Monthly Archives: October 1998
Gremlin – Actua Tennis
One of the first games ever to appear on a computer screen was Pong, a version of table tennis with two bats, a square ball and severely limited graphics. It was pretty dire, but since nobody at the time had ever heard of motion capture or texture mapping, they all blithely carried on and had…
Rocky Mountain Traders – CD Repair Kit
When CDs were first invented, Tomorrow’s World ran a feature showing how tough they were. You could stamp on them, scratch them and even use them as frisbees, but you couldn’t damage the audio tracks stored on them. Unfortunately, this information turned out to be totally false. CDs, and therefore CDROMs, are actually very delicate…
Panasonic – ToughBook 71
The adjective ‘sexy’ is usually reserved for supermodels, film stars and, occasionally, cars. To call a notebook sexy is, you’d have thought, taking things a little too far. But then, this is no ordinary notebook. The Panasonic ToughBook 71 has been designed to be a little more durable than the average plastic laptop. Intended for…
Interactive Magic – Vangers; One for the Road
According to the blurb that comes with this game, “By the end of the 20th century, people finally united scientific and esoteric knowledge, which had long been separate and antagonistic. It was the achievement of some Spirits who got in a transcendental contact with some powers resembling Infinite Mind”. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? This is obviously not going…
Xoom Internet – Web Site Templates 250
The Internet may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but UK companies are lagging far behind their trans-Atlantic counterparts when it comes to actually making commercial profit from the newest advertising and marketing medium. Large and even medium-sized companies may well have a Web presence, but the smaller operations are conspicuous by their absence….
Techworks – Power 3D2
The 3Dfx Voodoo2 chipset has proved to be one of the fastest 3D graphics solutions for PC gamers, and is supported by a large number of 3D games. The trouble is, compared with some competing technologies, the Voodoo2 chipset is a complicated beast, with three separate graphics processors not to mention plenty of memory chips….
Team17 – Nightlong; Union City Conspiracy
‘Graphical adventure’ was a description that came back to haunt many games developers in the early years of multimedia, since it almost always meant a sad, clunky excuse for a game with lots of poor quality video footage connected together with the gaming equivalent of bits of string and Sellotape. But there have been one…
PowerQuest – PartitionMagic 4.0
Autumn is, apparently, the time for the launch of new hard drive partitioning tools. We’ve had Partition Commander (reviewed on this site) and now it’s time for the latest version of PartitionMagic. This is the program that made partition management popular – nay, practical – on the PC. Before it, apart from a couple of…
In Focus – LP425
Weighing a tad over 3kg, this is just about as portable as projectors get. The In Focus LP425 is a compact portable projector that can be used to display PC graphics, as well as S-video and composite video if required. It also has sockets for PC audio, although the built-in speaker won’t be of too…
Acclaim – WWF Warzone
Wrestling. Not really the most British of pastimes, is it? Mention wrestling in this country and an image of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks bouncing off each other’s guts springs to mind. In those old enough to remember, at any rate. But across the pond it’s a different matter, with various ridiculously-named large blokes in…