Golden Disk 64 09/90

Cover
Do you like adventure movies? Do you like Indiana Jones? If so, we've got him, or at least some other guy dressed up very much like him, right here on the cover! He's just found the treasures hidden within the walls of some ancient king's tomb, and, judging by his dumbfounded stare, he's also discovered that he is being filmed.

Of the three games on this issue's disk, the cover is clearly referencing Gordian Tomb, even though the burial chamber depicted here looks decidedly Egyptian. There is also a mummy emerging from its sarcophagus, but the game does not feature any bandaged tomb-dwellers. Furthermore, if you're hoping to play a whip swinging and gun-toting archaeologist, you'll inevitably be disappointed to find that Gordian Tomb's protagonist is a slight, unarmed guy wearing a sombrero.

I could be generous and call the apparent lack of common vanishing points in this picture an intentional depiction of non-Euclidean geometry to make the tomb feel unsettling and wrong. Alternatively, I could just assume the more probable case, namely that the artist either didn't much care for or wasn't very good at drawing stuff in proper perspective.

As it is usually the case, the cover image is not meant to be an accurate representation of the title it's referencing, as it was probably created long before there even was a playable version of the game.

Compared to the previous issue, the Golden Disk logo underwent a slight facelift: It's still shiny, but it now has horizontal metal gradients in the style of those chrome text effects prevalent in the 80s. The label of the disk was changed from the English NEW to the German NEU, which I find kind of amusing. I imagine someone working at CP Verlag complained about there being too many English words on the cover.

Despite its somewhat amateurish look, I remember liking this cover image when I saw the magazine at the local kiosk. The promise of a treasure hunt inside a tomb was tantalizing enough that I forked over the 20 bucks, which was a hefty sum for a twelve-year-old. In the top right corner, you can see a scan of that very issue with literally decades of smudges and scratches all over it. Click on it for a larger and potentially more disgusting view.


Games
Crystal Fever
Tower of Terror
Gordian Tomb


Summary
This is probably one of my favorite Golden Disk 64 issues. I say probably because I had problems with two of the games which caused me a considerable amount of frustration: Crystal Fever had a semi-regular bug that made all the crystals explode when a level started. I usually had to load the game several times, and eventually, I'd get lucky and the bug would not be present for whatever reason. Tower of Terror didn't have a bug, but a certain spot in the third level required such an outlandish way of jumping that it took me years until I stumbled over the solution. And when I did, I felt like giving the level designer a good strangling.

Gordian Tomb is certainly the game I remember most fondly. I was immediately fascinated by the combination of colorful, well-drawn graphics and SID music of epic proportions. The entire game still conveys a unique atmosphere to me that I find hard to describe. The action adventure gameplay is not amazingly special, but when I recently replayed the game to write an article about it, I still found myself enjoying the experience.

In closing, I recommend giving all three games a try. Each of them has something unique to offer, like a level editor (Crystal Fever), a fantastic 32 minutes soundtrack (Gordian Tomb), or a bizarre menagerie of monsters (Tower of Terror).