From: Roberto Chiavini Subject: One review The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat (Ares) Twenty years ago a young and promising designer at SPI, Greg Costikyan, made a little, not very popular solitaire game for Ares, the SF version of Strategy & Tactics. Even if probably obsolete for today standards, it certainly was a real innovation for the wargaming market of the time and it could be an interesting found in the bargain bin of a remote store in some corners of our gaming world (i.e., e-Bay). This magazine game comes with a splendid chromatic map, full of tables and combat displays. You, as the gamer, are the hero of this adventure inside a space station, where you have to de-activate an evil computer. You may play with the eponymous character, Jim DiGriz, or with his wife Angelina. Your character is equipped with various kind of weapons (laser, sub machine gun, various types of grenades, etc) and other useful tools (like lockpicking objects, cigars, bottles of liquors, gloves, first aid kits, etc.). You have a weapon on hand, up to other five objects on your body, a suit (of various kind), and two leg sheaths. The counter with your data contains a value for combat (used for hand to hand unarmed combat) and one for Alertness (really important: you have to check very frequently rolling two dice and hoping to obtain a total less or equal to your value). One of the more innovative aspect of this design is the use of Disbelief points: each object or weapon you choice has a cost in disbelief points; also, you may choose to pay this kind of points for discovering clues (yes: there is also a system similar to Clue for determining who is the villain in the story…), for negating stun and wound effects, and so on. If you reach 75 disbelief points, you lose the game. You move inside the station checking for enemies and other happenings with a paragraphs driven system, similar to the one used a couple of years after by Eric Lee Smith for VG's Ambush. In practice, the game it's very similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook, but with a more complex combat system (the part regarding the movement of enemy robots and, in particular, their facing definitely too complex for this kind of game). As such, it was probably a novelty 20 years ago, but today we have several computer games (and we have since about 15 years ago) who are better in simulating a game of this kind (and easier to use, if not much funnier). So, this splendid and innovative design is probably destined to collect dust in some of the higher shelves in your gameroom, to be taken rarely to show to your sons or nephews how you play Doom before the advent of PCs. I rate this game 7 in a 1-10 scale (as the original design for the time it was made - for today standards it's probably worth 6 or even less).