With any luck, I'll get it out of there in time to enter it into the TT. The subject is Hotel Dusk, and the verdict is significant disappointment.

Which seems to be perfectly in line with the reviews already up on the site, but it's just something that needs to be said.

Moraffware is responsible for quite a number of cute DOS era games, but foremost among them are a trio of dungeon hacks titled Moraff's Revenge, World and Dungeons of the Unforgiven respectively. Of these, Moraff's World was a major improvement over Revenge, having an entirely new game engine and lots of new options to play around with. Dungeons of the Unforgiven, on the other hand, takes the engine of World, throws only a few things around, and feels more like an elaborate mod than a brand new ...

In the early nineties, Moraffware was as ambitious as small developers could get. A bundle of titles were released in a fairly short time frame, all with free shareware versions to try out and the option to register to get a bigger and better version of the game. The help files associated with each game spoke of even bigger plans, including a movie and a rock band themed after said games. Neither of those have ever come about, but some of Steve Moraff's games of that age survive to have some mea...

Out of the three dungeon hacks that Moraffware released in the late eighties and early nineties, Moraff's Revenge is the first, has the most basic graphics, the least depth to its gameplay and the smallest scope - yet also the by far the biggest challenge. Nostalgia aside, Revenge is likely to be the least appealing choice out of the trilogy, unless you want to work for your victory, which the much more popular Moraff's World never really makes you do, and Dungeons of the Unforgiven only to an e...

Theatre Europe is a wargame simulating a not-so-peaceful end to the Cold War, namely a Soviet invasion of West Germany and beyond. Taking turns, the NATO and Warsaw Pact players move their armies across a map, attacking each other, with the Warsaw Pact's ultimate goal being the capture of Bonn and several other NATO cities whereas NATO must keep the Red Army at bay for a month. The game plays out as turn-based strategy and is regretfully for one player only, which means the other side will be co...

There are people who consider the idea of worms crawling around a maze trying hard to eat or be eaten quite revolting. Serpentine is not for them. For this is game that brings us to the bare basics of ''survival of the fittest'': you take control of a blue worm in a PacMan-like maze (minus the cute little edible dots), and as you enter each level, so do three big, hostile red worms. They will try to eat you, and your goal is to do the same to them. Eating enemies is done by nibbling away at thei...

One of my greatest irritations in gaming, right after online cheaters, inexplicable crashes and self-corrupting saved games, is slowdown. Or lag, as we call it on the internet. Whether caused by a slow connection or locally by video issues, there's nothing more effective in breaking a nice gaming experience than the game constantly s-l-o-w-i-n-g down. The music skips, the mouse movements become jerky, the CD drive spins up, and your teeth grit. There's nothing quite like it. Fortunately.

River Raid is a 1984 Activision game that is counted among the better shooters on the Commodore 64. After all these years it remains as a favorite of many stubborn Commodore gamers, and is among the first games mentioned when such veterans are asked which titles they remember most fondly. River Raid owes this remarkably popularity not to deep gameplay or stunning visuals - it has neither - but to being a simple, solid and lovable title that's easy to get into.

To the modern day gamer, the concept of the "text adventure" game genre may be difficult to understand. Without any graphics to go with, and with typed commands being the only way to communicate with the game, the genre will probably appear bland and boring to those who didn't experience it firsthand. Nonetheless, text adventures have been huge throughout the late seventies and early eighties, and Ring of Power is but one of many. Admittedly, it's not nearly the best one - certainly no competito...

Released by Epyx in 1984, Jumpman Junior is the sequel to the original Jumpman game, though especially on the Commodore 64, it is probably more famous than the original. The Commodore version is only slightly different than the Atari original from 1983, consisting of 12 levels rather than 15, but otherwise simply being a port of the same game. Jumpman Junior is an excellent platform game that would have certainly ranked with the best of the Commodore's games, but a multitude of bugs, including a...

Gamers are strange animals. A game may give us state-of-the-art graphics, an excellent soundtrack, lots of different options and whatever else we may be looking for, and we can still write it off as boring. Another game may look like nothing to the casual observer, but for some reason people fall completely in love with it. In the end, what matters is if a game is fun to play, and it is not always as easy to grasp why it is or why it isn't.