Mayday: Conflict Earth

Remember 1995? That was the year the first Pentium chips appeared, just in time to make the new-fangled Windows 95 vaguely bearable. Fast modems sucked 14,400 bits every second, and the doublespeed CD-ROM drive you needed to play Virgin's The 7th Guest cost Pound-200. And, of course, there was Red Alert.

Yes, everyone knows about Red Alert. You know the rules, you've done the moves, you've seen the countless imitations. And you're about to turn the page because you're sure that Mayday is just another pale facsimile. But wait! Even some of the most recent real-time strategy benchmarks could be seen as mere Command & Conquer derivatives - why dismiss this one? Ah, yes. The score.

Mayday follows a well-trodden path, and it does so with none of the pace, brio, excitement, visual razzmatazz or satisfaction of its rivals. Things kick off badly, with the installation program failing to detect a secondary CD-ROM drive, and go downhill thereafter. The third-party video drivers play havoc with existing software, take an age to remove by hand and don't support hardware acceleration. The 40 or so missions are varied, but nowadays feel old and conventional. The units are a cliched assortment of troops, factories, ore refineries, tanks, helicopters and boats.

A visual glitch causes the map to ghost its own image on the opposite edge of the screen, and sound effects, such as the din of small arms fire, shut off abruptly the moment the gunner walks out of view. To cap it all, support on the website istnurauf Deutsch. To sum up, Mayday is less of a game than Red Alert ever was, and it's an absolute mystery why anyone would want to develop it, let alone buy it.