The Legacy – Magazine Reviews

I only found the two reviews for The Legacy and they differ wildly. The first from the June 1993 PC Zone below is the most negative citing criticisms such as the game being more Lovecraft than Poe, objects just lying around, the room layout not making sense and the combat being difficult. All of these are true but I didn’t regard any of them as major issues. I may be doing the reviewer a disservice but I do get the strong impression they barely played the game. Certainly none of these screenshots are beyond the very early levels. One thing I do take out of this review is the Horrorsoft games it mentions were horror dungeon crawlers along something of a similar vein. I’d forgotten about them entirely and really should try them out one of these days.

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Onto the second review from the May 1993 PC Review. This is the one that got me to buy the game 23 years back so it goes without saying they liked it a whole lot more than PC Zone. The version I played did allow for saving of custom screen layouts so this must have been added post review. It still scores a very healthy 8 which is the same as Lemmings 2 and X-Wing which both got reviewed in the same issue. Maybe timing was The Legacy’s problem in the end with two big titles like that in the same month. To compound this, Veil of Darkness and Shadow Of The Comet both with a similar horror theme are in the same issue. It clearly wasn’t a bad month for PC gaming although the balance was redressed to a large extent by Accolade’s Wacky Funsters. Hopefully I’m the only person who remembers that turkey.

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Finally, the August 1993 PC Review featured a brief guide to playing The Legacy which I happened to spot when doing those Tornado scans. It’s a long way off a walkthrough but offers a few hints to help out in those difficult opening sections.

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Jedi Knight / Mysteries Of The Sith Reviews

It’s off topic for this site but I had a request for magazine scans on Jedi Knight + it’s add-on pack Mysteries Of The Sith which I thought I’d share here while I had them. For those that never played it, Jedi Knight was a first person shooter from the late 90’s which basically combined Quake-like gameplay with the Star Wars universe. That sells it somewhat short though as the level variety and storyline were far improved on anything Id had produced. Lucasarts had already turned out Dark Forces which did the same for Doom and the series was easily my favourite FPS of the 90’s at least as far as single player gaming is concerned. Origin had wanted to produce something similar in the Wing Commander universe in 1997 which only got as far as a pitch to EA who sadly didn’t take the offer up.

The expansion pack Mysteries Of The Sith came out a few months after Jedi Knight and is one of the earlier games I remember to move to game engine rendered cutscenes instead of FMV. This won it praise in some reviews for being more immersive but I expect was actually done because the add-on pack had a smaller budget. I always thought that the 3D engines back then were nowhere near up to the job but other games followed suit as PC gaming shifted to all-out 3D and it’s probably no coincidence that it’s about this time that I started looking into older games instead of the latest and greatest.

Onto the reviews anyway. I’ve not played it in at least a decade so I’m not sure how it would stand up these days but it’s fair to say that Jedi Knight met with unanimous praise from all concerned at the time. Starting with the October 1997 PC Zone:-

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From the November 1997 Ultimate PC:-

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From the December 1997 PC Format:-

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From the December 1997 PC Gamer:-

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From the Xmas 1997 PC Home:-

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And finally the January 1998 PC Guide:-

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Moving onto Mysteries Of The Sith this review is from the April 1998 PC Zone:-

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From the April 1998 PC Format:-

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And this last one is from the April 1998 PC Gamer:-

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PC Zone Scans

PC Zone - Issue 2

During most of the 90’s the only readily available source of information for many PC gamers like myself were video gaming magazines. The first of these to purely focus on PC games in the UK was PC Zone which started up in April 1993 and ran for about 250 issues until September 2010. The reviews were irreverent and laddish but largely reliable if you wanted a guide of what was worth spending your pennies on. The quality waned after a while but it was by far my favourite of the available magazines in the 90’s.

I’d seen numerous requests for PC Zone scans on the web since then but there was precious little available. I’ve made liberal use of other people’s old magazine scans and wanted to contribute in return so a year or two back I came up with the ambitious and unlikely aim of getting a complete set of scans and cover discs together up to the end of 2001. As so often with this sort of project my interest ultimately waned but with help I did get about half of them done. The site hosting all of these has gone down since then and I’d hate for them not to be available somewhere so I’ve dumped them onto my webserver for anyone who wants them. I may add more issues at a later date but if any reader wants to take up the baton in the meanwhile then any additions would be gratefully received.