Game On 03/90

Cover
In the distant future, dinosaurs will roam the Earth again, and mankind will celebrate their return by using them as race animals. Because that's just how we roll.

It's not hard to guess that this cover relates to the game called Dinorace 64, even though it isn't a very accurate depiction. The artist was probably told that Dinorace 64 is a game about racing dinosaurs, but nobody clarified that the prehistoric lizards compete in an individual time trial and run without riders. Inadvertently, this resulted in a cover where the subject matter was presented in a cooler way than how it actually looked in the game.

As with previous covers, the perspective doesn't quite work. The lizard in the back was probably intended to seem further away from the camera. Instead, it just looks like a smaller dinosaur with an equally smaller jockey is overtaking the larger one. Also, the front dinosaur's right leg kind of freaks me out, as its upper thigh seems to go right up to the lizard's arms without any torso in between. Try to imagine how the dinosaur would look like half a second later when the position of its legs would be reversed.

I like how the race is shown to take place on a circular race track in a huge, well-attended stadium. There are even some birds in the background, which I assume are doves the organizers released during the opening ceremony. Let's hope there isn't a huge open fire nearby where half of them get roasted to a crisp, like what happened at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.

Last but not least, I have to commend the artist for their decision to have the dinosaurs run from right to left, which isn't something you see very often in western illustrations.


Cover Lines
This time, everything that is advertised on the cover is also found on the disk. Compared to the disaster that was the previous issue, this is already an improvement.

• Anti wants you to defend a city against a hail of missiles, according to this cover line. Since you are defending a nuclear reactor instead, I'd hazard a guess that whoever wrote this line probably didn't play the game.
• Dinorace 64 is simply described as a funny dinosaur race, which is perfectly accurate. Huh, it's almost unusual when a game doesn't get massively oversold on the cover.
• Elec-Tron is touted as a deadly duel on motorbikes. It's the light cycle race from the Tron movie but done with kiddie karts that don't look like motorbikes at all. The game uses a split-screen (even in single player mode) that is so horribly narrow that you'll constantly crash into walls.

Magazine

The intro picture is a bit of a puzzle: Why is there a demon with its head stuck in a stone ring? The hole is barely large enough for the monster's neck to fit through, so how did it manage to squeeze its angular head and massive jaw through the opening? Can it actually close its mouth with teeth like that? Is this some kind of punishment for demons that aren't demonic enough? Why is the GAME part of the logo hanging out on a chain ladder?


Articles

• The introduction article suggests to the readers to try out some simple hardware projects that connect to the C64's user port. The author mentions examples like a timer for watering plants or a controller for a laser show. The latter sounds like a cool idea for a SID music visualizer, and sure enough, there are many videos of such projects to be found on YouTube. Here's one:
• Several people in the reader mail section complain about Magic News, the cracker scene diskmag found on the last couple of Game On issues. Surprisingly, their problem has nothing to do with the (mostly) illegal subject matter discussed in the diskmag's articles. No, the readers ask why Magic News is written in English and not in German. The letters editor doesn't give a straight answer and instead goes into full grumpy old man mode, lamenting the trend that everything has to be in English nowadays. It's apparently too foreign of a concept that a diskmag reporting about international scene news might be read by, you know, an international audience.
• The highest rated (full price) game in the reviews section is System 3's Myth which gets a perfect 10 out of 10.

Notable Games
Anti
Dinorace


Summary
Game On 03/90 is a step up from the previous issue, but not by much. Dinorace is the best game on the disk, in my opinion, even though one playthrough only takes about twenty seconds. Anti isn't much better in the longevity department but for different reasons: The game is so difficult that I can hardly survive for longer than two minutes. I didn't review Elect-Tron because it is mainly a two-player game, and I wouldn't want to force anyone else to waste their time playing this thing.

I still get the impression that CP Verlag had trouble finding quality games for this magazine at the time. If I compare Game On 03/90 directly to the Magic Disk 64 issue of the same month, there is a pretty stark difference in games quality. The software acquisition department would eventually get the hang of it, but there are still some decidedly mediocre issues to go.