temporal distortion matrices and cloaking devices), fans of the original Journeyman Project won’t have any trouble getting into this hipper, larger sequel, a three CD-ROM set. In Buried in Time’s bizarre opening sequence, the player is visited by a panicked future self (!) handing off a man-portable time-jump suit before he is carted off by his fellow Time Officers, and the story picks up with the player framed for altering history. The only way to clear your good name is to once again muck about in time, both past and future. The biggest new gizmo in the new Journeyman is “Arthur,” a neural-net artificial intelligence chip which acts as gameplay advisor, educational commentator (this is one of the few games I’ve seen in years that’s managed to slip in a little historical by-the-way without actively annoying me) and wisecracking sidekick. Arthur’s advice runs simultaneously with commands executed in exploration mode—and not as a separate function—so this virtual pal truly is useful rather than irritating. Players can elicit comments from Arthur which may or may not be of value, and if the player’s clue factor erodes completely, he or she can cave in and ask for “help.” If you’re a lazy gamer, don’t even bother with “Adventure” mode—you’ll just hurt yourself. Instead, play “Walkthrough” and enjoy the cinematic feat here. This is an awesome experience whose completion feels a little like finishing a long novel that actually makes you think.

Best described as an interactive Fruitopia commercial, Endorfun’s puzzle gameis set against a background of pulsating, shimmering, moving, colorful patterns.

Despite the wordy description above, Endorfun is a very simple puzzle game. You roll a cube around a board made of blank squares and try to land on the board’s one pulsating, colored square—with the matching color on your cube facing upwards. This concept alone makes for a challenging, if repetitive game; but the title’s New Age graphics and messages make Endorfun far more interesting fare.

Best described as an interactive Fruitopia commercial, Endorfun’s puzzle game is set against a background of pulsating, shimmering, moving, colorful patterns. The colors animate to the hypnotic rhythm of jazzy World Beat and New Age music performed by The O Band, a collection of artists led by Nigerian master drummer, Onye Onyemaechi. Layered in the soundtrack are 100 subliminal messages of positive self-affirmation, a first for computer gaming. The messages are undetectable by the conscious mind, but comprehensible, at least in theory, by your subconscious. They range from the harmonious (”I love the world and the world loves me”) to the downright scary (”It’s OK for me to have everything I want”).

Frankly, after playing the game for several hours, I don’t feel any more confident or joyous. In fact, there seem to be opposing forces within the game itself: while the music soothes your nerves, the increasing challenge of each level increases your stress.

Even so, Endorfun is a challenging, unique puzzle game that is pleasant to look at and listen to. On a technical note, this game seems to be rather temperamental when run under Windows 95, causing a random general protection fault. While I found many complaints about this problem on TWI’s America Online forum, there were no public answers or patch files posted. Perhaps the tech support folks figured the game’s subliminal messages are enough to keep players happy. In closing, let me state that I now have an uncontrollable urge to let you know that I am a beautiful and perfect spirit.

As a crash-course in offensive driving, Road Warrior provides some mindless fun, but is only a slight improvement over its flawed predecessor.

Drake Edgewater - the vigilante cabbie from 1995’s Quarantine - is back behind the wheel of his hover-cab in GameTek’s Road Warrior, a violent kill-spree that explores the many meanings of the term “hack.”

The aforementioned Quarantine was an interesting attempt at a 3-D shooter, a hybrid of Doom and Death Race 2000 in which you drove around destroying vehicles in your way and running over pesky pedestrians. A pleasing setting, to be sure, but Quarantine suffered from several problems, the most apparent of which was an unrelenting control scheme that made stopping your vehicle nearly impossible. Road Warrior tries to address its predecessor’s most frustrating shortcomings, but in doing so it eliminates some of the features that made Quarantine special in the first place. Most notably, the addictive “vigilante for hire” element has been removed. In the first game, you had to earn money for weapons upgrades and repairs by picking up fares around Kemo City. In this sequel, you’re simply sent on a series of assignments, and your cab is repaired and your ammo replenished upon completion. Another improvement allows you to brake more easily, but the movement of the game never feels realistic. Your cab still bounces around like a hockey puck whenever you get sideswiped, and getting stuck to scenery is an all too common occurrence.

Road Warrior does add some positive features. The original’s simplistic story art has been replaced by excellent comic-book style cut scenes. A new option allows you to view your cab from behind, making it easier to maneuver through the maze-like streets, and an SVGA mode allows for smoother art on more powerful machines. And, in all fairness, the mission-based levels do give the game a bit more focus, eliminating the endless schlepping around of psychotic citizens.

For all its merits, however, this sequel to Quarantine doesn’t have the horsepower to keep up with the next generation of 3D shooters. As a crash-course in offensive driving, Road Warrior provides some mindless fun, but is only a slight improvement over its flawed predecessor.