Adrenaline Entertainment, $20. Requirements: PowerPC, 8 MB RAM, System 7.1+. For more information, visit Adrenaline Entertainment at http://www.adrenalineent.com. Review by Ed Carmien Missile Command For...what decade again? I have a soft spot in my heart for the kind of nutzo behavior it takes for someone to code up a game and put it out as shareware. Really, I do. And I rate such efforts against other games distributed using a non-retail channel, in this case crippleware. But in this case, while all the mechanics work right, I must fault the designer here for a lack of vision. Native Assault (and I have yet to figure out where that oddball title came from, as there are no natives being assaulted and the natives aren't assaulting anyone) is a re-do of the old Missile Command coin-op, a coin-op game that's been copied before for personal computers. I have a vivid memory that I'm certain comes from the Mac Plus, for example, of just such a Missile Command copy. My question is: why would someone copy Missile Command so completely? It was a fine game, and a blast to play with that big old rollerball input device--any other gaming dinosaurs out there remember the rush of spreading a line of missiles with a quick flick of your wrist and a bambambambambam on the shoot key? Angled just a bit down, across the top of the screen, to catch the beginning of the first wave of missiles on the upper levels? Striking first like that was necessary to survive in the old gimme your quarters coin-op environment. Today, with all that the Mac can do, why is the game exactly like Missile Command? Six cities, three on each side of your missile base. Point and click to target a missile. Watch your timing. Special enemies and some nice bonuses come floating down as you progress. Spend your points between waves to get more missiles, buy more cities, improve your weapons. All it would have taken is a little vision to sharpen this old title into something that would startle a player, that would take advantage of the Missile Command lineage but evolve it somehow, make it the same concept but a game that you could sit down today and play and say "wow." At least a little wow. No Wow Here There is no Wow here, I'm afraid. The graphics are OK, the interface quick. You start off very slowly to make more room for improvement as the game goes on--so slowly, it is a painful prospect to start a new game, as you know you've got several minutes of ho-hum play ahead of you before things get interesting. This isn't a case of "the reviewer doesn't like this sort of game." I like this sort of game fine. The very first coin-op arcade game I played was Space Invaders (yep, I'm THAT old), and Missile Command ate quite a few of my quarters back in the day when a single quarter actually made an arcade game work. Native Assault just strikes me as being...listless. Techy Problems After registering the game, it seemed to play a bit better as well as offer me access to the second level. Then when I started playing the next day, it wanted me to register again. What the...well, OK. So I registered again. So far, the second registration seems to have taken hold. My creakly old Performa 6400 may lack the VRAM necessary to allow Native Assault to switch resolution modes to 640x480 on its own--whenever I started up in another graphic mode, it halted things and told me no can do. Manually switching to 640x480 worked fine, and this may not be a problem on other machines. Then again, I've never had that resolution switching problem occur with any other software--and as you can imagine, I run a lot of resolution switching software. Native Assault did crash on me once, but that was probably my fault, as I'd had my old machine jumping through quite a few hoops right before that. Aside from the quirks mentioned here, Native Assault ran fine. Final Thoughts As a MacReactor editorialist mentions in a recent editorial, writing negative reviews is tough. I love the Mac and want all that is done for the Mac to be bright and wonderful. I just can't recommend this game to anyone but a Missile Command buff, the sort of gamer who has a Missile Command arcade game in their basement and a complete collection of every Missile Command like game to ever hit the market. It's too bad that the main thing I don't like about this game is the concept. How easy it would have been to put a bit more thought into innovation during the design phase. Instead of everything coming from the top-down, with the player viewing the game from the side, how about a 3/4 view, with a 360 degree view attained by turning in a circle, with missiles and planes moving in from off the horizon, getting bigger and bigger as they get closer? How about more options to boost your defenses than launcher number and missile speed? (In all fairness, such options may appear in higher levels of the game.) MIRVing defense missiles? Self-targetting missiles? Missiles with bigger warheads, to help deal with those "multiple hit required to destroy" enemies? Thirty seconds off the top of my head and there are four features I'd have loved to see in this game, features that would have made Native Assault more than a humdrum copy of a decades-old coin-op arcade game. Or any features beyond the basic set I've already described.