99 Action & Arcade

The Good
There's not a lot to like here. It really is a super budget game that fails to deliver in just about every department. The best I can say is that this is not a bundle of old shareware games that have been recycled and repackaged. They are 'original' games and they have a consistent style as though they have been developed by the same person/team.

The Bad
Where to start! How about starting with the name. Notice it is called '99 Action & Acrade' on the front of the inlay. It only says '99 games' in the text on the back. Clearly the buyer is expected to think there are 99 games in this package when there are really ten games and one hundred levels.

Sound: When I tried this game, and I tried three different setups, I got no sound at all. To be absolutely fair this may be because none of my systems support the OpenAL sound system used here, I just don't know. I tried to get the Vivaldi to play in a standard CD player and that didn't work either.

Gameplay: I have several gripes about the games themselves but the biggest and most damning of all is that they are so boring. It's as though the games have been designed and developed by a committee who'd once looked at a game over someone's shoulder. They've completely missed the point - games are supposed to be fun.
Here they seem to have worked to a checklist of features that successful games have. So, yes this package has tanks, it has aliens and space ships, you can blow things up, and there are lots of levels but they're all boring. The only way the developers had to make the game challenging is to make the enemies harder to kill and that failed, I committed suicide just to end the game because I could not be bothered to play through to the end of another thirty minute level.

Quality: Elementary mistakes have been made. I didn't go looking for mistakes but these are the ones I can remember noticing while I played the game(s).

• In Tank Battles & Tank Duel it's possible to drive out of the game area into a featureless blue void.
• Other games end when the player has minus one lives.
• Immortality in one game is Unmortal in another.
• Even the keep case inlay is inaccurate, it says "20+GB HD" which to me means the game unpacks into twenty gigabytes on the hard drive. One of my favourite games, Fallout 3, only takes up 8.8GB and that's the game of the year edition with add-ons. This game actually installs into 246Mb which is around 1% of the stated requirement

Then there's the lack of any form of high score table. In this kind of casual game I need to know what I scored or how long I lasted so that I have something I can try to beat. Not to include such a feature for me really kills any replayability, I mean what's the point of getting a high score if it's not recorded!


The Bottom Line
Poor quality, boring, and no fun at all. I'm not in the least surprised to find that there are no credits on the CD.
Probably to be expected of a game that makes having forty minutes of royalty free classical music a big, front of case, selling point.