Review: Amiga CD-Sensation: Golden Games

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         Review: Amiga CD-Sensation: Golden Games from Schatztruhe
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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...apparently, Gamer's Delight 1 and 2 wasn't enough.

Golden Games, the new CD from Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe, is the second
I've seen in their new "psuedo-magazine" packaging.  (The first was the
"Demos are Forever" CD.)  No jewel box, just an A4-sized cardboard "cover"
and information in English and German on the back about the CD.

The information pretty much tells you the obvious--there are a lot of games
on here.  Specifically, there are a lot of freely redistributable games and
demos, as well as the requisite group of degrading tools to make them all
work, and an extensive selection of hints.

Unlike Gamer's Delight 2, there is no custom GUI interface, only the
Workbench.  A set of icons will configure your system to the recommended
color and screenmode for browsing, and another click will set up various
assigns needed to allow the games to execute directly from CD.  The games
are divided into 12 major categories by type, with DMS'ed archives in their
own separate hierarchy.  (The majority, by far, of goodies on the CD are
unarchived and ready to go.)

The selection, like anything of this kind, is going to be largely hit and
miss, but overall I was fairly pleased.  I found a few more "instant
classics" and there are a number of my personal favorites on the CD.  I was
impressed with how much I could painlessly run off of the CD, although
programs that expect to save their prefs file to progdir: are always in for
a shock, which means a lot of clicking "cancel" for the user.  (Unless
you're smarter than I am and are running an assign-requester patch, in
which case it will be less of a nuisance.)

One of the things which caught me off guard was the lack of English
documentation for the CD other than the introduction on the back of the
packaging...the rest is German only.  It's nice to be able to read about
the compilation and any last-minute changes we might need to be aware of.
You can use the German guide to navigate (easily) to the master index of
games with documentation and click directly on the individual docs for each
game.

The categorization on the CD is overall a plus but I think a bit more
notice should be given for those items which are just game demos (lest
anybody get really excited when they see "Worms" and "Skidmarks 2" (both of
which appear in the "Great Action" section).

If I may digress for a minute, I've been having trouble sitting down with
the Amiga and having a genuinely good time lately...it's not a problem with
the Amiga, but with me, as all the work I've done on Amigas lately have
made me associate them with just that--work.  However, Golden Games has
given me a number of incentives to start treating the Amiga less as a "work
tool" and more like a computer that I genuinely enjoy using.  So, for that,
I am grateful.  If you're having a similar problem, it's going to be worth
the small fee to pick up a copy of this CD for yourself.

Published by Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
45131 Essen
Germany
WWW: http://www.schatztruhe.de/
E-mail: stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de

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