VIDEO GAMES REVIEW : From Kong to Carpet, He Rates the Hot--and the Not-So-Hot : Player who got hooked in the ‘70s looks at offerings of the ‘90s, in a search for the insane.

Let’s get one thing straight: This column is about video games. Others in this great, gray newspaper will tell you everything you want to know about CD-ROMs that extol the virtues of fine wines or classical music. Still others will go into painful detail about how to run a spreadsheet.

But this column deals exclusively with video games. We’ll review three games each column, telling you what’s cool and worth buying and what sucks and should be avoided. Now and then, we will also take a look at new gadgets and new systems as they are released.

The coming year promises to be exciting as a slew of companies are gearing up to challenge the dominance of Nintendo and Sega. Expect 16-bit machines to fall by the wayside as 32-bit and 64-bit machines are introduced. With so much happening, it can get confusing.

And mistakes can be expensive. Who wants to spend their hard-earned cash on a machine that never quite catches on and ends up little more than a $400 doorstop? Even a poor game choice can leave you $50 poorer.

Ratings will be straightforward, divided into four categories of descending excellence. The very best games appropriately will be labeled insane. Cool games will, of course, be cool. Games better borrowed than bought will be mediocre. At the bottom of the barrel are games that suck.

Two of each column’s reviews will be devoted to Nintendo and Sega--at least until other machines filter into more homes. The third review will rotate between some of these less common platforms--such as PC CD-ROM, 3DO and Atari Jaguar.

By now, some readers may wonder what qualifies me to review video games. Actually, very little. I am a casual gamer, not die-hard, and this column will not even try to compete with game magazines. It intends instead to point out to the everyday player the good games and to warn against the bad.

My history with video games goes all the way back to the 1970s, playing Pong on my grandparents’ television. I first played Space Invaders with a quarter bummed off an uncle at a Straw Hat Pizza. The game lasted about 20 seconds.

Later, my brother and I spent hours playing games such as Asteroids and River Raid on our Atari 2600, now boxed for posterity in our parents’ attic. Somebody said recently that comparing the games of my youth to today’s games is a little like comparing the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk to the missions of the space shuttle.

Perhaps 10 years from now, the same will be said of games such as Doom and Donkey Kong Country as each new breakthrough dazzles us with still better graphics, faster play and clearer sound. Until then, play well.

Super Nintendo / Donkey Kong Country

This is the first video game since Centipede that my wife actually wants to play. And who can blame her? Since Donkey Kong Country was released in November, it has become the best-selling video game in history. If you are one of the two dozen people who has not bought this game, do it now.

Touted as the crossover title between 16-bit and 64-bit games, Donkey Kong Country picks up where the legendary Donkey Kong arcade game left off. You are the grandson of the original Donkey Kong and your horde of bananas has been swiped. With your little friend Diddy Kong, you set off in search of the stolen fruit.

Before I played it, I thought this game was little more than Mario with monkeys. I was wrong. Although there are a lot of similarities to the Mario games, Donkey Kong is in a different league entirely.

Even standing still, Donkey and Diddy Kong are a hoot to listen to and watch. Their expressions are hilarious. The game is completely computer-rendered, resulting in graphics and sound that are superior to almost any game on any platform. The environments Donkey and Diddy explore are stunning.

And the music is enchanting. Perhaps a little too enchanting. Lying in bed in the dark one night after playing, my wife complained: “I can’t get that song out of my head.”

But what makes this game so much fun is the variety of action. Unlike a lot of games that rely on variations of the same themes level after level after level, the action in Donkey Kong Country differs from screen to screen. In the four weeks my wife and I have been playing the game, neither of us has gotten bored.

One thing that would make the game more fun for my wife, though, is more frequent opportunities to save games in progress. Save points are scattered here and there, but my wife gets impatient when she has to repeat a level she’s already played. So far, that’s been good for me because she lets me play through them.

In the same vein, we both like the opportunity to repeat levels at any point in the game to collect extra lives and bonuses. We needed all the help we could get on some of the more difficult levels.

Manufacturer: Nintendo

Platform: Super NES

Rating: Insane

Sega 32X / Doom

The PC version of this game has been banned at workplaces all over the country--including at the offices of the company that created it. The problem is that Doom is as addictive as crack cocaine.

Originally released as a PC game, the 32X version is a faithful adaptation with a first-person perspective and an arsenal powerful enough to blow away a never-ending legion of zombie soldiers, imps and others of the undead.

The goal of the game is quite frankly to kill, kill, kill. You are a Marine assigned to clear and secure a maze of laboratories where scientific experiments have gone frightfully wrong.

Parents should be warned against the graphic violence in Doom, but compared to the hanging corpses of Doom II: Hell on Earth, the spattering gore of the original seems downright quaint. Nonetheless, some may not want their kids to revel in blasting apart the chest cavities of video humans.

I thoroughly enjoy this game, regardless of the platform. With the Sega joypad, I found maneuvering through the labyrinth of corridors is considerably easier than using the PC keyboard or even a joystick.

The one gripe I have is unavoidable and has to do with the limited number of buttons on the joypad. An important part of Doom is the rapid changing of weapons. On the PC, this is easy to do; you just type the number of the weapon you want. With the three-button Sega joypad, though, a player must cycle through the arsenal to find the weapon of choice, a time-consuming chore.

Along the same line, switching between the map--a vital function--and the first-person perspective involves a combination of button and joypad motion that gets confusing in the heat of the game. From reading the directions, it seems that some of these problems can be avoided using Sega’s six-button arcade-style joypad.

In all, though, this is a game everyone should have in one platform or another, if for no other reason than it is already considered an essential classic.

Manufacturer: id Software

Platforms: Sega 32X, Atari Jaguar, 3DO

Rating: Insane.

PC CD-ROM / Magic Carpet

Tough to get the hang of, this cross between a flight simulator and adventure game is a fascinating journey through magic worlds where sorcerers vie for powerful spells and mana, which is the source of their magic. Beginning as an apprentice sorcerer, you try to collect spells and restore order to a series of 50 worlds.

Accomplishing that task involves blasting other wizards and a host of ethereal creatures as well as building castles in which to store your ever-increasing power. All of this is done from your personal magic carpet.

Although mastering the trickeries of magic carpet aviation takes time, the screen displays are so dazzling that it seems the goals of the game are almost secondary to the scenery.

I played the game in its low-resolution mode on my 486 and was blown away. I can only imagine what the high-resolution mode--which requires 16 megabytes of RAM and recommends a Pentium--is like.

Once you actually decide to engage in game play, it requires a fairly high degree of dexterity and cunning to stay alive for long. Using a joystick in tandem with the keyboard allows players to program spells for easy access and control the carpet simultaneously.

I played with a couple of friends, each of us taking turns at the controls, but the game is set up for network play. That, we all agreed, would be truly cool. But even on a stand-alone PC, the game was a blast.

Manufacturer: Bullfrog Productions LTD/Electronic Arts

Platform: PC CD-ROM

Rating: Cool.

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