•By Mike Gorman •   MDK Company: Playmates Interactive Entertainment Estimated Price: $49.95 I waste a huge amount of time playing games. Let me rephrase that: I'm a new father, I work 40 hours a week, I do a ton of freelance work to help make ends meet (some 20 hours a week), and I enjoy, during my limited free time, to kick back with a few frosty cold ones and a good video game. I am of the "Total Carnage" group of game fans. I hated Myst, don't care much for those "Sim-Scenerio" type games, and gave up role-playing games after high school. No, my flavor in gaming is the 3-D shoot 'em up. The 3-D shoot 'em up is an amazing gaming style: You walk through halls, the barrel of your gun protruding into your line of vision, and kill anything that crosses your path. I own them all, too (Quake, Wolfenstein, the Marathon Trilogy, the Doom Trilogy, Dark Forces, Unreal, Duke, Shadow Warrior, etc...) Anyways, while fun, the scenario is limited. The game makers of the titles I listed above did a great job creating their worlds, and in the process gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment. But the reality of the 3-D gaming experience IS that you spend all your time walking through halls shooting whatever crosses your path. Sure, games like Dark Forces and Marathon (especially) made you think a bit by giving you puzzles to solve, but in the end the feel of the game was the same as all the others. So recently I bought a new game, MDK, that was a wee bit different from what I was used to. In MDK, you follow behind and above your character. This is a whole new look! But how does the game hold up to the game scenario I loved so much? MDK blew the doors off of everything I could even dream a game could be. It's a HUGE game. It's funny as all hell. It's interesting. It's new. It's inventive. It's... ok, I will go into details... In MDK, you are a black leather suited space commando, set on defeating a slew of freaky bosses who will stop at nothing to do you in. You adventure through vast worlds that are a combination of Blade Runner, Alien, a full Olympic arena, with some Lego Land thrown in to keep it nutso. This is a lush world with superb graphics that really has to be seen to be believed. The levels are HUGE. They literally go on for longer than I could conceive possible. At times in the world of MDK, you are lugging through tunnels, surf boarding, and stealing alien planes to drop bombs on your enemy! Your character can also glide using this crazy looking parachute you have as part of your outfit, which you need to drop into certain parts of the game (I'm currently on this level where I just dropped though this arctic valley that seemed to be a mile deep!). You also use your chute to harness the air flow of vent shafts to fly up to the top of buildings. You even disguise yourself as a robot to sneak behind enemy lines! The game play is very cool-you play from the view of either up and behind, or you can switch to sniper mode (which you have to switch to from time to time depending on what's ahead of you). In sniper mode, you can zoom in and out, and pick off the enemy before they know what hit them. The majority of your enemy is a hysterical crew of screaming robots that sometimes appears behind force fields to berate you in alien gibberish, give you "the finger," and shake their butts at you! There're all kinds of robots, each with their own special weapon of destruction. There are also fleets of alien ships, GIGANTIC tanks, suicide bombers, and really bizarre bosses you must defeat to end each level. The weapons in the game are wicked cool. You get to pick up such artillery as "The World's Smallest Nuclear Explosion," "The Worlds most Interesting Bomb," a slew of different bullets and bombs to use during sniper mode, or you can pick up a decoy that can be launched to divert the enemies attention and get the pressure off of you! I think all of you gamers out there who are blown away by Unreal will be knocked on the floor by MDK. Maybe it's a tad less lush than Unreal, but the game play is vastly more fun and interesting, and the graphics 100% smoother. I think of MDK as Star Wars meets Coney Island Amusement Park. In other words, similar, but no comparison. All in all, MDK never ceases to amaze me in its inventiveness, its humor, and all out fun game play. I genuinely think this is the best video game ever created, and look forward to any new game playmatestoys has to offer. Buy it NOW! •Mike Gorman • Websites mentioned:   My Mac Magazine ® 1999 My Mac Productions. All Rights Reserved.