Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5043431" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 163: November 1990part 4/6The role of computers: Secret of the silver blades is another Forgotten Realms CRPG that sticks pretty close to the actual game rules. Once again, you can even bring in your characters from previous adventures. It doesn't get quite the high marks of Azure bonds, mainly due to the plot not being as good, but in terms of gameplay, it does make some improvements. Another one to help the Realms rise to eminence as THE AD&D game setting with the mass market penetration. Centurion: Defender of rome is one of those large scale tactical wargames where you get to build an empire from the top down. It has some control issues, and the fact that you have to prepare for events blind annoys the designers, but they still think it shows promise. The screenshot they have is certainly pretty amusing.  The keys to Maramon gets a rather mediocre review for not being sufficiently role-playey. False advertising, man. :shakes head: Dungeon Explorer is basically Gauntlet, only with up to 5 players, and a little more NPC interaction. This is a pretty good thing in the reviewer's mind, giving them an RPG'y fix without requiring days of grinding and regular saving and restarting to finish a game. The Revenge of Shinobi sees Sega sequelize to capitalize on the ongoing popularity of ninjas. Shuriken, double jumps, a special power you can only use once per life. This sounds very familiar indeed. I strongly suspect I may have wasted a load of money in an arcade on this one summer. Fiction: Storm Winter by M C Sumner. Yo. Y-Yo. Sentient reptile people with a dry sense of humour in da house, representing it northside. Some of us really want to rule the world, but I just want to be a captain of sail. They try sacrificing me to their cruel god, but I'll team up with a human girl. We'll avenge her father, foil necromantic slaughter, send them packing, and hide the macguffin. And that's enough bad rap-filk for quite a while. Still, this was another fairly enjoyable bit of fiction, with some rather good world-building for such a small amount of space. And it doesn't take itself too seriously either. They're keeping up the good performance in this area. The statement of ownership is in an odd place in the middle of the magazine this year, which means I missed it the first few times I looked through. Hmm. With an average of near 109 thousand, but a last issue number of only 103, it looks like they continued their slow rise early in the year, and then started declining in the last few months.  Interesting to note that the ratio of subscribers to newsstand buyers has increased quite a bit though. I wonder why. Perfectly normal fluctuations. Buck Rogers Play by Mail game? Talk about combining an out of date property with an out of date format. More excuses for Loraine (roll of thunder, stab of organ music) to siphon money out of the company. The marvel-phile has a lot of writers this month. This is probably because this is more leftovers from the new marvel handbook installment, and they can't remember who did which characters, or split the labor on each of them in some arcane way to make the production treadmill work faster. This time, it's a couple of cut villains, Nebulon and Solarr. A shapeshifting alien who tried to take over the world, and a mutant thug who absorbs energy from the sun, although not to ends as powerful and wide ranging as superman. Both are now dead, which may be a factor in their non-inclusion in the update. And It doesn't look like they've been brought back since either. Since I didn't find them very interesting to read about, I think they can stay in the dustbin of history where they were found. It's nice to see characters stay dead around here, ironically.</blockquote>

Verification