OS/2 e-Zine! - Games for OS/2

Games for OS/2 - Introduction - by Chris Wenham

Like an exercise in Ying and Yang, we decided that if our last issue's focus was about something boring and necessary like command line shells, then this week's issue should balance it out by focusing on something exciting and completely unnecessary: Video games.

OS/2 is not known for its active games market, in fact the release of new titles for Warp has dropped off considerably as the ranks of OS/2 users metamorph into business users, technicians and the more practical minded set. But even they can't all be stuffy and left-brained all the time, there has to be some room to flex the trigger finger...

In this issue we cover three of the newest OS/2 game releases, each appealing to a progressively more mature age group. Starting with Drilling Billy, an arcade game suitable for pre-schoolers but curiously appealing to grown-ups too. Colin Hildinger comes back briefly to write for us again and talk about the game with spit-polished graphics and sound, but a slightly shaky OS/2 port.

Next comes Galactic Civilizations Gold, a strategy game that concludes the three-part saga of Galactic Civilizations which established itself is the classic OS/2 game, and took Stardock with it to fame as one of the leading OS/2 software vendors. Lief Clennon explores the uncharted sectors again and discusses what's new in this sequel.

Lastly is Hopkins:FBI, a highly anticipated role playing game from PolyEx - a company which has also brought us Vigilance on Talos IV and the Wordup Graphics Toolkit. Hopkins:FBI is clearly for the more mature audience, as it features a high degree of blood, gore and violent animation. Dr. Dirk Terrell took the tranquilizers this time and explains what makes Hopkins:FBI so compelling.

Games Rating System

Making a debut in this issue of OS/2 e-Zine! is our new product rating system, which separately scores games, applications and hardware on four different factors. Scores range from 1 to 5, with 1 being worst and 5 being the best. For games, these factors and some examples of what the scores mean are:

Playability - How fun and addictive was it to play the game? 1: A dismally boring game. 5: A real killer experience.
Polish - How well finished was the game? 1: Buggy, unfinished, and my cat could draw better graphics. 5: Seamless perfection.
Multimedia - How much video and sound was used? 1: This is a character-mode game with no graphics. 5: Is this a game or an interactive movie?
OS/2 Leverage - Does the game take advantage of OS/2 technologies like DIVE/DART and multithreading etc.? 1: It's a DOS port that doesn't even use long filenames. 5: It was born on OS/2, you couldn't port it to another operating system if you tried.

These scores are then averaged to give an Overall Rating.