Tiger Game.com Reviews I-R

At first glance Indy 500 looks positively kick-ass! Your racing car is huge and well defined on the bottom of the screen. It looks like it was drawn by an artist with a pencil. The road is bright and wide open. Then you hit the accelerator and the cold, hard reality sets in.

First you find yourself slamming into walls you can't see coming. The trick here is to keep an eye out for arrows that appear in the upper right corner of the screen. Hold left when they appear, go easy on the gas, and you'll probably make the turn.

When jockeying for position the collision detection is highly suspect. Sometimes it appears you're overlapping another car, and often your car spins out for no apparent reason. When you hit a puddle, the impact is like hitting a brick wall!

The flashing word "damage" means you need to pull into the pit stop. This presents you with a separate view of ghostly men who appear around your car before vanishing into thin air.

Once you get the hang of turning and pitting, you might be able to hold your own against the 33-car field. The race is initially set for eight minutes, but periodically you get a "time extended" message. No thanks!! Indy 500 is only marginally playable, and it tends to drag on forever. © Copyright 2013 The Video Game Critic.

It's the worst game show video game I've ever played. [Buzz!] What is Jeopardy? What a disappointment! After Wheel of Fortune (Tiger, 1997) turned out so well, I expected Jeopardy to be a slam-dunk! After all, it's a better game show right? Not on this system it's not!

This poorly-designed title is bogged down by endless waiting and a tedious interface. You and two CPU contestants select from a grid of topics like famous poets, US Presidents, and ambiguous categories like "a stone's throw". When a question is displayed you "buzz in" if you know the answer. Beat your virtual opponents to the punch and you're prompted to enter an answer via a miniature keyboard interface.

Knowing the answer isn't good enough; you need to spell the thing correctly! That's kind of a big deal considering topics deal with historical figures and ancient civilizations. The questions are extremely hard and if nobody "buzzes in" you'll need to wait an eternity before the question finally "times out".

Host Alex Trebek isn't much of a presence and the digitized voice sounds nothing like him. I can't stand playing this game - it's torture. Instead of testing your knowledge, Jeopardy tests your threshold for pain and misery. © Copyright 2014 The Video Game Critic.

This ill-advised movie adaptation is visually impressive but languishes in the control department. The Lost World begins with a high-speed driving stage that lets you weave around a stampede of dinosaurs. You view the action from behind your vehicle and the illusion of movement isn't bad. There's a decent sense of speed and the marauding creatures look great. Unfortunately it's hard to tell where you're supposed to go with so many dinosaurs, bushes, and other hazards cropping up all over the place. When my car blinks, does that mean I'm taking damage?

The second stage is a typical platform stage boasting lush jungle foliage and lumbering dinosaurs in the background. That's great, but I wish the developers had paid a little more attention to what happens in the foreground! Your scientist is extremely stiff and the animation is comparable to flipping the pages of a book.

Dinosaurs blend into the scenery, and when you finally spot one unresponsive controls make it hard to react in time. Even if you manage to shoot a dinosaur with your tranquilizer gun, the effect wears off in about ten seconds. Leaping between branches is an exercise in futility, especially when your character tends to change direction in mid-air.

The audio effects may be the best part of the game, as the dinosaurs unleash digitized screeches, grunts, and roars. The background music on the other hand sounds like a toddler banging away on a Casio keyboard. It's pretty obvious that the Jurassic Park developers focused their attention on the graphics, leaving us with a showcase title that's a constant struggle to play. © Copyright 2014 The Video Game Critic.

I've finally reached the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Game.com titles - or at least one would hope! I have to say, it's getting really hard to stomach. When you turn on Lights Out the intro music sounds like a squeaking wheel of a grocery store cart. So annoying.

The playfield consists of a 6x6 grid of black and white tiles. You touch one and it "flips" the color of the four around it. You "win" by filling the whole board with black squares. The regular mode offers a predefined series of puzzles, and the first dozen or so were so painfully obvious I had to quit out of it. You'd expect the random mode to be more interesting, but the game is just flat-out mind numbing.

While tapping on the screen I felt like one of those zombie housewives playing Candy Crush on their smartphones. The difference is, I wasn't having a good time. Lights Out is a throw-away title that might have been justifiable as a built-in game. As it stands, this cartridge should only appeal to completists, if that. © Copyright 2018 The Video Game Critic.

This Game.com version of Mortal Kombat is so bad, even Scorpion and Sub Zero refused to have anything to do with it! Only characters desperate for work showed up for this one, like Night Wolf, Ermac, Jade, Rain, Cyrax, Sector, and Noob Saibot. The fighters look small and shadowy, and the busy stages make it hard to tell what's happening in the foreground.

The bright street stage isn't so bad, but in the dungeon stage the characters blend into the rock walls. The four buttons let you execute high punches, high kicks, blocks, and low kicks. The fighting is very shallow, and the bizarre physics makes for some unnatural looking jumps. It's easy to get the fighters mixed up, and it's generally hard to tell who's hurting who.

A lot of sound effects are missing, and the matches tend to be quiet aside from the hit and yelp effects. The blood is hard to make out, and looks more like splotches of black ink. This edition of Mortal Kombat Trilogy is so bad it makes me not want to rip out somebody's spine. Now that's bad! © Copyright 2013 The Video Game Critic.

A 3D survival horror title is a tall order for the Game.com, but this turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a simple side-scroller, but this is a full-blown 3D adventure. It turns out that Resident Evil's slow, deliberate pace is a perfect match for a system that tends to run games at a slow, deliberate pace. You begin on a city street with a few staggering zombies nearby.

Unlike the console versions, the camera is fixed and usually provides a side angle. The characters scale nicely and the depth perception isn't bad. Walking around is slow going (especially when you're injured) but the locations are reasonably small. One thing I do hate is when you walk onto a new screen and discover you're standing right next to a zombie! You don't have time to react and usually take some mandatory damage.

The status screen comes complete with inventory controls, a map, and a health meter. Switching weapons is confusing but I got the hang of it. The map is critical because the scenery tends to be very faint. This makes the characters stand out, but makes it hard to locate doors in the background.

The monsters look sharp and digitized sound effects feature realistic groans and voice samples. And yes, the game includes a save function. I can't imagine sticking this one out to the bitter end, but it's interesting to see how Resident Evil 2 was effectively revamped to fit this system. © Copyright 2013 The Video Game Critic.