Stopped by the police, in Midtown Madness.
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One of the trickiest elements of MIDTOWN MADNESS is the city traffic. In the middle of some furiously competitive racing, you'll be swerving around ordinary vehicles obeying the signs and signals in their oh-so-mundane manner. If you can avoid your fellow drivers, you'll reduce the damage done to your own car, so expect to find yourself careening through parks and screaming down the sidewalks. You're allowed some collisions that would certainly be fatal in the non-virtual world, but eventually your vehicle shows real damage that impairs its speed and handling.

The constant mayhem, however frequent and unrealistically violent, is gore-free. Pedestrians are expert at diving out of your way or shrinking up against buildings when they have to. Crashes can involve many vehicles and they sound unnervingly realistic sometimes, but you won't see any bodies or blood. Like a Star Wars movie, the violence in this game is indeed frequent and anonymous, but it's also bloodless and nonrealistic.

You can race other cars in a checkpoint challenge, run your fastest laps in a circuit race, blitz through checkpoints against the clock, or just go out for a leisurely, noncompetitive cruise through the city. Multi-player games can be cruises or races too, and there are even a few ways to play "gold bar" scenarios-Drive the gold bar to your headquarters before somebody rams you and takes it away. If you like using the Microsoft Gaming Zone, finding opponents is usually very easy.

Your cars vary a bit too, from the nimble Volkswagen New Beetle to the city bus, with a Ford Mustang police car and a Ford F-350 Super Duty in between. Some of the vehicles can only be accessed after winning certain races.

It's a silly blast of fun for quite a while, notably with good force feedback support, but before too many hours whip past you, you'll begin to wish for broader horizons. If ever a game cried out for add-on packs, this one is it. I'm sure if more cities and vehicles are pressed onto a CD, there will be a line of us MIDTOWN MADNESS players waiting to buy it. Just don't drive ahead of one of us on the way out of the computer store parking lot.

This game might turn your PC into roadkill unless it meets the following minimum requirements: Multimedia PC with Pentium 166 Mhz or a Pentium 133 with a 4 Mb 3D accelerator, Windows 95 or 98, 32 Mb of RAM, 300 Mb of available hard drive space, double-speed (2X) CD-ROM drive (4X recommended), super VGA 16-bit color monitor, Microsoft mouse or compatible pointing device (DirectX-compatible joystick or steering wheel recommended), and a DirectSound 6.0-compatible sound card. There are additional hardware requirements for multi-player racing; see the bottom of the MIDTOWN MADNESS box for details.
Grade: A-

The third LANDS OF LORE outing sports an updated graphics engine, including native support for Voodoo and Voodoo2 3Dfx chipsets. The interface is again like a 3D first-person shooter, with added features related to your inventory, spells, recorded conversations, etc. I really would recommend a good video card for this game. I played it for a week on one PC in which the murky graphics seemed to be hiding all the visual cues. Getting my hands on a Voodoo2-equipped system this month made such a startling visual difference, I could not resist starting my game over.

Another new feature with this installment eliminates a complaint of LANDS OF LORE II, in which you were forced to play as a single, specific character-How un-RPG! In LANDS III, you are stuck with the role of Copper LeGre, a lad who's got the unenviable task of recovering his own stolen soul. To give you some role-playing flexibility, early in the game you may select one of four guilds to join to emphasize particular skills (and fulfill some sub-quests). The four guilds are Cleric, Fighter, Magician, and Thief.

Another worthwhile new feature is the "familiar," who adds to your party of one after you join a guild. If you join the Thieves' Guild, for example, your familiar is a slippery little creature named Syruss who is good at lock-picking. Familiars can help attack bad guys, and they have a range of assorted tasks that make them worth having around; for example, Syruss also likes to find melee weapons, and he can cast a "poison shield" on you. Nice to have somebody right there, playing along with you.

There's a lot to like about LANDS OF LORE III, including a great deal of exploring in a reasonably interesting kingdom. I was most impressed with the various ways this game tries to be helpful to the player. For example, you're armed with a journal that records recent conversations, explains objects and creatures you'll find along the way, and maps your travels (with handy annotation tacks should you choose to use them). When your journal auto-records a new fact about an object, for example, the journal sparkles to let you know there's new knowledge within, and that object's picture glows to let you know where you can read what's been learned. Remember when adventure and RPG players used to have to keep extensive notes and maps ... on paper? I don't miss it.

With all this RPG-lite fun crammed onto four CDs, you'd expect LANDS OF LORE III to hit some brilliant high notes once in a while, but those memorable moments are fewer than expected, and instead Westwood has let this game lapse into cheese and mediocrity. You'll note the distinct cheesiness of the forest environment, where the bushes look like the painted walls of a room (See also LucasArts' STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE), and, for whatever reason, there's a canopy of some low-res substance draped across the tops of the trees. As for mediocrity, the quality of both the voice-acting and the writing vary a little too much, but they never really produce excitement; it's as if one layer of final polishing was missing inspiration.

The graphics engine, mentioned above as an immediate improvement over its predecessor, is still clearly outdated. It gets the job done, and in many cases looks great, but I couldn't help but think, "This should look better," in so many other instances. Alternatively, if we're going to stick with a graphics system that's below state-of-the-art, there should be some payoff in terms of faster load times or spectacular animation fluidity. There's not.

To revisit the LANDS OF LORE, your PC should meet or exceed these minimum requirements: Windows 95/98 or Windows NT 4.0, Pentium 166 CPU, 32 Mb of RAM, 450 Mb of hard drive space, quad-speed (4X) CD-ROM drive, 16-bit DirectSound compatible sound card, DirectX 6.0 compatible video card with 1 Mb of video RAM (2 Mb recommended), and a Microsoft compatible mouse and mouse driver.
Overall grade: B-

Lighter Blue: Mini-Reviews

I could try and explain all the technical gaga about TOP SHOT, from Head Games, tell you about how it plays and describe the scenery and how the interface makes one feel, but I think I have a better idea. Instead I will tell you how to feel as if you are actually playing TOP SHOT without buying the game!

	Skeet shooting in Top Shot.
Click on the thumbnail for full image. (95K)

Go to a hobby shop and buy a plastic soldier and any enemy of your choosing (monster, demon, Republican-whatever you like). Now put the two pieces on a table, gather a bunch of rubber bands, choose a side, and plink at the other piece until you knock it down and your side wins.

Hey! It is kind of fun isn't it? (Keep playing.) By now you are remembering your childhood, huh? (Keep playing.) All of a sudden you're wondering why in the world you are playing this game, aren't you? There! That's TOP SHOT!

This game comes with all the flash and flair of a game like DUCK HUNT or PONG. The only possible use for it is, perhaps if you are a parent who does not want to let your kids play the violent stuff, you may be able to pacify them a bit with a game where they get to shoot but nothing dies. It is not that it is such a bad game, it is just so extremely out of date!
Grade: I give it a C-

Star Wars movie buffs will undoubtedly be pleased that LucasArts has extended their "behind the scenes" software with a title devoted to the latest film, EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. This is a fun, electronic encyclopedia on two CDs, devoted to all kinds of tidbits surrounding the world of THE PHANTOM MENACE. It includes a scene-by-scene screenplay browser that links to stills and trivia from the movie, behind-the-scenes interviews with many people involved in the film, descriptions and photos of people and objects within the worlds of THE PHANTOM MENACE, an extensive glossary, trivia questions, theatrical trailers and audio clips, etc.

	The vehicles of Star Wars: Episode I, in Insider's Guide.
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Compared to the STAR WARS: BEHIND THE MAGIC title that was devoted to the earlier three Star Wars films, the little extra humorous touches aren't nearly as clever this time around. Well, if you're not among the "Kill Jar-Jar" contingent, it's still only mildly amusing to watch him fall into little slapstick situations in Watto's junkyard. Apart from the weakened sense of humor, this EPISODE I INSIDER'S GUIDE matches the contours of its earlier companion piece.

I was disappointed to see that INSIDER'S GUIDE didn't include the video mini-documentaries that Lynne Hale shot and made available on the official Star Wars Web site. These were quite good, and I'd rather not have to see them over the Web. Well, they'd still be a nice feature to add to the DVD release of Phantom Menace (the movie). My own little disappointments aside, these two discs are packed with pleasurable browsing and presented with multimedia flair for a fan of the movie or of moviemaking.
Grade: B+.

It was a real shame we didn't get a quicker jump on HALF-LIFE, which was fermenting beneath the Grievously Overdue Software Reviews Pile. This first-person 3D action shooter is perhaps the finest descendant of DOOM to date, leaping to the top of many "Best Game of the Year" lists upon its arrival late in 1998, and some of those reviewers may have even been referring to 1999. It deserves its status as an instant classic. Its story, about monsters entering a high-tech physics facility through a dimensional rift, puts you in between the evil creatures and the military teams sent in to "clean things up."

Developers at Valve built a beautifully modeled environment on top of the QUAKE engine, providing colorful environments, expert level design, great monsters and sounds, and then some features that made HALF-LIFE better than anything in its genre. Levels are loaded piecemeal, introducing smallish delays within missions but eliminating the usual lengthy load times between levels. HALF-LIFE also makes great use of scripted events, where your presence or progress triggers actions or events that, used this extensively and cleverly, bring the whole show to life. You feel like the story is unfolding around you, and there's a recurring element of surprise.

	Here come those Half-Life military guys...
Click on the thumbnail for full image. (24K)

HALF-LIFE brings all its elements together beautifully. Clearly its developers spent some time getting everything right, and its myriad elements work together to create a rich work of entertainment. Play this one with the lights out, and you're bound to yell sooner or later. Watch (eagerly) for the add-ons, and a sequel.
Grade: A