Games section

6. Review: Wasted Dreams

There was nearly no other Amiga games, that was waited for as it was with Wasted Drams, which problems you all could read in the last editions of AMIGA aktuell international. The happier I was, when Wasted Dreams was in my letter box. How else could it be, that Wasted Dreams is shipped in the standard CD case. In addition to the CD-ROM you find a booklet in the inlay of the CD case, which explains the game in English. Manuals in other languages can be found as texts on the CD-ROM. There are 16 languages supported, also German, of course.

The story of the game is quite extensinve and can be read on the CD-ROM in any of the supported languages. I make it short for you: The two soldiers Johanson (the main character) and Harper participate with the ExplorerFX2 mission, which was started to find a replacement for the 'dying' Earth. After some time you find a suitable planet: Agillera. The planet has been found ideal, because there were no forms of intelligent life, only evidences for an existence a long time ago. Due to a missing radio contact between Earth and Agillera 80% of the crew, which also includes the two heroes, decide to return to Earth to tell the good news. After the start, nearly the complete crew is killed. But the hero Johanson survives the explosions and finds himself near the destroyed spaceship. His collegue Harper survives the crash only in the 2 player mode :-)

Wasted Dreams does not have to be installed on the hard disk, it can be played directly from the CD-ROM. On the CD-ROM there are two different starting possibilities: Wasted Dreams with or without intro. In addition there are the manuals in any language present, within an extra directory. But I was not able to watch the intro, because there has to be enough Chip-RAM to show it. This should really be present, because I used a minimum Workbench and approx. 1.95 MB of 2 MB were free. According to the game there was not enough memory for the voice output, too. So it does not matter, on which icon I click, I always get into the game directly.

The game can be played by two players as well as by 1 player. In the two-player-mode you can play as opponents or as team. You can control the game by joystick or keyboard, but even with the joystick selected you have to use the keyboard from time to time. In the option menu you can adjust the language to use as well as various other things. The animation of the characters is quite smooth and includes many unique frames. The graphics are also fine, if you consider, that they just use ECS. Wasted Dreams plays fine, if you get use to the a bit complicated controls. The game makes it easy for you: So it automatically shows an icon, if you are over an object, you can pick up. Then you just have to press the fire button resp. RETURN. Even, if you want to use the object with another one, it is shown directly to use it. This increases the fun. Finally Wasted Dreams is no classic adventure. If the laser gun is empty, you can use your fists to defend yourself.

Conclusion: The devolopers kept their promisses with Wasted Dreams. Wasted dreams plays quite fine, and is fun even after some weeks. It can be seen, that they tried to keep the controls and the handling as easy as possible, what increases the fun quite much. However, Wasted Dreams is a fine game, which includes voice output and video sequences as an extra (if they would only run on my computer). This results in: