INNOCENT UNTIL CAUGHT 2: GUILTY

The crude grifter Jack T. Ladd returns for another space adventure. This time he's Guilty! Released in 1995, this sequel to Divide By Zero's Innocent Until Caught adds an unwitting companion by the name of Ysanne Andropath: Space Cop. Does this extra playable character add to the experience or just Jack's innate sexism?

LOTUS ESPRIT TURBO CHALLENGE TRILOGY

In the age before polygons were able to give us fully realised environments, I wasn't too keen on the racing genre. Back then, I felt the limitations of 2D weren't able to adequately recreate the sensation of driving a car, at least not in games that positioned the camera behind the vehicle instead of a top-down viewpoint. The one exception (at least in my collection) was Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.

DISNEY MINI-GAMES

   

Disney were incredibly prolific in the 90s with their computer edutainment titles. Most followed a pre-set theme such as the Animated Storybooks, Activity Centres or Print Sudios but there were a few titles that stood on their own. Be Our Guest, Timon & Pumbaa's Jungle Games and Topsy Turvy Games compiled a collection of 5 mini-games each and tied them to a Disney animated classic (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame respectively).

NOIR: A SHADOWY THRILLER

Cyberdreams continuing ethos of publishing games with the clear voice of a named artist behind them was an admirable - if short-lived - one. In their fifth and final game released in 1996 a director by the name of Jeff Blyth joined the development crew of TSi to create Noir: A Shadowy Thriller. While his work isn't as well-known as H.R.Giger's alien landscapes or Harlan Ellison's sci-fi stories, he has had an interesting and rather unorthodox film career.

THE GODFATHER: THE ACTION GAME

Today is Oscar day. I'll be staying up 'til 6 AM to see if La La Land or Moonlight gets the golden statuette (edit: turns out it was a bit of both!) but 44 years ago arguably the 'Best Film of All Time' won; The Godfather. But we're not here to talk about that. We're here to shoot some gangsters in the 1991 video game adaptation by US Gold.

CRITICAL PATH

In 1993 FMV was the future of gaming. Back then any attempt at a cut scene was jaw-dropping but to include actual actors was something else. The problem was that a video stream didn't allow for much in the way of interaction so way before the decade was up the fad died with a reputation as bad as a Pauly Shore movie. Critical Path, according to PC Gamer, was not just one of the worst of its genre but the 9th worst PC Game of all time! Is that dubious honour really justified?

HARDLINE

As someone who proudly calls himself a movie-nerd along with retro-gamer, I find the FMV craze of the mid-90s to be extremely fascinating. The data storage of CD-ROMs allowed for compressed video files to be part of the narrative. Many failed, falling into the trappings B-movies had learned to stay well away from but others had Hollywood in their sights. In 1996, Cryo Interactive took on an ambitious project called Hardline, a bombastic on-rails shooter with minor adventure elements that boasted over 2 hours of footage and 200 special effects.