RUSSIAN 6 PAK from Interplay (Windows version)

Reviewed by Bernard Dy

              Computer     Graphics     Memory     Disk Space 
Minimum       286            VGA          640K         2.65 MB 
Max/Rec.      386sx/16+                   2 MB

Control: Keyboard, Mouse Sound: Adlib, SoundBlaster and compatibles, SB
Pro, or Windows compatible sound

Reviewed version 1 on: 386dx/33, 8MB RAM, VGA w/1MB RAM, PAS 16 sound card
  Reviewer recommends: SB-compatible sound card

There is a large resource of untapped programming talent in Russia. In light of recent political events, it is only a matter of time before this resource is discovered and harnessed. Spectrum Holobyte has been very successful with Tetris. Another arena gaining popularity is Windows games. Once ruled solely by Minesweeper and Solitaire, this area is no longer sparsely populated. Entries into the field have included numerous entertainment and puzzle packs, pinball games, and even high powered adventure games like Critical Path and Iron Helix. With RUSSIAN 6 PAK, Interplay hopes to capitalize on both Russian imports and Windows formats.

The 6 Pak collects six puzzle games from Russia, each one quite a challenge. The development team included a female programmer formerly involved with the Russian space program. Most gamers will not be terribly impressed with the graphics, finding them clean but unspectacular. The introduction to the manual is written by Alexey L. Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris. Pajitnov explains the background of Russian game programmers: "Due to a lack of sophisticated hardware availability, Russian programmers are typically a few years behind their American counterparts regarding sound and graphics. Because of this, we don't tend to emphasize them as much as strategy aspects and game concepts."

The programs are 100% Russian, from the graphics to the sound effects. The manual and options screens imply there are Russian songs in the background. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the music to work, if there was any. Too bad. I'd missed the music I remembered from my days playing the stand-up arcade version of Tetris. The sound effects were operating, however, and I was treated to some new and odd sounds. The death groan featured in Flying Pictures is particularly funny.

As Pajitnov stated in the introduction, however, the graphics and sounds are secondary in the 6 Pak. Though not quite as creative as the box would have you believe, the arcade puzzles here are definitely fun to play.

In Flying Pictures the object is to knock down a fruit pile until only four or fewer fruits remain. The screen is composed of three elements: ceiling beams, the fruit pile, and a ladder. You move your character, Alice, up and down the ladder, and throw a fruit at the pile. The pile is composed of strawberries, limes, grapes, and cherries. When your fruit hits another fruit of the same type, the pile's item disappears and your projectile continues into the pile until it hits another of dissimilar type. At this point, the fruit you threw trades places with the one in the pile and the new fruit type is returned to you. There are two limitations here. One is that you only have five lives, and each life has a limited amount of energy. When that energy is expended, you lose a life. Another problem is that you must throw initially at fruit that matches the type you are carrying. If you have grapes and throw at a lime, the items will trade places as described, giving you a lime, but you will lose a life in the process.

If the fruit in your line of sight do not match the type you are currently carrying, there are other tactics. By banking the tossed fruit off the ceiling beams, you can attack the pile from different angles. The goal is to move to the next level by reducing the pile to four or fewer pieces. To make things interesting, each level includes an 'extra life' and a 'loss of life' icon, each buried within the fruit pile. Flying Pictures reminded me of a the classic Breakout game, but with a twist.

The next game, Fast Ring, is more time intensive than Flying Pictures. The screen here is composed of a 10x10 play area, and a timer bar. At the beginning of each game, a few buttons placed randomly within the play area. With each passing second, the timer bar moves closer to zero, and more buttons are added to the grid. After selecting a starting button, you can connect it to another by using the arrow keys. As long as the next button is somewhere along your x or y axis, you can connect to it. Marking your connections is a length of rope. Your goal is to start at one of the buttons and then 'connect the dots' until you can bring the trail of the rope back to your starting button. When you have done this and thus completed a 'ring', the ring and the buttons composing it are destroyed. For each button the ring removes, some time is added back to the timer bar. Like all the games in the 6 Pak, this game requires some quick thinking. Points are scored based on how long you can survive before the timer runs out. The speed of the timer increases, of course, as you proceed through the game.

Lineman is a lot like Fast Ring. Instead of a grid of buttons, however, you work with a grid of road pieces. Some of the pieces are curved, others straight. By rotating the pieces around, you can link them up to form a continuous circuit similar to a ring in Fast Ring. When this happens, the circuit vanishes and you receive points for it. As the game goes on, more and more road pieces are added to the grid and when you fail to connect a road before the board is filled, the game ends.

Master of Bombs, the fourth game, is the one I enjoyed the most. Perhaps this was because it was the one most like Tetris. As a result, I was able to learn its mechanics quickly and concentrate on playing. Instead of blocks falling into the Tetris screen, the Master of Bombs screen gets filled with hand grenades! Each grenade can have up to four fuses attached to it, one on each side. Most of the grenades have only one or two fuses. By moving the falling grenades so that their fuses touch each other, you can ensure that the random detonators which fall will destroy more than one grenade. As in Tetris, the goal here is to keep destroying levels of grenades before they add up and fill the pit, thus ending the game. Variety is added to the game by provided options to also include dynamite sticks and sphere shaped bombs to the mix. Because these new explosives are larger than the hand grenades, they require even more quick thinking to organize. This is fun game that supports the cliché: Easy to learn, difficult to master.

Crete is also an interesting puzzle. Remember those Game 15 square puzzles you played with when you were a kid? These were those square boards that had 15 smaller squares within them, and each inner square was numbered from 1 to 15. There was one empty space where you could shuffle inner squares around and try to eventually organize the squares into an ordered sequence. Crete is similar to that. On one side of the square puzzle is Theseus, and on the other is the minotaur. Instead of numbers on the inner squares, there are castle wall patterns. By arranging them properly, you can create a path for Theseus to cross the labyrinth. Of course, the minotaur would love to have Theseus for dinner, literally. So you have the added challenge of trying to create a path which traps the minotaur in one section of the labyrinth while allowing Theseus safe passage. Again, a nice twist on an old puzzle concept.

The last game didn't work too well for me. Shadows is a game in which the screen is a targeting screen in your spaceship. By moving a crosshair around the screen, you can hit the asteroids you see floating about. The objective is to destroy all the asteroids before a time limit. There is a catch; some of the asteroids are invisible. The only ways to hit them are by luck and by destroying the other asteroids first. When a normal asteroid explodes, it leaves behind a cloud of dust. When other asteroids move through the dust, they leave a visible trail. So if you see a trail suddenly appearing by itself, you've just been given a clue to the whereabouts of an invisible asteroid. This concept is interesting, and one of the more original in the 6 Pak, but is ruined by awkward crosshair movement. I suspect this was done to add challenge, but I found it quite frustrating. The crosshair does not move when you operate the arrow keys. Instead, it seems itself to be an object in space, floating in the screen and moving primarily in one direction, until it bounces in a different direction when it hits the edge. Pressing the arrow keys will nudge the crosshair in a slightly different direction or slow it down, but you otherwise have very little control. I found the given time limits were often beyond my reach, and Shadows became a disappointment for me. Perhaps I simply needed to practice the cursor movement more, but I think the game would have worked with a controllable cursor. Hunting the invisible asteroids is too difficult without a truly responsive crosshair.

The press info I received with the Russian 6 Pak did not include price listings. Therefore, no comment can be made on the product's value. If released at a price no higher than the Microsoft entertainment packs, however, then I believe the 6 Pak could be considered a decent value. The games are easy to learn but challenging. The graphics are simple but effective. The programming seems pretty clean, except that Master of Bombs would sometimes freeze my system. The 6 Pak may not be quite as original as its designers would believe. Many of the puzzles are simply twists of existing mind benders experienced gamers will remember from elsewhere. Still, the games are different enough from existing computer games that users may find the 6 Pak a pleasant sample of a different perspective. Puzzle enthusiasts will probably like this one. Younger gamers of the MTV generation never had to rely on things like board games or mind benders (gasp, how boring!) for entertainment. With the 6 Pak, they might get a glimpse of the types of games we old dogs played before the days of desktop computing.

This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by Zone Five Enterprises for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.