Worst feature - nothing dies

Owing to Disney's timely morality-steering interventions - specifically their animated musical fantasy film, Pocahontas - we've learnt that it's wrong to invade the land of indigenous American Indians, plunder their precious resources, and even annihilate them should they dare to object. Thanks Disney, I'll give that a miss in future then. Featuring the voices of Mel Gibson and Irene Bedard, it's very loosely based on the life story of the real Native American woman, Matoaka. By 'loosely' I mean it's about as accurate as Dumbo, seeing as the true story isn't especially palatable for young children, or in accordance with Disney's didactic diatribe.

In the same year (1995), an accompanying puzzley-platformer video game was commissioned by Disney, developed by Funcom for the SEGA Mega Drive, to hammer home the equality, peace, love and understanding message.

Is it possible to look beyond the preachy character-building manipulation to enjoy Pocahontas in either medium? And still emerge as a decent human being imbued with non-murderous, civilised values? Let's find out.

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In memory of Caprona

In 1988 Denton Designs made their Great Escape from 3D, isometric, arcade-adventure games... slamming down smack bang in the middle of a prehistoric lost world where ferocious dinosaurs stalk a Land That Time Forgot. It's an isometric, 3D, arcade-adventure game in which four hapless survivors of an aerial crashlanding must Escape from various perilous threats to their wellbeing and sanity.

'Where Time Stood Still' was published by Ocean and originally made available for the ZX Spectrum, DOS, and Atari ST. In 2014 the Atari ST port was reverse-engineered, allowing it to be enjoyed by Amiga users too.

However you experience it, Where Time Stood Still is an innovative and fun, yet traumatic ordeal that will have you running to Jurassic Park for rest bite. May as well review and trace its inspirational forebears then. Oh, look.

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I Know Kung-Faux

Contrary to common wisdom, you don't have to visit a parallel universe to witness Ted 'Theodore' Logan playing Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It truly-really-genuinely happened back in 1992 and performed pretty well at the box office. Produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola believe it or not.

A year later, Keanu was further immortalised in pixels courtesy of Psygnosis. First in a platform game for the SNES and SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis and once again in 1994, allowing Amiga owners to indulge their bloodlust too.

I gingerly crack open the musty crypt to take a peek at them all, paying special attention to the Amiga incarnation, linking its key elements to their movie-based corollaries.

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Might as well face it, you're addicted to spuds

Amiga public domain games generally had a reputation for embracing slap-dash, amateurish production values. Despite essentially being a Lemmings clone with bells on, Blobz by Apex Systems broke the mould upon release in 1996. It's faster and prettier than DMA Design's classic rodent-herding, genre-defining, head-mashing puzzler, but can it compete in the all-important gameplay stakes? I investigate...

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Angel of the City

Sylvester Stallone's maverick cop vs deranged Night Slasher flopbuster, Cobra, turned out to be one of the worst of his career. Ironically, the off-kilter platform game developed by Joffa Smith, published by Ocean, was considered one of the most technically brilliant for the underpowered ZX Spectrum upon release in 1986.

I give them both the once over, obviously through the lenses of my celebrity Ray-Ban 3030 Outdoorsman sunglasses, for good measure taking a quick sideways glance at the divergent, less loosely licenced ports for the Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64.

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