Consoles, Games and Emulators.

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: why does this game exist? SkullCracker is a case in point.

Created by Mac developer CyberFlix, the folks behind Jump Raven, Dust, and Titanic, SkullCracker proves the old adage that little good can come from a Macintosh. SkullCracker was a clinker when released for the Mac back in the Pleistocene age of computer games. Several years later, ported to Win95, it’s just a puzzlement. Who looked at this and thought it was worth releasing?

The premise is mildly amusing and might be a fair setup… for another game. In an alternate universe a gruesome assortment of monsters, zombies, and freaks are a common sight on the streets. These critters are kept down by a corporation called MEI (for Mortality Enforcement, Inc.), the people who “help the dead stay dead.” But business is getting tough for MEI, since monsters are starting to organize and demand civil rights. People are so used to zombies in the streets that they’re no longer worried about them. At the same time, the critters are getting restless because of a mysterious substance known as goop, which makes them mean. Average Joes and Janes are also being converted to monsterhood because of this goop.

You enter the picture as one of two freelance toughs: either Mortis “Skullcracker” Rigor, or Penelope “Bonebreaker” Jones. A loose narrative with several cartoon characters sets up the missions to follow and offers tips in between. Neither the characters nor the silly story woven throughout the combat are particularly important.

Most of the game takes the form of a side-scrolling fighting game - and, boy, is it wanting. Your character can walk either left or right, jump, climb, and crouch. She can also kick and punch. As she strolls through a series of bland levels, she comes across different monsters who need to be dispatched. Power-ups for health, extra lives, extra points, and so on are scattered throughout the levels. Several special weapons - such as a flame thrower, flare gun, and supersoaker filled with holy water - are also available, though regrettably scarce.

There are four main missions, each taking place in a given location, each lasting about four levels. These include the woods and playground, shopping mall and arcade, graveyard and cathedral, and MEI lab and headquarters. Each of these features boring, poorly rendered backgrounds that roll by with astonishing monotony. I could doodle on a roll of toilet paper and get a similar effect.

The action that takes place in front of these backgrounds is little better. The characters look like paper cut-outs, and have almost no animation. There are two attack moves: a punch and a kick. If you have a weapon, you can use that instead of punching. (Whoopee.) The monsters are equally lame, with a big boss at the end of each mission that’s supposed to give it a big finish. It just doesn’t work.

Bad art, poor animation, limited controls, no decent action, lame gameplay. If it weren’t for these problems, SkullCracker would be a winner. As it is, though, the bargain bin is too good a fate for this turkey. Landfill would be a more appropriate use.

Area 51 comes up short in gameplay, graphics, and sound effects.

Every once in a while, a company releases a computer game that sets new standards for the industry - offering outstanding graphics, stunning sound, and truly addictive gameplay. Area 51 is not that game. A repetitive, derivative shooter that offers nothing in the way of original features, Area 51 is inferior to many of its predecessors. For fans of the genre, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and even Doom are far better choices.

Area 51’s plot involves an alien infection at the famous “secret” military base. You are a soldier, a member of the Special Tactical Advanced Alien Response Team. According to the manual, you have been trained to deal with this exact situation. (I question the “training” involved, when the manual later advised me, “shoot anything that moves.”) Once past the opening screen, you are given several options to configure the program to your taste. Unfortunately, there’s no setting available that makes the game interesting or fun. A practice mode allows you to shoot mindlessly at the mutants until you’ve vented your anger at paying good money for the program. One positive note is the ability to adjust the mouse sensitivity - it has a tremendous influence on your accuracy.

Once you’ve begun the game, you’re off on what literally looks like a roller-coaster ride. The graphics are low-res, which allows for an impressive frame rate. Your task is simply to shoot everything that moves, except for members of your team. You have no control over how you move or where you move. You simply shoot at barrels, ammo crates, windows, paintings (?!?), machinery, and the occasional mutant. The game may actually retain your interest the first time you play. Once you replay it, though, you’ll realize how little randomness is involved. If you play it enough, you’ll be able to hit the mutants simply because you have memorized their locations. When you die, enter your initials into the Roll of Honor; after all, anyone who plays this game long enough to qualify deserves some sort of reward.

Area 51 comes up short in gameplay, graphics, and sound effects. Many shooters crowd the PC game market, but this one has very little to recommend it. If you see it on a store shelf, be afraid. Be very afraid.

SH4 won’t blow you away with its technical brilliance or design innovations… But it’s tremendously playable and lots of fun.

Spaceward Ho! has been around in one form or another for what seems like forever. It’s a much loved and time-tested conquer-the-galaxy game. More to the point, it’s a conquer-the-galaxy game “lite”: easygoing, simple to understand and play, and quite breezy in tone. There’s none of the mass of Master of Orion, or the narrative and complex interactions of the Star Control series. You won’t have to learn much to play it, and you can adjust the game size to whip off a full conquest in under a lunch hour.

Spaceward Ho! IV is the newest version of this old standby from Delta Tao and New World Computing. Gameplay is not only a snap to jump into, but also highly customizable. In the first screen, you pick the type of galaxy you want to play in: densely or sparsely populated; circular, spiral, ring shaped, random, gridded or clustered in terms of planetary layout; and anywhere from small to humongous in size. You can set the base intelligence of computer players from dumb to super-smart, and the number of opponents from none to 19. Once set, the game creates a random galaxy and you’re ready to begin play. (If you’re playing a multi-player game, it pauses until everyone’s ready.)

The game is based around a main screen dominated by a large map of all the planets in the galaxy. Each player starts with one planet, a colonizing ship, scouts, and a certain amount of cash and metals in reserve. These cash and metal deposits are used to build new ships and research new technologies. The main action takes place as you send out scouts to explore new planets, determining which are best suited to terraforming and mining, and then colonizing them. Metal is the name of the game: you need it to build and expand your empire. The unsettled planets have it, but many are hostile to your life form: they’re too cold or too hot, have bad gravity, or their other settlers make things tough. Sometimes you need to take a chance on an iffy planet just to get some funds to keep going, and sometimes you have to go to war to defend your colonies or to get a particularly tasty planet.

All this is tracked with a fine interface that allows you to set sliders to track expenditures, designate money for research, examine the status of your holdings, and view charts and graphs detailing your progress. It’s a pretty wide-open system. You can choose from a number of different areas to research, for example, which will give your spaceships an edge in range, speed, weapons, and so on. Spaceship-building itself is delightfully customizable, allowing you to create your own ship design by setting ranges, speed, weapons, shields, and “miniaturization” (which conserves metal).

As you come in contact with your enemies, you’ll have to expand your fleet to include armadas of warships. Ship-to-ship combat takes place when you enter the orbit of an enemy planet, and is abstracted in a screen showing battle results. Or, you can avert combat by forging peaceful relations, using a fairly complex set of diplomatic instructions that can be sent to other opponents. These are simplified stances such as “I want to be your ally” or “I want your planet,” and work with computer opponents as well as human.

It’s all quite easy to get into and quite fun to play, without many glitzy flourishes or complex foo-faws. The general improvements over previous versions are new ships, new graphics and sounds effects, a time clock, and other features that help balance gameplay and keep things running smoothly. The only real gripe I have with it is that Internet play is not automatically implemented, though it can be hacked. Such a low-bandwidth title as Spaceward Ho! is ideal for Internet play, and it really should have been native.

SH4 won’t blow you away with its technical brilliance or design innovations. It’s actually quite plain. But it’s also tremendously playable and lots of fun, especially in a vast network game. Joe Bob says check it out.

Bedlam is a faster, more mindless version of the Crusader/Syndicate school of gaming.

Bedlam isn’t a great or brilliant game: it won’t blind you with its originality or searing gameplay. But it’s a decent enough game with a fair number of fun hours in it, and that in itself can be rare enough these days.

Bedlam is a faster, more mindless version of the Crusader/Syndicate school of gaming: top-down, hard-core hellraisin’. Its premise suits it well. In the future, we have come to rely on biomechanical creatures for our menial labor. Now these creatures have run amok and are raging across the city, lowering property values wherever they go.

As leader of a squad of Remote Assault Tanks (RATs), your job is to destroy the biomex where ever they are, and strike at the heart of their operations by wrecking key installations. Three RATs are at your disposal, each controlled from an “satellite uplink”: the standard metaphor for skewed, top-down perspective real-time action game.

The RATs themselves are kinda cool. They move and turn fast, and carry a nice assortment of weapons on their pylons. You start the game with a certain amount of money, and must buy weapons to arm each RAT. Bombs, bouncy grenades, sticky grenades, photon guns, conventional guns, delayed fuse bombs, and more provide a pretty good assortment of offensive weapons, with more available as you get deeper into the game. Defensive equipment like shields and sensors can also be fitted, though only two are allowed per RAT.

Each mission has a primary goal and a number of subgoals, and begins with your RAT or RATs being dropped into the combat zone. The graphics here are, for the most part, pretty sharp, high-res visuals, with multi-level buildings, well-animated monsters, and plenty of fiery explosions. I found, however, that perspective was often a problem: I ran into a great deal of trouble telling one level from another in many instances. A little fiddling with the controls clarifies this problem, but more careful rendering would have been a better solution.

Each mission features a number of different elements that you need to understand to get through, tempering the action with a fair amount of problem solving. Most of this is based around switches, power fields, gates, and moving platforms which enable you to get from one level or area to another. In addition, money, power-ups, armor, weapon loads, and other prizes are scattered throughout the terrain.

Almost everything in Bedlam can be shot or blown up: always a nice feature. And levels tend to move fast and furious, with lots of action and lots of carnage. Control of all this takes some getting used to, since movement and firing are completely based around the mouse: left button to move, right to fire. It’s a tricky interface, but one that can be learned. It’s much harder to get the hang of switching from one RAT to another in a single mission, which was at times more than I could juggle.

Bedlam is a fine example of a top-down action game with some solid elements. If it only seems good, not great, that’s because we’ve seen this type of game done before and done better. Its frenetic pace and somewhat repetitive visuals can become tiring after a few missions, and play can wear thin. But if you like Crusader and want something with action that’s a little faster, take the demo for a spin: it might just be what the doctor ordered.

Only a couple of years after they took an interest in computer games, Hollywood finally got one right. But not without a little inspiration - or highway robbery, depending on how you look at it. GT Interactive’s Nine dumps you in a mysterious mansion that you have somehow inherited. You’re not really sure what the story is, so you acquaint yourself with your mission by clicking endlessly on random objects and solving puzzles. Sound brutally similar to a game you may have heard of? Let’s just say if you’re champing at the bit for Myst II, this will satiate your appetite for now. And even if you’re one of the brave few who actually admitted that they hated Myst, you may still want to check this out for a few simple reasons: better graphics, actual interaction with characters and moving objects, and a more coherent storyline. The biggest shocker of all? It actually plays like a game, rather than a Novocaine-induced walk through the forest.

That’s not to say Nine is without fault. The various puzzles you have to solve are a mixed bag. While many are straightforward brain teasers (for instance, there’s a challenging Concentration-like puzzle that requires you to match two sound effects out of several dozen possibilities), unfortunately, most require more patience and blind luck than actual noggin-crunching. Make sure your pointer finger is limber before you start playing - there’s a good chance you’ll end up getting stuck in a marathon session of mindless mouse-clicking.

Fortunately, unlike Myst, playing this game for hours at a time won’t leave you in a coma. The art and animation in Nine are fantastic. The often creepy, carnival-like 3D graphics are great eye candy as you plug along, and the music and sound effects are also enthralling. As for the Hollywood hook, it actually has a point this time around. The characters’ voices - provided by the likes of Cher, Christopher Reeve, James Belushi, and Aerosmith band members - actually help make the game more vivid and interesting. Salty, the character played by Belushi, is a bizarre, cranky fellow who shows up from time to time to give you tips - a godsend for some of the more random puzzles.

The goal of the entire game is simple: get rid of the bad seeds that inhabit your newly acquired mansion. But, as the game’s packaging boasts, it isn’t easy. If you’re still boasting that you solved Myst in under 14 hours, give this one a shot. It may not take you as long to finish, but it’s a far more beautiful and less disorienting ride.

Elementary, my dear Watson? Not even close. If you have a few dozen hours to kill, check out Electronic Arts’ Case of the Rose Tattoo from the Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes series. While figuring out the mystery actually is elementary, solving the case isn’t so easy. Sherlock Holmes’ brother is injured in a strange explosion during a social function at the Diogenes Club. Was it faulty gas pipes or foul play? That’s the question.

Despite the hours the game takes to solve, you’re not likely to get bored too easily. The game makes great, subtle use of video and graphics, and gives you plenty of characters to interact with and interrogate. The down side to all of this is that the game is strictly linear. In order to move along in your investigation, you have to get the right questions answered, and uncover the right clues, in the right order. Unfortunately, that means clicking on things until your finger goes numb. For a large part of the game, the only deductive reasoning you need is figuring out what object you haven’t clicked on yet, which doesn’t take skill or brains, only patience. Luckily, when you get stuck, an included hint book is around to give you enlightenment.

Depending on how you look at it, the linear nature of the game is a bit of a mixed blessing. There are so many places to go, and so many people to question, it would probably be too overwhelming were you given the power to go anywhere you wanted. There’s a handful of puzzles along the way, including a chemistry set you use to analyze clues, as well as a game of darts. While the game doesn’t really require a whole lot of brilliant detective work, it’s still entertaining to watch the story unfold as you click along. If you’re looking for unpredictable twists and turns, this game probably won’t deliver. But if you’re in the mood to use a little brain power and watch a fascinating mystery from the eyes of a master detective, this is the game for you.

This game offers an exhilarating time to those who just want to hoistthemselves into an oversized killing machine and let some hi-res bullets rip.

The MechWarrior 2 series, one might agree, is more than a game - it’s a sort of cult. At the title’s release, gamers were entranced by Mech 2’s complexity of control and engaging post-nuclear storyline. Now, just in time for the release of MechWarrior Mercenaries, Interplay introduces Shattered Steel, a game which some anticipate might achieve similar elevated status among futuristic-sim fans. But while SS has an interesting plot, the missions don’t really give the mech pilot the same sense of “being there.” Still, even though it’s a pastiche of other popular titles, the game offers an exhilarating time to those who just want to hoist themselves into an oversized killing machine and let some hi-res bullets rip.

The story behind Shattered Steel involves a number of Mega-Corporations who, having risen from the ashes of a post-holocaust Earth, have taken to terra-forming nearby planets, mining them for their resources. In the midst of their great bidding war over planetary mines, these Mega-Corps (who have all but completely overtaken basic governmental functions) encounter a hostile alien presence that is particularly keen on inflicting grievous bodily harm upon humans. As a hired mercenary, you’re deployed on a series of missions to reconnoiter and decimate the anomalous beings.

The immediate-action quality of Shattered Steel’s gameplay is partially due to the fact that the controls are more simplified than Mech 2’s. As in Mech 2, your mech moves in four cardinal directions, with your torso/turret revolving independently. You use the keyboard or the two mouse buttons for your primary and secondary weapons. Your HUD is pretty straightforward, containing your basic radar system, damage status, and inventory. One control improvement explored here is power optimization, where the act of increasing or decreasing speed, weapon restoration, or shield levels boosts or diminishes the power areas that you consider a higher priority.

As you progress through higher missions, you’re offered the chance to upgrade your mech, its weapons, and its shield. Chassis types that become available during computer or network play range from the scampering, maneuverable Cervotron, to Shiva, a formidable, hulking metallic quarterback. Weapons range anywhere from your default light laser, to the highly effective heavy plasma cannon, to the morally questionable Nuke. These objects should be chosen strategically because they ultimately effect your mech’s maneuverability.

As mentioned before, Shattered Steel is more of an action-oriented sim than Mercenaries and is more comparable to Psygnosis’ upcoming Krazy Ivan. But this isn’t necessarily an asset, unless you’re thoroughly satisfied by the simple task of reducing an unrelenting stream of airborne attackers, mechanized arachnids, and bipedal reptilians to scrap metal. Though it’s true that most of the beginning levels are relentless shoot-’em-ups between you and what ever juggernautical bionoid happens to cross your path, the missions become a little more interesting and absorbing as you advance through the levels. But even so, the game still has graphical shortcomings. Without question, the graphics are stunning in hi-res mode, but running it that way ultimately means sacrificing performance. Entering lo-res makes Shattered Steel more playable and also more graphically comparable to Mech 2. This game will definitely reach mech-game fans, but there’s still question of whether or not it will be exalted to MechWarrior status.

The frustrating thing about The Neverhood is that its simple beauty belies its malformation.

The frustrating thing about The Neverhood is that its simple beauty belies its malformation, making it all the more difficult to squash. Never before has a game’s window on its own secret world begged so colorfully and texturally for you to stick your hand right into the thick of it and start moving your character around. Were this by some as-yet invented medium actually possible, however, the design would backfire, for the ability to encircle little Klayman’s neck and squeeze all of the animated life out of him in the last third of the game would make ever finishing it impossible.

Which is not to say that finishing the game isn’t impossible anyway. While exploring The Neverhood’s early stages and solving its puzzles - which involve moving or rearranging items, making connections, and mimicking a tune - are a pleasure to work your way through, things take a serious turn for the worse the deeper you go. Clues are so abstract they will lead you to despair. Remembering what you have encountered and how it may be relevant to your current situation or problem becomes a dumbfounding enterprise - in part because once you pick up an item and add it to your inventory, there’s no way to see it to reconsider its use - or anything else you are carrying - again. It’s not until you click on whatever else one or more of your inventory items goes with that it suddenly reappears and fits itself into the grand scheme of The Neverhood’s muddily linked together objects. Trial and error is one thing, but to make, for instance, the assumption that players will spontaneously relate a beam of light and a series of floating crystals to “the colors in the spectrum of visible light that you learned back in high school” is just plain unfair.

Which is a pity, especially when you consider how the game’s fungible look and feel will, on the surface, appeal to younger players. The irony saddens the heart, because The Neverhood seems to have everything going for it: A lovingly hand-crafted character dreamed up by Earthworm Jim creator Doug TenNapel, painstakingly modeled sets, and - for once - marvelously animated cut scenes that are a joy to watch, each one building upon the last, as though you’re sitting front and center in the screening room of your own private, shoe box-size claymation film festival. Yet despite its lively hero and enchanted story, The Neverhood’s sum of parts never quite lives up to its promise.

Published by DreamWorks Interactive, whose founders include former Disney animated film honcho Jerry Katzenberg, Stephen Spielberg, and David Geffen, it is hard not to expect a certain level of widespread accessibility for young and old players alike, along the lines of that perennial mega best-seller, Myst. But as with certain unsatisfactory films such as Casino, whose actors mesmerize us, and whose locations and sets and cinematography transport us to another place and time, the plot ultimately distracts us from ever reaching total absorption. The Neverhood would have benefited from a tighter, more attainable script.

Mode is likely to gather dust on your shelf after only a couple of hours of gameplay.

Money can’t buy everything, and mega-software company Corel’s recent “interactive” movie, Mode, is the best proof. The game places you in the middle of an ultra-hipster fashion event to mingle with the natives. You interact with people by using a MoodBar (a multi-colored bar at the bottom of the screen). If you’re feeling nice, go to the far right and click on the color green. If you’re feeling downright pissy, go with red. In many situations, it doesn’t even matter.

Since your only way of modifying the situation around you is to click on this bar, your conversations are completely one-sided, and to make matters worse, they’re pretty boring as well. Sitting on your can while staring at talking heads gets old fast. And they truly are talking heads: to save space, only the character’s head is video - the rest of them is just a still image. (So much for body language.) It’s especially humorous when the character’s head moves slightly, because it will actually go outside the border of the video frame. In other words, someone is rambling on, suddenly moves a little bit, and half of their head goes missing. Looking for more badness? Okay, there’s also no way to stop a video clip unless you back completely out of the game. And to top it all off, you’ll see better acting performances in the movie Showgirls. Rinky dink.

I don’t want to bash til I’m blue in the face, and in all fairness I must admit that there is a tale to be told in this game. If you’re patient enough, it’s interesting to piece through the character’s speeches to gather clues and figure out what’s going on. The game’s plot is unique - not many other games will let you troll around the underbelly of a make-believe fashion scene. And the more people you talk to, the more you can move around, and the more you learn. Some characters are interesting enough to at least keep one of your eyes open. And since the story isn’t linear, you can explore any of the plots going on at once, although none of them is edge-of-the-seat riveting. The game’s overall video quality is pretty good, too.

Unless you’re a complete digital videophile, Mode is likely to gather dust on your shelf after only a couple of hours of gameplay. (And we use the term gameplay liberally.) If you’re set on playing this, do yourself a favor: either invest in a jukebox CD-ROM player, or take juggling lessons. Spread out on three CD-ROMs, this game takes up more space than many of Corel’s gigantic clip art collections. All in all, there’s not much to do with this game except click and listen. It’s interactivity at a bare minimum, and you’ll probably get bored quickly.

Opponents are tough and smart, and each trip out brings a new set of challenges.

When Apache hit last year, it broke a long, long drought of helicopter sims. Digital Integration and Interactive Magic created a sim with clean yet detailed polygon graphics, difficulties ranging from arcade to realistic, and plenty of missions and mission types. It was a terrific piece of work, and now it has been followed up by an entirely new kind of simulation built on the same core technology.

Hind recreates Russia’s front-line warhorse, the Mi-24, codenamed “Hind” by NATO. For desktop jocks accustomed to the fly-by-wire, computer-driven finesse of American fighter planes and choppers, the Hind will be a rude awakening. The cockpit is full of conventional instruments, with no multi-function displays to be seen, and only a moving map to help track position. Radar is limited to a light-up threat warning indicator. Hind’s lack of sophistication extends to its handling properties, which can charitably be called sluggish. It is a large aircraft with heavy armor, lots of weapons, and extra cargo space behind the cockpit for carrying up to eight infantry, extra weapons, or fuel. Though the Apache can fly circles around it, the Hind has its own strengths. Its thick armor can stop a 12.7 mm hit, and its weapons loadout includes a powerful machine gun, air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles, rocket pods, and even dumb bombs.

Obviously, the Hind was designed to serve a different purpose than the Apache, and the mission structure of Hind reflects this. For starters, play options are plentiful, and range from jumping into a target-rich environment with infinite weapons and complete invulnerability, to a quite realistic flight model. Single missions take place in Korea, Afghanistan, and Kazakhstan, with everything from other Hinds opposing you to full Apache formations. Missions reflect the unique nature of the Hind, with troop inserts and extractions, rescues, close support, and ground attacks. The gameplay is entirely different than it is in Apache, with fewer lightning strikes and more methodical types of missions. Opponents are tough and smart, and each trip out brings a new set of challenges.

Control of a helicopter like the Hind can be tricky without some help, which DI has provided in the form of a “silicon WSO,” or Weapons Systems Officer, who can designate and prioritize targets automatically. Hop into the turret gun while he’s tracking a locked target, and you can rotate along a boresite view. This helps ease the workload on a hot battlefield, where things can quickly become overwhelming. (That’s why there’s two men in actual Hinds.)

Graphically, Hind is as sharp as its predecessor, with one new flourish: infantry now figures heavily into the action, and enemy infantry is depicted on the ground with their weapons, including shoulder-launched SAMS. If you lock on an infantry and strafe them, there are even little animations of the guys running, ducking for cover, and keeling over dead. Nice touch. Numerous exterior views give you a good window on all this carnage.

Head-to-head mode expands upon the core gameplay greatly, with options for direct connection and LAN play. You can fly pilot/WSO, pilot/wingman, or against each other. Hind also links into Apache so you can create Apache versus Hind death matches for up to 16 people.

Hind offers everything from easy to realistic flight models, head-to-head play, single missions, campaigns, sharp graphics that won’t strain your system, and good opponents. It’s a winner in every sense of the word.