If, like me, you've always thought computer games were boring, ugly and two-dimensional, maybe you had hopes for the incoming wave of interactive CD-ROM games. Trouble is those few brave attempts so far are either excruciatingly slow or fail to perform satisfactorily as games.
But now there's Iron Helix. This game combines the real-time, gun-to- your-head urgency of an arcade game with the kind of grungy, claustrophobic superrealism that takes its visual cues from the malign universe of Alien. Think PacMan, only from the first-person point of view you associate with that masterpiece of cinematic horror.
When you home in on the Helix ghost ship - a giant interplanetary craft you navigate inside with a remote probe - you're instantly enmeshed in a cyberpunk nightmare where you're hunting, and hunted by, a killer "defender." Your mission is to obtain samples of DNA traces from the ship's missing crew which enable you to disarm your opponent or destroy it along with the renegade ship.
With its uncanny verisimilitude, ultrasophisticated scenario, suitably spooky original soundtrack, and stylish, quirkily dramatic video clips of the dead crew members' instructions, Helix is a stunner. It is also devilishly difficult to play. The creators of Helix have ingeniously manipulated the PC's limited memory capabilities, eliminating those characteristic file load delays that have become synonymous with CD-ROM titles to allow the game to be played at top speed - and that goes for a Mac color Classic as readily as a Quadra.
Iron Helix: $99.95. Spectrum HoloByte: (800) 695 4263, +1 (510) 522 3584.
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