Bananoid (BANANOI) VGA Arcade Games William Rieder; $0 is the best "breakout" type game we have ever seen on a PC. It requires VGA or MCGA (which is no kin to CGA), a mouse, and at least a 286-10. The graphics are beautiful. One unusual feature is that the playing field is two screens wide and scrolls smoothly as you move the mouse. Another unusual feature (for a breakout game) is that every once in a while, one of the colored blocks that you are breaking out falls down the screen and if you catch it with the paddle, it changes the paddle (to narrower, double-wide, or "sticky"), or it changes the paddle to a ship which can fire laser blasts at the remaining blocks (while the ball is still bouncing around, of course), or it advances you to the next screen. Which of these happens depends on the color of the block. The game appears to have been fashioned after the arcade machine game Arkenoid. If you have the requisite hardware, this is one game you do not want to miss. Beyond Columns 1.1 (BEYOND) VGA Arcade Games Brad P. Taylor; $0 "...is like Tetris, only different." That's what our write-up of this program would have been before reading the background given by the author, who says: "The orignal Columns game was invented for the X window system by Jay ESC:Exit  #:Page PgDn/PgUp Home End Geertsen of HP." In this game, you control columns as they move down the screen, much like with Tetris. However, each column is composed of three different blocks and you make the columns dissolve by getting three blocks of the same color or design (your choice of several block designs is given) in a row, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. To further complicate things, you can rearrange the blocks within the columns so that, for example, if a column on the bottom has two green blocks on top and the falling column has a green block in the middle, say, you can rotate the middle green block to the bottom of the column so that when it lands on the column with the two green blocks, there will be three green blocks in a row, causing them to dissolve. In our opinion, this program is a lot more difficult than Tetris. The Easy level drove us to a nervous breakdown. Bad news: it is for VGA or MVGA only, and it appears that you have to reboot to get out of the program. EGA-roids 1.0c (EGAROID) EGA Arcade Games Designer Software; $5 is a fast moving, high resolution Asteroids type of game for the EGA. This is a minor update, but we have also included in this archive a patch (by ESC:Exit  #:Page PgDn/PgUp Home End John Deurbrouck) that will increase the maximum number of ships from three to thousands, so that you can get more practice. It will also create a new EGAroid file that allows only one ship, for when you are ready to really prove your skills. Fans EGA Arcade Games Mettus Graphics; $0 is an arcade game of the shoot-em-up genre, but with some strange twists to it. Fans has good graphics, for which EGA video is required. Snarf Arcade Games Everett Kaser; $0 is an arcade game similar to the commercial arcade game, Tutankham. The graphics are excellent and require EGA/VGA video. Complete C and Assembler source code is included. The author says, "The game is playable, but it is not what I would consider a finished game." (We had fun playing it, but maybe we didn't make it far enough to see the unfinished parts.) The source code is provided to allow others to do more work on it. We first saw this game in 1987, but did not add it because of a very restrictive copyright notice. However, when we recently contacted the author, we got some bad news and good news: no new versions have been released, but PsL is now being allowed to distribute the program. ESC:Exit  #:Page PgDn/PgUp Home End