AMINET ® GAMES REVIEW

By Ray C. Hawkins.
Dual Editor of the CRYPT

Programmed by: © Stefan Ossowskis Schatztruhe

Price: £15.00 + £1.00 P&P

Available from: Forematt Home Computing.

Supplied on: Amiga CD-ROM also readable with Windows 95/98/NT, OS/2 and Unix etc.

Game type: More than 1,500 Amiga Games

Required hardware: Amiga with AGA or GFXboard, 1.5 MByte ChipRAM, 4 MByte FastRAM

Description: A CD containing nearly 1 gigabyte (uncompressed) in more than 1,500 archives of the best games from the world's largest software archive.

WHAT'S ON THE CD ?

On Aminet Games CD you will find some 1,527 freeware and shareware games plus around 70 commercial titles including Gloom3, Max Rally, XTreme Racing and Gamers Delight 2. There are so many titles here that it is impossible to name or tell you about them all. Many of the titles such as Gloom 3 deserve a review on their own. The Gamers Delight 2 drawer contains no less than 70 excellent games coded by H. Muller, these alone will keep you busy for hours.

The games have been sorted according to their category as follows:-

Two or more player games.
Action Games.
Board Games.
Demos of commercial games.
Gag programs.
Jump'n'run games.
Miscellaneous games.
Role playing and Adventure games.
Shoot-em-up games.
Mind games.
Workbench games.

HOW TO UNCOMPRESS THE GAMES.

It's important that you realise that ALL the games on the CD have been compressed using the LHA utility and have be uncompressed before you can play or install them. However this is made very easy for you by utilising a program called Power Guide. Power Guide is very similar to AmigaGuide which I'm sure that you are all familiar with.

Clicking on one of the games categories will bring up a Power Guide screen. (See Aminet Games Pic) which will list all the games of that category. You can then either select to read about the game or select its title to uncompress it.

I would recommend that you read FIRST about the games as many of the older titles will only run on A500/600 machines or require a degrader such as JST or SKICK to run on a A1200/4000 computer.

Uncompressing the games has been made easy too. Just click on its title and the game will automatically be uncompressed to RAM. The game can either be played direct from RAM or you may wish to copy it to your hard drive to play.

THE REVIEW

Well there's certainly plenty of excellent quality games to play and the Power Guide method of uncompressing the game files is easy once you get the hang of it. I was however a little disappointed to find that many of the games were shareware. Don't get me wrong here I have nothing against shareware games, after all why shouldn't the author be rewarded for all his hard work. However many of these games are many years old and I doubt very much that the authors are still with the Amiga now.

I would therefore suggest that before you send off any registration fees that you check FIRST the author is still participating. Another downside is that there are far too many titles that are too old to run on a modern day Amiga and therefore you can expect many a system crash trying to run them.

These minor problems aside the Aminet Games CD contains so many titles that there is something to please everyone, and a wonderful opportunity to play again some of those old games you have forgotten all about. I would recommend this CD to anyone as it offers excellent value for money.

SCORES

Ease of use. : 7/10

Playability. : 8/10

Value for money. : 9/10

Overall. : 8/10


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