September 2002 Volume 83 Number 9 "serving the protectors"
Edited By John Ballantyne

Prisoner of War (POW)

Format: PS2, Xbox, PC

This absorbing, challenging and realistic World War II adventure takes you from the shores of Europe to prisoner-of-war camps in Hitler’s Germany.

In this suspenseful, third-person, action-adventure game, you play an Allied pilot shot down and captured during a reconnaissance mission in 1941.

Other characters in the plot attempt to escape from their respective POW camps before ultimately meeting in Colditz – the Germans’ highest “escape-proof” camp – and co-operate in the most daring breakout of the war.

POW is a war game with a difference. There are no shoot-outs, dramatic explosions, or racing around at breakneck speed.

You use no weapons – only your skills, wits and cunning – to defeat your enemy. A gung-ho approach simply won’t work.

As a POW, you are guarded around the clock by enemy soldiers. Step out of line and you risk a German bullet. Worse still, any rash actions on your part may result in your fellow prisoners being punished too.

POW creators, Codemasters, have developed a remarkably sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI). Twelve of them are friendly; 50 of them not-so-friendly; and each has his own personality, intelligence and aptitudes.

There is a clever twist to the plot of POW. While you are learning how to escape, you stumble across evidence that Germany is engaged in building an ultra-secret weapon, which could turn the tide of war fatally against the Allies.

Escape is no longer your sole priority: you are now engaged in a race to stop the Germans from completing construction of this secret weapon.

Atari Anniversary Edition
Format: PlayStation

Atari – a name synonymous with the birth of the video games industry – has released a compilation of 12 of its most famous early arcade games.

Dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s, each game is reproduced down to the last detail and comes with a wealth of memorabilia (including interviews with Atari game creator Nolan Bushnell).

• Asteroids places you in the cockpit of a spaceship from where you fend off huge chunks of rock.
• Asteroids Deluxe offers more enemies, faster rocks, and a new picture-based background.
• Battlezone is a first-person tank game, set in a 3D wire frame world of tanks, missiles and saucers.
• Centipede pits you against an onslaught of huge multi-legged creepy-crawlies.
• Millipede – a vamped-up version of Centipede – introduces DDT bombs, which enables you to wipe out multiple enemies in one hit.
• Crystal Castles is a 3D gem-collecting game in which you aim to collect scattered jewels before your enemies eat them – and you!
• Gravitar has you travelling from planet to planet, fending off malicious extra-terrestrial attacks.
• Missile Command has you protecting six cities, with the aid of three missile turrets, from incoming alien attacks and spaceships.
• Pong is the well-known digital ping-ping game, in which two vertical paddles bounce a square ball back and forth.
• Super Breakout has you bouncing a square ball against a multi-coloured brick wall. With this upgraded version you can choose ball sizes and different ball speeds.
• Tempest places you on the edge of a long tube. You must defend that edge from swarms of aliens coming up the pipe.
• Warlords: Four players must defend their own castles from a giant fireball that is bounced around the screen. The last surviving player wins.

Home Automation

A fully automated house, run for your convenience by a super-smart computer, sounds like the stuff of science fiction.

But such technology, able to unclutter and simplify life, is now readily available to ordinary householders at surprisingly affordable prices.

Suite Lifestyle Technologies™ has developed inexpensive ways to integrate your home’s systems and appliances into a single large system, in order to give you more freedom and convenience.

A central “minder” computer links up and co-ordinates such things as lighting, air-conditioning, home entertainment, appliances, sprinklers, roller-doors, curtains, motion detection and home security.

Many standard everyday household functions can be pre-programmed and automated.

Doors will unlock for you without the need for keys.

Lights can turn themselves on when you enter a room and switch off automatically two minutes after you have left.

Room temperatures can be adjusted, in your absence, to save energy.

Automated sprinklers will water your garden whenever a hydrometer detects a deficiency of moisture in the soil.

And you can expand the possibilities of home automation with a host of other Suite Lifestyle Technologies™ products.

A clever feature of the integrated system is that you can control it from anywhere you happen to be with simple, user-friendly technology.

You can use wired-in or wireless systems. With the latter, special “Powermids” will boost your remote control’s signals so that they are not blocked by walls.

If you prefer, however, you can speak directly to your command system using HAL2000 voice-recognition.

Or you can monitor and operate every aspect of your home’s integrated technologies using a portable PC-EPhone.

This unique handheld device combines the features of a cellular phone and organizer/computer (with full internet and PC capabilities).

The compact screen on your PC-EPhone is like a hand-held window on the world. With it you can check the weather, find out which movies are on, or see from miles away who’s at the front door of your home.

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