Hi there!

Cinemaware making yet another offer I can't refuse:

Like S.D.I. was King of Chicago a game that was announced for the C64, but never came. Once again Cinemaware had me waiting years - for nothing

20 years after the fact, I was now finally playing the Amiga version and again I'm wondering what all the fuss was about

As indicated by the games title already, the twisted story is fulfilling every single mafia movie cliche, right down to the cheesy dialog-lines of the characters. And of course there's also a woman you're after

The core of this Cinemaware game movie is the adventure part this time. It's spiced up with 2-3 minigame sequences, but about 80% of the gameplay is made of longish multiple-choice dialoge sequences. The music is fitting the genre (but not really matching my personal taste ) and the graphics are okayish, but not matching the high standards Cinemaware set for themselves.

The game is a rather short experience, in less than an hour I beat it on my second try:

In my book KoC and S.D.I. are definitely the two weakest entries in Cinemawares range of games, so it probably wasn't all bad that the C64 versions never materialized. King of Chicago is the slightly better of the two. At least you can play through it a couple of times and try different dialog choices in order to see different branches of the story.

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see Cinemawares next blockbuster in the form of "The Three Stooges", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel