Turok : Dinosaur Hunter is among the plethora of first-person shooters out there that are vying for a brief ascendancy to the top of the Quake-beating heap, Acclaim's Turok: Dinosaur Hunter stands slightly apart. For one thing, it's the genre's initial offering for the Nintendo 64 platform. Until Doom 64 and Hexen 64 make an appearance later this year it remains the only option for N64 owners who want to bath their television screens in pixilated alien blood. Turok is also the first decent third-party game designed for the new Nintendo console, providing some sense of relief for those who feared that the N64 would be buried under a mountain of third party shovelware titles like the woeful Cruis'n USA. And lastly, the power of N64 console means that Turok is rendered with some absolutely stunning visual and lighting effects, running with a smoothness that could only be matched by the kind of high end PC that has chip-mongers salivating wildly in their dreams.

Turok is based on a comic book hero who has been around since the 1950s. His identity is passed down (Phantom-like) through the male members of the Native American Fireseed family, and his task is to safeguard the squishy membrane between the Earth and the Lost Land: a mythical place populated by a gruesome mix of aliens, bionic dinosaurs, and disenfranchised members of the Iron John masculinist movement. Turok's ultimate goal is to find and assemble the shattered pieces of a powerful weapon called the Chronoscepter, and use it to stop an evil genius called The Campaigner, who wants to magnify the power of the Chronoscepter in order to rip open the fabric of time and rule the world.

Turok features eight massive levels which can be explored in a quasi-linear fashion. The levels modify the more straightforward linearity of Doom levels with aspects of the ‘hub-play' circularity that made Hexen confusing and no doubt contributed to its lack of popularity. The seeming lack of linearity can be initially frustrating, especially since the levels themselves are so large and easy to get lost in, and the console format means that games can only be saved at predetermined points on the map. Most players will find that placing an emphasis on exploration rather than reaching the end of levels makes Turok more interesting and enjoyable, especially since the individual Chronoscepter pieces can be very difficult to find. This means that unlike Mario 64, Turok isn't a game to be picked up for a quick five minutes of game play.

The other factor which sets it apart from the rest of the N64's current stable is its price; it's about $20 more expensive than Nintendo's in-house games and, compounding this price discrepancy, Turok requires that you have a Nintendo Controller Pak (another $30) installed in order to save games. The sheer size of the game makes it unplayable without one. All up,

Turok will set you back about $150. This might seem like a steep price for a game that doesn't significantly redefine the first-person genre, but Turok's appeal lies solidly in its amazing visuals and super- smooth handling. Glance up at the sun and the screen whites out in a brilliantly rendered lens flare; shoot one of the many disgruntled duck hunters and he will writhe around in noisy blood-laden agony; look down into a pool of water and see a refracted image of what lies below, all at 30 frames per second. Each level contains new additions—monsters, weapons, architecture—that will only increase your admiration for the game as you progress into it. Welcome to the dark side of the N64.

Phil McCluskey

Pod : Nothing summons up images of racing car excitement quite like the word: "Pod—a long seed-vessel esp. of a leguminous plant, e.g., a pea." As one of the first game titles to be released which makes use of the new instruction set in Intel's MMX processor, Ubi Soft's Pod is poised to take advantage of a new market with few competitors. Despite its use of MMX, however, Pod is an uninspiring racing game wrapped up in some fancy visuals. Here's the story: a corrosive toxic substance (called Pod) is destroying everything on the freshly colonised surface of Jupiter's moon, Io.

There is only one single-seater rocketship left which is capable of leaving the recently- evacuated planet and returning back to Earth; it has been stolen by a gang of drag racers who have nominated it as the prize in a circuit race around Io's crumbling streets. In order to escape the planet and the menacing Pod, you've got to win the racing circuit. Out of this convoluted narrative comes the rationale for driving around alien landscapes listening to techno tunes in a variety of "futuristic" vehicles with fast names—ie. "Saber [sic]: Like a sword, this vehicle cuts through the wind with amazing speed. At the beginning of the century, the Saber was the car of choice among the upper class."

Although it is optimised for use with an MMX processor, Pod will run on regular processors, and the Pod disc also contains versions of the game optimised for Virge S3 and 3Dfx graphics accelerator cards. While the hardware requirements state that the game can be run on a Pentium 120, doing so on one that doesn't have a graphics accelerator card will produce very disappointing results. And beyond its use of the MMX instruction set, Pod suffers because of the mediocre nature of its gameplay.

Despite the manual's claims about doing extensive research into the racing genre before making Pod, ("Only serious game players were allowed to engage in this process') the game adds absolutely nothing to the racing genre. The ability to modify the characteristics of your vehicle, and to download new tracks and vehicles from a dedicated web site is a helpful addition, but can't on its own breath life into what is really just a good-looking corpse. It's unfortunate that the first experience of MMX technology for many gamers will be this stale title.