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After Dark Games
& Deluxe Screensaver
£9.99 Each
PC CD ROM

With all the complex and time-consuming games that developers are inundating us with at the moment it’s nice to get back to some of the basic gameplay that made the industry what it is today. Every PC has a copy of Solitaire or minesweeper on it somewhere, and these are great for passing an idle moment, but what is missing is a little bit of variety. So, go and buy AFTER DARK GAMES, new to the Focus range, and you’ll quickly realise that you really don’t have enough idle moments to spare…! 

These games, 11 of them in all, are designed to be there when you want them, no loading time and no waiting, just instant fun. And the collection is well balanced between fun time-passers and games that really make you think so there’s something for everyone and for every time…! 

Take ‘Hula Girl’ for example. This is just an upward scrolling series of platforms occupied by a hula girl who jumps between platforms collecting food items and more hoops. The knack is keeping her on-screen without being whisked off the top or falling to her doom from the bottom. Sounds easy but as the scrolling gets faster the pressure mounts. Then there’s ‘Fish Shtik’ – strange name, strange game but it’s a bit like TV’s Countdown where jumbled letters stuck on fish have to be made into words to score points. 

Foggy Boxes is a game we have all played at sometime. It’s the one where lines are drawn between dots in turn and if you make a box the square is yours. Then there are the Mooshu tiles, a bit like Shanghai but with different images on the tiles – all wickedly addictive, of course. A couple of the games are variations on the Pac-Man theme such as Roger Dodger and Mowin’ Maniac and there is a quick fire quiz game too, but my favourite must certainly be Roof Rats. It’s a rectangle filled with coloured squares upon which perch some strange animals. The idea is to double-click on groups of touching tiles to make the wall collapse and set the animals free. Hopefully you can get all the animals down while you still have touching groups but it ain’t that easy…! 

The compilation is completed with another word game, Bad Dog 911, a version of Solitaire and one featuring a flying toaster. Now flying toasters are not a particularly common sight but the After Dark collections see them cropping up quite often. They are certainly prominent in another new Focus release called simply AFTER DARK DELUXE SCREENSAVER. In their own words it is the ultimate collection of screensavers and although not as essential as they were a few years ago they certainly brighten up that monitor and do protect against screen burn. 

This CD contains a massive 85 of them in all and they are great fun to use and collect. Other characters from the games collection also make an appearance such as the ‘Mowin’ Man’ and Bad Dog but with a massive 50 wallpapers to choose from, all the customising features you could ever want and a randomiser to display all your favourites your monitor screen will never be the same again…!