Hey guys, it’s been a bit quiet this side so I thought I’d just post and see how interested people are in another round. Please leave a comment to let us know and also maybe include a topic for the games.

This review was written by Static_A_Matic from Just Games Retro where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games relating to the undead.

Look, let’s face it, Billy. I know you have dreams. We all did once. I can remember the halcyon days of my youth. I wanted to be a doctor. Seems funny now, of course, but at the time I was dead serious. I wanted to help people. I wanted to make a difference. Of course, after barely making it into community college, and then being promptly expelled for introducing the dean’s daughter to a little move I’ve since dubbed “the reverse Dutch toboggan ride”, I had to let that dream go.

Doctors don’t have to type, Billy. They don’t even have to sign their name legibly. Now you know I want you to grab for that brass ring with all your might. But just in case you end up having to sustain your miserable failure of a life through an endless string of soul-numbing temp jobs… Well, let’s make sure you can type.

There have been plenty of edutainment titles aimed at teaching li’l Billy how to touch type, but the only one I know that is fun enough to truly call itself a game is the infamous Typing of the Dead. Plus it’s got more bloody reanimated corpses than Mario Teaches Typing. The reason it plays like a fully realized game is that TotD is essentially an official mod of the already excellent House of the Dead 2. The only significant difference is that you’ve swapped your gun for a keyboard. So, rather than shooting the drooling deadite lurking your way, you’ll have to quickly type a word that appears beneath him.

Typing of the Dead began its life in the arcades (yes, an arcade cabinet with two full QWERTY keyboards) before becoming one of the more quirky Dreamcast titles, and then finally being brought to the PC which is the version we’re looking at. The PC port seems to be a direct copy of its Dreamcast brother as evidenced both by the cute Dreamcast backpacks the heroes wear as well as the sometimes wonky control scheme. More on that later.

If you’re a reasonably competent typist you can jump right into the game proper, but if you are playing this to actually learn the fundamentals of typing, TotD has you covered with the tutorials section. Here, our hero James walks you through such gripping concepts as the home row, which fingers are responsible for the most keys, and why the semicolon (bastard child of the comma and the colon) is given such a preferential key position that really should belong to a letter of the alphabet (HINT: follow the money). Having trained for this game in my tenth grade computer skills class, I easily whizzed through the basics. But having to find the damned squiggly bracket key before a zombie could eat my brain still put me to the test. Incidentally, I also had my share of problems with the number keys since that same computer class encouraged use of the separate number pad which TotD doesn’t recognize. The reason? To train us as sales clerks. Not kidding.

Once you’re comfortable with your WPM, you’re ready for the story mode which comes in “Arcade” or “Original” flavors. “Arcade”, predictably, is a straight port of the arcade version of the game, while “Original” adds new items and the opportunity to earn skill coins at the end of each chapter. Both modes include all the action of House of the Dead 2 as well as the incomprehensible plot and hilariously voiced cut scenes. You start off easy with slow zombies that can’t take a three letter word to the gut. Gradually, you work up to long, complex words, then phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs with accurate punctuation. Small, one-shot enemies like the little snake things or the axes and knives that some of the zombies lob at you can be dispatched with a single key rather than an entire word. Reflex is crucial here as these come at you quickly. Single keys might also show up beneath bonus items like health that you’ll only have a scant second to collect as the camera moves along its virtual rails.

Typos count as misses and reset the “perfect” counter which increases with every mistake-free word or phrase. But wrong keys don’t seem to do much more than waste the critical time between seeing a zombie and allowing it to get close enough to damage you. Slow speeds impact the letter grade rating you receive on each word or phrase which in turn affects your overall score. But as long as you finish typing before you take a hit, you get to continue unscathed. Several items are present such as tranquilizers to weaken your foes with easier words and Molotov cocktails that can torch zombies with no wordplay required. Occasionally you’ll encounter mini-missions within a level that will require you to defeat a certain number of creatures before the clock runs out or without taking any damage. These asides net you extra points and items if completed successfully.

Bosses have their own special rules, based loosely on their patterns in the light gun version. If a monster could only be shot at a key moment, then the game only accepts words at that moment. Baddies that took clip after clip to dispatch now require a thesis paper. Harder bosses will penalize you for typos or force you to choose the word that answers a particular question, all while they prepare to attack. This “type or die” scenario makes for some of the most intense word-processing of your life.
Please, no haiku.

However, the developers never pretend that converting a horror shooter to a typing tutor is a serious idea. The farther you progress, the more you’ll notice humorous words and phrases popping up. These range from the silly (“Out of toilet paper”) to the purposely difficult (“Indirect vendetta”). From the deceptive (“I have a sore trout”) to the vaguely sexual (“Which hole?”) You can also pick up alien dictionaries that up the nonsense quotient considerably and genre dictionaries that give you a string of related words. You get a real sense that the creators had a blast tossing out stupid things for you to type. The words are selected randomly each time you play and you’ll almost never see the same words twice in a single session. Waiting for the next one-liner keeps you engaged enough to measurably improve your typing proficiency quicker than a more generic program could.

Like the game it’s based on, Typing of the Dead is pretty short. Aspiring administrative assistants should be able to knock it out in less than two hours easily. If you do complete the story or just tire of it, there are several different drill and training modes for you to hone your speed, accuracy, and reflexes. The boss drill allows you to fight any of the game’s bosses to get their patterns down. All of these come complete with high score records.

Graphics and sound are straight from the source material which was a very nice looking 3D rails shooter for its time. There is an option to turn the blood off, but if you’ve got the stomach for it you can literally watch as each letter you enter takes an oozing green chunk out of your opponent.

Most of the control just involves typing, of course, and this works beautifully. A particularly handy feature is the ability to cancel a word you’ve begun typing with the escape key. This allows you to reprioritize if you suddenly realize the fellow running full speed at you with a chainsaw is a more pressing matter than the one slithering toward your shins, or if you need to abandon a long phrase to quickly nail a one-letter projectile flying toward your head. But there seems to be no provision for exiting a sequence. So if you start a chapter, hopefully you’re happy with your decision because short of alt-tabbing out of the game and closing it from the taskbar, you’re stuck there. This goes for exiting the game and returning to windows as well. Realistically this can’t be true, but since I could only track down a manual for the Dreamcast version (which encourages you to use Ctrl Alt Del to reset the game and Alt F12 to exit a training sequence, neither of which work on the PC) I can’t be sure. Another interesting note on control is that the game doesn’t give a crap about case or spacing. You’ll only need the shift key for punctuation and you can forget the spacebar entirely. This does make for a faster, more streamlined experience, but as far as real world typing skills go, you’ll eventually need to throw a space or two in your memos.

Like the original, there is a two player network mode that is a real blast. Comparing WPM with your pals has never been this fun. Or fun at all. All on-screen words are first come first serve, meaning that you might start typing a word only to realize you’ve wasted your time since your teammate typed the first letter before you and thus locked it for himself. But this is a relatively minor concern.

The only genuinely disappointing thing about this game is that it reminds me how much better I am at typing than playing House of the Dead. Typing of the Dead is not only a great example of a studio having some playful fun with an old title, but it manages to also be the best educational software I’ve ever used. Make sure to stick around for the credits.

This review was written by The J Man from Just Games Retro where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games relating to the undead.

Corpse Killer is one of the last of the interactive movie games from Digital Pictures and guru Tom Zito. These games were their specialties, and really only continued by virtue of new console hardware, namely, the release of the 3DO, 32X, and CD-i; all of which were intended or outright designed to do a better job of showing live action video at higher resolutions. It didn’t help the quality of the games though, but it does explain why they were still being made, and why they were still released on the wimpy ol’ Sega CD.

The name “Corpse Killer” is an intentional oxymoron that will give you exactly the right idea about the subject of the game. You’re a special forces Lieutenant air-dropped with a squad of four others onto the remote tropical island of Cay Noir. The details of your mission become more clear as the game progresses, but the idea is stop the mad Dr. Hellman, (played by veteran character actor Vincent Schiavelli) and his out-of-control research into creating an unstoppable army for the United States. His methods to get there should come as a surprise to no one – good old fashioned voodoo – and his results are an island full of zombies and spiritual nasties. Your goal is to shoot through a never-ending supply of zombie soldiers to rescue and un-zombify your four captured teammates.

Assisting you throughout your quest are a single-minded female reporter named Julie (Brigett Butler), and a Rastafarian and voodoo specialist named Winston (Jeremiah Birkett). Winston, endearingly, is only interested in finding enough pirate treasure to buy a Humvee (take a shot every time he says the word “Hummah” – you’ll be on the floor before the intro movie is over). However, he is infinitely useful in providing you a Jeep for transportation, information, and all sorts of voodoo brews. You can even have him read the future from chicken bones back at the base camp, and he will make appropriate suggestions as to which path to take – more on this later. The reporter’s not quite as useful. Or anywhere close. At all. She essentially rides around and takes pictures, whines if you don’t help her out with her quests, and schizophrenically wavers her acting from flatly delivering backstory as if she’s reading bullet points, to ineptly attempting some sexual innuendos (“Neat gadget! I bet you know how to TURN IT ON.” – I’m serious, that’s a real quote). At least Winston won’t let you down, and in terms of gameplay, Julie at least keeps out of the way.

The game breaks out into a series of linear shooting galleries. The camera always scrolls left to right for the length of about four screens, while zombies walk sideways, toward you from the background, or pull off amazing leaps. Your health and ammo are tracked at a standard display at the bottom of the screen, complete with a little image of your character (who resembles Mike Nelson from MST3K). You have four flavors of bullets you cycle through with the B button, though two of those bullets must be created using items you can gain at the end of missions. The C button will instantly abort your level and let you regroup. There are no pickups to collect or anything else to shoot; you simply fend off waves of digitized zombies until you reach the end of the “gallery,” and automatically move on to the next video clip.

The clever parts involve how the game breaks up and gives purpose to these shooting galleries. It’s a linear path of shooting-movie-shooting, up until you save your first comrade. From here, Winston takes you to a graveyard that works like a base of operations. The graveyard is the only point where you can access your PDA, which holds backstory, information on items you can collect, Winston’s fortune-telling ability, and the map. The map shows all the various missions you can choose to undertake. At any time, you can take on the central plot by selecting to raid Hellman’s fortress and rescue the next guy. Otherwise, randomized side quests will appear. You can choose to help Winston find treasure for his Humvee, or help Julie get some Pulitzer material. You can take quests to get armor-piercing ammo. You can take quests to attack certain groups of zombies and get a random powerup as a reward. The “missions” all simply entail a single shooting gallery, but completing it gives you the item you came to get, or something to assist you in your quest. You can even get ambushed along the way, and having Winston read the bones will make suggestions about avoiding missions that will lead to such traps.

It gives the game a level of strategy, and makes this the most elaborate FMV game I’ve played yet. It’s certainly a great leap forward from watching a couple video screens and hitting traps at the appropriate time, or selecting a list of witnesses and watching an uncontrollable video clip as you question them. It’s also the most like an actual game, despite still being hawked as a “U-Direct” interactive picture. You’re not simply following a linear movie order or picking your next move out of a list like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book – you’ll have to consider tactically where you want to go next, and your shooting skill will help determine the outcome.

Another major key to introducing some strategy is the Datura plant you sometimes get after missions. Datura, as Winston explains, has anti-zombie properties. It can either be used to give you powerful bullets, or as the only method to replenish your health. Each time you get a plant, you get a screen asking you if you want the bullets or the health. Both, as you can imagine, are awfully useful. Regular zombies can be dispatched with your infinite supply of standard ammunition. Yet there are special voodoo spirits that also appear in the shooting sections, and can only be killed with Datura bullets. Same story with your captured fellow soldiers. So to continue with the plot, you need these side quests for precious Datura, but you’re not required to take them. As soon as you feel you’re ready, you can go raid the fortress. If you want to take your time and build up an impressive stockpile of Datura bullets, you can do that too. You also have your health to balance, which stands to take a hit each time you venture out for supplies. You soon may need to use that Datura for your health instead.

You may further need to take quests for armor piercing bullets, to have enough to create Datura bullets, or may have to take other missions while you wait for a “Datura quest” to show up. Point is, you’re making decisions and frequently weighing the consequences of “voodoo bullets vs. health,” instead of simply watching some video and pressing a button every now and again.

The shooting sequences similarly go out of their way to be standard arcade blasters that happen to use digitized video for the characters. Zombies appear independent of the background, and react individually, allowing for many to be on the screen at the same time. It’s not a cutout shooting gallery like Ground Zero, Texas was, with one enemy appearing at a time, and scads of down time. Here, you get swarms of bad guys without loading or similar breaks in the action.

Of course, it’s not without faults. In order to have the characters separate from the video backdrop, all the actors in these shooting sections appear to be on wires. I understand wires for the jumping ones, but even walking/running zombies appear to have been hung up in front of a bluescreen and told to run in air. It results in a strange swimming look to everyone’s movements, and creates characters who obviously are not a part of the scene. I think the tradeoff for a quick and seamless shooter is worth it; others may believe it simply looks too hokey. And since these characters are simply overlaid on the scrolling video footage, it creates situations where they ignore the foreground. The video is set up to have some field of depth, with totems or sheds sometimes passing by on multiple layers of distance. The zombies ignore these and charge right on through. The developers have, at least, masked these zombies out if they’re “behind” something, to maintain the illusion of 3-D. It will still result in running zombies suddenly appearing through solid walls, usually too close to you to react in time.

Another smaller issue is that characters near the edge of the screen simply disappear if the screen is about to scroll past them. I kind of like it, since it was a lifesaver for me a few times. Practically, it means you should never waste your time shooting at enemies near the left edge.

Control is the wild card here, and it’s barely up to the task. You will be able to complete the game with even the pad controls, but none of the schemes can be called particularly ideal. For the control pad, the issue is the loose crosshair. You will be able to move around swiftly to deal with threats on either side of the screen, which will get you through the large majority of the game. You will not be able to pinpoint anything, or hold down a button to modify the cursor’s speed for more accuracy. This results in drawing a square around any small objects you’re supposed to hit, like thrown grenades or knives. The lack of real accuracy also means much of the game will be spend waggling the cursor around in a “spray ‘n pray” style. At least you have those infinite bullets.

The game can also work with either of the Sega CD lightguns. Aiming becomes less of an issue, but lag does. The game puts a red bracket on everything it registers as a hit, while your cursor continues on. So you can be shooting at your next foe, but if that red bracket hasn’t faded from the last enemy, then that’s the one the game is still thinking about. All of the zombies require multiple hits to drop, which isn’t such an issue with your automatic main weapon, but can result in thinking you’ve dropped an enemy when you haven’t done enough damage yet. Through a combination of this and the lag, the only sure way to kill a zombie is to keep firing until it falls. This will always require more bullets than necessary, and usually allows a different zombie to close to biting distance. Fortunately, the generous health you have (100 points, and each zombie takes 4 off) help to mitigate this, so a single blow will never be much to worry about.

The graphics, as is always the case with the Sega CD, are where most of the hurt is. It’s pixelated, it’s blocky, colors shift around frequently, and most of the beauty of the live island location gets lost to fierce compression ratios. Fortunately, it’s never unplayable. Characters never get lost in the backgrounds, though some thrown projectiles do. It can also be hard to tell a regular enemy from a silhouetted “shadow man” (all-black ghouls that damage you if you shoot them) at a distance. But you will still be able to find all of your targets and deal with them without dropping frames. Don’t get any other versions of this game expecting improved or easier gameplay; what’s here is good enough, and you’ll really only be getting better quality video for the plot films. The movie sections are of standard cutscene quality, and you can usually tell what’s going on with enough detail. Still, they’re not pretty to look at, and the crushed blacks often mean that poor Winston’s face blends with his dreadlocks and the grille of his Jeep, resulting in a character you can sometimes only see by grinning Cheshire Cat teeth.

Dialogue on these sections are at least clear, though Winston again suffers here. He speaks with a heavy Rasta accent, complete with authentic pronouns like “I-and-I,” which may result in some people not understanding what he’s saying. I didn’t have an issue here, but I do know that all other versions included a subtitle option for everyone who doesn’t speak accent. You’ll want to track one of those down instead if you’re the kind of person who has to watch the Yankee-dubbed version of Mad Max.

Nobody here gets to flex their acting muscles to any real degree. Winston manages to be my favorite character, since he actually helps you through the course of the game, and Birkett seems to be having a great deal of fun with the role. Digital Pictures always was good at creating a useful buddy role, and finding an actor perfect for it. Julie is an annoyance, at best, and Butler seems to be running on autopilot. Vincent Schiavelli, poor guy, did this role so many times that he probably lost track of what film he was in day to day. He was a better actor than this part, and you can tell pretty clearly that this one was a paycheck job. Hellman is appropriately lunatic, and feels no qualms about letting you in on his perceived brilliance. As for the men you rescue, well, their acting amazingly gets progressively worse with each one you save.

Corpse Killer is one of the shining examples of the genre. No wait, don’t laugh yet. Night Trap was the perfect introduction, and the voyeuristic gameplay made the most sense for telling a story in cinematic language while trying to maintain some level of gamer control. It sucked as a game, and the second-generation titles tried to remedy that. You can see here how this is a standard arcade shooter, but with FMV characters and FMV cutscenes. It has enough “gamey” elements to make it a title worth existing, and the interactive movie parts support the game rather than attempt to replace it. That is about the nicest thing that can be said for such “interactive movies.” It’s really your call as to whether you want to consider that praise or not.

This review was written by Mr Creosote from The Good Old Days where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games relating to the undead.

Dracula – a universally known horror icon. Ironically, only few have actually read the novel these days. Instead, the count’s image is dominated by his numerous appearances in other media. Most notably movies which have taken on a life on their own, straying from the original more and more over time. Instead, these movies seem to be based on other movies. Or how would you explain that almost every vampire movie out there claims these undead creatures dissolve in daylight? A hint: this wasn’t the case in either Dracula or the even older vampire story Carmilla. That ‘tradition’ was established by Nosferatu, an unofficial movie version of Dracula from the 1920s.

Max Schreck’s (the actor who played Nosferatu) silhouette can be seen on the game’s title screen. Good (the movie is still one of the most athmospheric ever made) or bad (it takes extreme liberties concerning the source material) sign?

Neither of the presumptions turns out to be fully correct. This Dracula game is closer to the novel than Nosferatu (and most of the other movies) in many ways, but it doesn’t follow it slavishly. Instead, it takes three parts of the story and adapts them as episodes of the game.

In ‘The First Night’, the player controls the actions of Jonathan Harker, a real estate broker who has been called to Transsylvania to take care of a transaction with a local count who wants to move to London. Due to the bad traffic situation, Harker has to spend the night in a small inn. As it turns out, the local population is deadly terrified of something. As the player quickly notices, for a good reason – the night can become deadly.

The second part, ‘The Arrival’, has Harker arriving at the count’s castle. He’s quickly drawn into dangerous sitations involving the charismatic count as well as a group of beautiful ladies roaming around the grounds. Slowly, it dawns to Harker he has to escape. Quickly.

Finally, ‘The Hunt’ puts the player in the role of Dr Seward, head of one of London’s asylums. He receives a letter of warning from his friend Harker about several boxes being delivered to England, giving strange instructions to intercept and get rid off them.

Each of the parts is longer and more complex than the previous one. So the difficulty is rising slowly, which is always good to see. As has to be expected with such a topic, there are many ways to die – in all the parts. Sometimes, only trial and error will help. In fact, many puzzles are like that, because you suddenly get into situation you can only survive if you’ve done the right preparations before. However, these ‘right preparations’ only make sense in hindsight in many cases. With this knowledge (after restoring), the puzzles become quite easy. Nothing overly creative – again, as has to be expected from a game which uses a standard two-word-parser.

The in-game texts are well written, providing a nice athmospheric touch with simple foreshadowing and attention to detail. You shouldn’t expect the literary quality of Dracula or the terror-inducing imagery of Nosferatu, of course. Compared to the usual level of computer games, it’s quite good, though.

The latter, and the very good-looking graphics which pop up in special situations (also accompanied by fitting classical music then) are the aspects which make the game a likable piece of work. This can’t hide the average quality of the gameplay, but it helps. It certainly has its charms and fans of this theme or classic interactive fiction can’t really go wrong with this one.

This review was written by Wandrell from The Good Old Days where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games relating to the undead.

A sudden cloud of bats splashing in your airplane forces you to land in a lost, dark and small valley. A place ruled by a vampire, and where, ignoring it, you have started to fulfil a prophecy of freedom.

As expected, it tells in an ambiguous way what you should do. But if you can make sense of the thing it’s a great help. Basically, each line or pair of them is a quest, they do not have to be solved in order, but for the last part, the death of the vampire, you will need to accomplish all the previous ones.

While the game is an adventure, fights have their importance. Few places are free of skeletons, zombies, vampire women or other undead creatures. But beating them isn’t much fun, just get near them, press the icon of your equipped weapon, wait for the delay to finish and press again until your character or the enemy dies or you flee. Luckily at the beginning you can choose the complexity of those combats, which I assume is how hard or easy killing the monsters will be.

The thing could work without them, and it is noted in the many objects related to fighting that will serve mainly for encumbering your character. Potions to increase strength, plants to cure poison, disease or weakness, holy water to easily kill vampires or potions and crystals for healing, which aren’t that great when you can easily escape and visit the gypsy healer, they are, except for some plants, in greater quantities than those you need.

What is good of the game is the plot, the valley filled with dangers and cursed where everybody is scared, many hide dark secrets and things work according to legends. Werewolves are forced to transform when accused of being so; cursed spirits are bound to important objects of their life and there are plants that mark murderers.

And so, much of what you do is talking, this is the way you will get the important clues and information, which not few times should be typed in a box prepared for that, and then with it you will act, have some not very entertaining exploration in labyrinths of caves and bushes, and solve the puzzles.

Well the reviews have been submitted and are in the process of being written into blog posts. I must say that I’ve enjoyed reading them and I’m sure you will too.

If any of you have ideas about the theme for round 3, please leave a comment. The 2 current suggestions are:

1. Casino Games
2. Games that are set in the future

Also, please try and advertise The Review Roundup where ever you can, as I think we need more people and sites to participate.

I’ve been tasked with setting the deadline and deciding what we’re gonna be writing about, so let’s get to work:

We chose my topic last time (Games about Armageddon/End of the world) so I think it’s only fair to use someone else’s topic. This time we’ll use Wandrell’s idea and write about games relating to the undead.

I think we can set the deadline for the 31st of March, which is just over 2 weeks away. If anybody has any other suggestions, please leave a comment.

Also, if anybody has a review for round 1, please feel free to submit it anytime.

Now that round 1 has finished and we’ve all read and enjoyed the reviews, lets start talking about round 2. If anyone has any ideas for a theme please leave them in the comments of this post. Let’s try and have a topic chosen by the end of this week.

Also, I think that if anyone is part of any other abandonware blog or forum, try and spread the Review Roundup “message”. It  would be great to get more people and sites involved.

My idea for the next theme is “Casino Games”. I think it could be a great topic as there is very little reviewed in this genre and I’m sure there are plenty games to choose from.

This review was written by Static_A_Matic from Just Games Retro where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games Related to the End of the World.

In 1990, Mindscape released Mad Max for the NES, a mostly disappointing game already expertly reviewed by The J Man. Apparently not shaken by their first sub par offering, Mindscape went back to the well in 1992 for another stab at the Mad Max trilogy, this time on the 16-bit consoles. Thanks to the shockingly sparse amount of online info available, I’m not completely sure what happened next. Maybe Warner Bros. saw the game and didn’t like it. Maybe they just decided it wasn’t the right time for it. Or maybe Mindscape was producing the game on spec, hoping to get Warner Bros.’ permission after the fact. In any case, Mindscape never actually got the legal clearance to use the Mad Max characters, but they’d already spent their lunch money on making the game. No problem. Tweak the graphics, cut anything identifiably stolen, change the title, and voila! You’ve got your own original IP called Outlander.

And really, Warner Bros. should have just gone ahead and given them the license. At least then they would have gotten some money out of the deal. Because even though the title screen says “Outlander” where it may previously have said “Super Road Warrior”, this is still obviously a Mad Max game. You play as Max — I mean some guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses — whose mission, presumably, is to drive around a lot. You start out in your swanky car, tooling down a generic desert highway that is invocative of, but legally distinct from Australia. You’ve got to deal with road obstacles, biker goons, and gyrocopters (or perhaps just non-copyright-infringing helicopters) as you speed to the nearest town. When you arrive, you’ll hop out of your car, tussle with some bad guys, and replenish your supplies so you can get back on the road and do it all over again. I was unable to track down a manual, which is unfortunate because I would have liked to see if this game had any kind of story apart from what was obviously lifted from the dystopian future of the Mel Gibson flicks.

If you’re a fan of the films, feel free to go ahead and pretend that this is an official Mad Max game. In terms of the handling of the license, you won’t be disappointed. As The J Man pointed out in his review of the NES game, Mad Max centers around our dependence on gasoline and how something we take for granted could become incredibly precious if we suddenly ran out. Carrying this theme to the game, Outlander focuses on resource management. Don’t expect to roar down the highway at top speed while firing your machine guns indiscriminately. You’ve got ammo and you’ve got gas. If you run out, you’re screwed. Thankfully, though, not as screwed as in Mindscape’s previous offering.

The driving is presented in third person, behind your car, allowing for easy maneuverability. You have a panel showing the dash directly below the main screen, and one showing your rear view mirror (and cocky expressions) directly above. The mirror, of course, gives you the heads up on bikers and copters approaching from behind, though short of running directly into you, your enemies don’t have much in the way of rear attacks. The dashboard houses all of your meters and gauges displaying health, fuel, machine gun ammo, shotgun shells, missiles, nitro for speed boosts, and a fantastically cheesy taxi-like points meter which comes complete with an indicator that lights up when you surpass the high score.

Your main task is avoidance since hitting things costs a surprising amount of health, but you’ll also have to dispatch plenty of your fellow commuters. Missiles are reserved for copters. Fire one and it will seek the nearest whirlybird. If one is close enough, the missile will hit. If not, you just wasted a missle. The machine guns mounted on your ride are for enemies in front of you, but they’re weak, hard to aim and always seem put you in the perfect position to be nailed by a molotov cocktail. The shotgun on the other hand is a thing of beauty and the most compelling reason to play this game. When you pull along side a biker, a little mini-window appears on either your right or left showing the view out of the appropriate side window of your car. Wait until he’s close enough and going about the same speed and then pop the left or right trigger to blow him away. I really can’t explain why this is so enjoyable. Perhaps it’s a personal thing as the shotgun is my weapon of choice in almost all games that feature it, but Outlander must have been one of the first to let you unload both barrels while driving. This kind of moment is Outlander at its most charming. At its best, it feels like a full game based on the arcade sequences from Full Throttle.

Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there. The creators tried gamely to deliver, but there’s just not much fun to be had. Your car handles well and offers a sense of speed, but the driving is boring and repetitive. You’ll fight the same handful of biker sprites and dodge the same road equipment over and over. Added to this is that most of the enemy projectiles are black and grey, meaning they blend in too well with the asphalt and give you an unnecessarily tough time dodging them.

Most of the game is spent doing the above. Eventually however, you’ll reach a town. This will be difficult to determine, especially if you haven’t done a little research first, because there is no visual representation of said town. Not even a “Welcome to TOWN” sign which I understand was employed in the Genesis version of the game. Your only tip off is your hazard lights which will flash and beep when you’ve driven far enough. At this point you can pull over and park (you’re strangely safe when you’re not physically on the road) and the game will show you your score for the sequence before sending you to town.

The towns are sidescrolling beat-em-up areas that are clearly not as polished as the driving portions. You wander around until a guy in a wifebeater, girl with a shotgun, or punk with a crossbow runs onscreen to throw down. These fights alternate between stupidly easy and inexcusably difficult mostly thanks to the punk. If you’re facing the guy or the girl, you can just crouch and punch. Your reach is much better than theirs and they can’t shoot down so you’re practically invincible. Your only trouble comes from multiple attackers, but a quick dash move can usually place you on one side of the screen so you can take them on separately. The punk, however, is a different story. He reloads his crossbow so fast that you can’t get near him. Ducking is safe, but this makes you immobile, so you better hope you’ve either saved some shotgun shells or enjoy sitting in the dirt for the rest of the game. Fallen enemies, as is videogame law, drop such necessities as food, water, body armor, car armor, and of course the coveted gas can. Eventually, if you make it all the way to the right side of the screen, where your car has inexplicably caught up with you, you may return to the driver’s seat, lather, rinse, and repeat.

As I pointed out, this game relies on the films’ concept of limited resources. Start feeling the need for speed and you’ll find your gas tanks empty. Same goes for the weapons. But unlike its predecessor, Outlander doesn’t leave you in the lurch. Pulling to the side of the road at any time and stopping, as if you were entering a town, will take you to a kind of pit stop area. This area looks and plays almost exactly the same no matter where you pull over. It’s a shorter version of a town, except with no buildings and with chain wielding bikers added to the rouges gallery. The bikers are your easiest foe as they are also rendered powerless by your “mighty duck”. However, the first one you see will, unquestionably throw a molotov at you. If you avoid this and the occasional landmine, easily outsmarted by your dash, these pit stops are a cakewalk. Their purpose is to provide you with enemies that drop the gas, health, and bullets you’ll be hurting for between towns. The health will actually be your most sought after pickup, though. Paying no particular attention to my tank, I never ran out of gas.

Being able to essentially pause the action and grab some supplies does take a bite out of the difficulty, but the huge chunks of health you’ll lose on the road balance this out reasonably well. There’s also the chance that you’ll lose more than you’ll gain since your car health and body health are one in the same. Taking even more damage than you had on the road in an area that ultimately yields no useful pickups can be quite frustrating. An even lovelier scenario occurs when you finally find that life-giving can of food only to discover that, thanks to the post-apocalyptic radiation, it’s toxic. Later in the game you get a Geiger counter, of all goofy things, to help figure out which items should feature a Mr. Yuck sticker.

Running out of health will naturally result in the dreaded game over. If you’re on an emulator, you’ve got save state, but if you’re playing fair you only get a save password every five or six towns. However if you’re an especially slick driver, you can earn continues when the game totals your score before each town.

There are little extras to be found here and there, the coolest of which is a speed modification to your car that officially makes it look just like Max’s police interceptor. However, this all adds up to a game with a reasonable amount of potential, but too many holes to seriously enjoy. The driving gets a little more challenging as you progress but it mostly just gets tedious. The action levels are woefully unrefined and seem to be thrown in simply because a game where you drive through a flat desert until you go crazy and kill yourself probably wouldn’t have been as marketable. When you’re driving you can’t wait to get to the next town. Then you can’t wait to get back on the road. It does not take long to pick up on this cycle. But each experience does have its moments, at least for a few minutes, and the one thing that never gets old is shooting delinquents off their Harleys with your sawed off little pal.

Control is one of this title’s weaker points. Things might be better with a keyboard configured specifically for this game, but on a gamepad Outlander takes some getting used to. In a racing game, your thumb naturally falls to the bottom face button for acceleration, but Outlander maps Y to the gas pedal and reserves B for the machine gun. After having played for several hours, I still instinctively waste bullets when trying to speed up. Brake is awkwardly mapped to X, the topmost button, though to be fair, you rarely need it. The A button is reverse but doesn’t work unless you’ve already come to a full stop with X. For some reason A also shoots your missiles, so good luck with that. The only good thing about the driving controls is that the two triggers fire your shotgun which is both logical and satisfying. In the sidescrolling segments, you naturally rest your thumb across B and Y thinking B will be jump or dash and Y will be punch. In fact B, the most comfortable button, has no use at all that I can tell. Y is dash. A is punch/kick. And X is shotgun. Again, you’ll waste shotgun shells trying to remember what does what at the beginning of each town.

Road graphics are muddy at times as evidenced by the enemies and projectiles blending into the road at long distances. But really, this is expected from a desert-based game on the SNES. Towns fair much better with bright blue skys and that cool thre-plane pseudo 3D scrolly effect the SNES did so well. The sound is mediocre. There are only a few tunes but they are appropriate, invocative of Mad Max, and don’t repeat enough to get annoying. The punches, gunfire, and engine roars all sound adequate but not outstanding.

It should be noted that there are noticeable differences between the SNES and Genesis versions of Outlander. For example, the Genesis title puts you right behind the wheel of the car as opposed to the third person perspective of the SNES. I’ve also read that the Genesis version is significantly tougher, almost the point of being unplayable. So if you had Outlander on the Genesis and couldn’t get past the first town, the SNES edition is worth a try.

Is Outlander a great game? Not at all. But it probably deserves better than its reputation as the bastard stepchild of the Mad Max license. And it definitely deserves better than the almost total obscurity it’s fallen into. This is not a forgotten classic that had anyone glued to their SNES, nor is it a title you’ll keep loading up again and again on the emulator. But if it were on your cell phone, you could easily get addicted to it while waiting in line for a movie. Actually that’s a great idea. I wonder if I can get the ROM to boot on my DS…

This review was written by Wandrell from The Good Old Days where you can go to view the review in it’s original form with pictures and ratings. It is part of the theme: Games Related to the End of the World.

Flames of nuclear war devoured the world, cities, towns, forests… all became a desert filled with mutants and survivors. But you are not only that, you are a leader on its way to join again this land.

For that, controlling terrains is not the only objective, first you need food, and water. Each region produces a certain amount of water, and nearly everywhere you can get some insects, but that won’t feed even a gang.

Technicians will solve this with traps, but you will need to defend the controlled zones with mercenaries, and also have some medics, as the wounds do not heal alone.

All of this creates the backbone of the game, searching for materials and food, hiring people with those items and securing control of the regions while looking for more food and water, unless you wish to die travelling.

Each of the map sections consists in some buildings or caves, where you may find objects or store them, some people, mutants, maybe dogs (good for hunting, but they don’t respawn) and a waterhole, that sometimes is hidden around.

You just take control of them leaving someone, anyone, there. But make sure of giving them a weapon. Doing this (controlling zones, not handing weapons) serves mainly for one thing, cutting the way to the enemy, as he cannot cross any of the roads that exit the place, except the one he came from.

Once you have a protected zone starts the improvements, get all the junk you find around and store it somewhere, make a technician take a look and if he can make something he will tell. Traps, contamination protective gear, pumps and other useful things can be made from what you get lying around.

If not, you can always trade the things for other more useful pieces, weapons (that range from knives to shotguns) or just food. Some merchants travel around the map, while other can be found in the cities, along with restaurants, pubs and doctors (these are the ones that heal you when your condition is below 50%) that exchange their services for food or water.

Fighting is very simplistic, as you walk around you may choose talking or attacking the same as you choose going in group or alone and all the other options, right click and then left click on the selection. Then just walk to the enemy and click again, the group will go to their objective and hit it once, repeat until the death. This also will increase the experience of your units, making them better fighters.

The game is lacking in one thing, multiplayer. It is thought for that mode (the time bar will be always becoming shorter in one player), but only two people can play. The game can be fast enough for more players when knowing what to do and would do it much good.