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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5216759" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 187: November 1992part 5/6The role of computers returns. This of course means the decision on what games to cover in their limited page count is an even trickier one than usual. This isn't helped by the fact that the number of games released continues to increase, and the cost of systems continues to decline. Before long, computer games'll be overtaking movies, books and music in terms of profitability. What then? A tricky question when this magazine is supposed to be primarily about tabletop RPG's. A-train is a rather challenging sim game of railroad management. Not too hard to start, but a real bitch to finish, especially as it isn't always easy to tell how near you are to failing. Expect to reload it quite a few times before you get good. Battletoads, of course, is renowned for being tricky but fun, and these reviewers hew to that conventional wisdom. Keep on trying, maybe you'll make it in the end. The four Crystals of Trazere gets middling marks. Overhead land adventuring, isometric dungeons, and the usual set of attributes, spells, treasure, etc. Just another party based computer RPG. King's Bounty loses marks for an annoying copy protection scheme and wonky controls, but other than that is a decent enough strategy/adventure game where you have to build troops, fight monsters and find the macguffin. The kind of thing that gives you lots of resource management choices, so you can experiment with playing it through in different ways. Super Space Invaders just gets poor marks because for all their gimmicky attempts to modernise it, it still feels stuck in the 70's. True nostalgics will probably prefer the actual original, and others might as well not bother. Ultima Underword: The Stygian Abyss gets our second ever 6 out of 5 result, putting it up with Wing Commander as a game that both lives up to it's predecessors and advances upon them in terms of visuals, challenges and control scheme. Just make sure you download the patch for your inventory so you can store enough items. Ahh, the joys of the internet. Letting coders get away with sloppiness after the fact. The marvel-phile: Looks like spiderman is once again suffering from foes that have complementary themed powers and work together to make best use of them. Deathweb, are a pair of gadgeteers and a mutant, all with varying spider themed abilities. This is obviously a bit embarrassing for your friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler, and the rest of the Avengers got involved in foiling them. They were eventually foiled, but they may well have achieved what they planned anyway, it's hard to tell. In any case, they're currently locked up, which means they can escape pretty much any time another plot has a use for them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Curiously, a quick googling reveals this isn't the case, and these guys have pretty much disappeared into obscurity. Hey, guess the system can work. It's only where celebrities are involved that it falls down, just like reality. Another fairly average entry in this department. The dragon's bestiary: Still just about in theme here, with two wilderness based monsters. Kruel are corrupted (and rather creepy looking) fae things that'd fit right into either of the World of darkness changeling games. They can shapeshift, but have a tell that gives them away, and some amusing quirks of behaviour and ecology. Halfway between raiding goblinoids & trickster fae in function, They're another one to give your low-mid level encounters a bit more variety. Pardal are another demonstration of Spike Y. Jones' talent for putting a new mythic spin on things. Big cats with hypnotic coats, they're actually comparatively weedy if you can shake off the hex and fight back against them, but if not, you'll be dinner. One that's a much bigger threat to small parties, as with any creature with a save or be temporarily incapacitated effect that then kills you while you're indisposed. They can also serve as magic item components or a pet for the more extravagant evil overlord, so there's plenty of reasons you could encounter one. Looks like he's still full of cool ideas. Troubleshooting your game: Another article born from the forum debates of late. They really do pay for themselves in terms of producing stuff tailored to the current issues that are important to gaming. In this case, it's keeping the game from falling apart under stress. Annoying players can kill things all too easily if you don't nip them in the bud. What are we to do. You can't kick out everyone who isn't exactly to your tastes, or before you know it there'll be no game left. But you do need to sort out the twinks, the party disruptors, and the people who act like idiots without expecting consequences. Yeah, this definitely feels like a forum letter bumped up to full article status, albeit deservingly. As this is one of those cases where it's not that the article is bad, it's just that the information in it feels very familiar, I shall just chalk my lack of enthusiasm up to my own jadedness. Not a lot I can do about that, as far as I can tell. Role-playing reviews: Shadowrun second edition is our only big review this month. As one of the biggest and most groundbreaking successes of recent years, they've decided it merits a little more attention than a cursory review. In fact, it's so popular it's seeing backlash from pretentious purists. You know an act has it made when that starts to happen. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Not that it isn't a mishmash of cool elements thrown together, but that's precisely why it's so successful. By blurring genres in a cool way, you can wind up picking up fans from both sides of the divide. Anyway, it seems that second edition couldn't come too soon, and has made significant improvements to the rules and visuals, while also moving the timeline along at the same rate as reality. It looks like you'll be having a good deal of fun with this, and isn't that more important than some kind of ideological purity. Course, they've also managed to put out a pretty decent number of supplements too, and these don't go unexamined. The adventures don't come off too kindly. Only a couple of years in, and they're either incredibly formulaic Mr Johnson betrays the party plots, or metaplot stuff which doesn't reveal even to the GM what's really going on, promising to deliver that info in future installments. This is very deserving of snark, and Allen delivers with panache. The character and location books come off rather better, even if hackers get the obligatory complaint about how using their niche disrupts everyone else's play. The problems of this system were obviously fully present and spotted by other designers right from the outset. Still, it'll give you plenty of time to figure out how to overcome them.</blockquote>

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