Gardensoft 1988
Genre: Simulation
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Freeware
System: ZX Spectrum

It's the things which are fun in real life which usually translate well into great computer games. And you know what's really fun? Lawnmowing. Don't you just love going back and forth, tweaking your route till perfection, while at the same time, you have plenty of time to think about all kinds of things? At last, Advanced Lawnmower Simulation gives you the opportunity to do all this in front of your computer!

Mattel / Epyx 1984
Genre: Puzzle
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

A game simulating the life of Barbie... what an amazing idea! Her boyfriend Ken calls and asks her out on a date. He might want to take her to the beach, to the gym, to the prom or to a restaurant. Of course, Barbie agrees. Now, she has one hour to choose the right look for this occasion.

Core Design 1992
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

1992. Sierra had left the Amiga market (only to return silently later again, but that's another story), other companies tried to fill the gap. Core Design (these days known as the makers of horrible action games featuring big breasts) did it most successfully - they almost perfectly took Sierra's place with their Adventures! Not so much in serial output, but certainly concerning the quality of their products. Does that mean they made great classics with intriguing stories and witty puzzles which stood the test of time? Well, not exactly.

PCSL 1991
Genre: Puzzle
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Dingsda was a popular quiz show on German television running from the mid-80s to the end of the last millenium (in fact, it was only popular until the mid-90s, but it ran for another five years after that). The basic premise: two teams of TV 'celebrities' would compete in guessing words which were explained by kindergarten children.

Mr Creosote 1996
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Freeware
System: PC

My second text adventure. 'Flight 714 to Sydney' is a Tintin comic, and the game follows it pretty closely... until the second half which is pretty much skipped completely, because I didn't like all that alien stuff.

Sierra 1989
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Jerrod Wilson, a journalist living in 1848 Brooklyn, apparantely never got over 'losing' his brother Jake who was forced to leave town ten years ago. Now the protagonist receives a letter from this lost relative. Jake has found gold in California and he urges Jerrod to join him there. And it would be much of a game if Jerrod didn't go along with this...

True Emotions 1993
Genre: Sport
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Who does not know the classic shaking sports games on the C-64 or the Amiga? They were as good to get cramps as they were Joystick killers. But this game is different! It leaves out the hectic movement of the input device and replaces it with...NOTHING.

Electronic Arts 1993
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Warhammer and its spinoffs seems to be a very popular franchise. I even met a professor at university who professed his love for '40K' on his institute website right next to the list of scientific papers and books he had written and and who used pictures of 'hulks' as the screensaver of his laptop. My first contact with this 'universe' was actually the computer game Space Hulk, and that's the very game this review is about. What an amazing coincidence!

Tim Browse 2007
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Interpreter

There's this TV series called The IT Crowd. It's quite funny. Probably the best current series. It's about these two IT support people (Moss and Roy), their 'relationship manager' (Jen Barber) and (occasionally) other people from the company. The series sets are full of all this so-called geek stuff (posters, comicbooks, old computers,...) - and on the series 2 DVD, there was a hidden contest to find some hidden easter eggs. Some of these were hidden quite well (one, for example, involved recording and decoding a flickering bar code). One of these easter eggs turned out to be a little text adventure... which this review is about.

Michael Zerbo 1994
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 1/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Amiga

Michael Zerbo used to be one of the most infamous authors of 'adult' (meaning violence, not sex) interactive fiction. His games always had some sort of gruesome theme, and the solutions to his puzzles were often equally gruesome. He alienated the classic target audience by utilizing commands such as USE (a mortal sin in the IF scene), yet his games were huge hits as their download counts exceeded those of more 'accepted' authors by more than an order of magnitude at times. This went so far that he even released some of his games as Shareware, i.e. expecting to make money from them (more info on that in the final paragraph).