Hi, my name is Jean Francois Martins, I'm 20 years old, I live in Montreal Quebec and work at Future Shop as a software merchandiser. In my spare time I play bass in a band and I love computer games so that's why I'm writing this column.

The game I'm writing about today is MechWarrior 2 by Activision. This combat simulator puts you in the cockpit of a mech (for all of you who don't know what a mech is, picture a 20ft. man-powered robot armed to the teeth). Faced with a mission, you basically walk around fighting other mechs tying to complete your mission. Starting off, you choose which clan you want to align yourself with, the Wolf or Raven clan, both which have a wide variety of mechs to choose from. Then you are sent on tons of missions which are actually quite fun.

There were a couple of things that I didn't like about this game. First, it's a DOS game, so it's quite hard to install unless you know what you're doing. Second, the only way I found it easy to play was with the Microsoft Sidewinder joy stick. Other than that, it's quite a good game.

There are 2 versions of Mech Warrior 2 available: the DOS CD version and the Windows 95 Pentium processor edition. You can choose between the expansion pack entitled Ghost Bear's Legacy, and the NetMech eight player pack which you play with up to 8 players via modem. You can see a demo of this game at http://www.activsion.com.