Oh sure, some of them were reasonable enough games in their own right, but with the possible exception of Thunderstorm FX, none of them looked like they couldn't have been done on an ordinary Mega Drive. We're still waiting for the game that's going to make anyone who's forked out £300 on some state-of-the-art hardware feel like they haven't just lobbed their hard cash down a big drain, and unfortunately, as far as Noabunga And His Ninja Force is concerned at least, that's the way it's going to stay.

Oops. I hate it when I do that. A hundred words into the review and I've given away all the conclusion already. Now I've got to fill another three and a half pages and still keep things interesting. Hmm. Tricky. I could tell some jokes, I suppose. No, on second thoughts, all my favourite jokes would get MEGA taken off newsagents' shelves quicker than you could say - well, better not say that either, actually. Ahem.

Okay, I've got it. At random points throughout this review, I'm going to scatter some arithmetical instructions (You know, like 'Add six', that kind of thing. And no, that one doesn't count.) At the end of the review, the game's overall percentage will be the result of the sum you'll have just done, except that the sum doesn't have a start. So if you work backwards from the result, you should end up with a starting number. Get the number and send it to Absolutely Desperate Compo at the usual MEGA address and you'll win an absolutely fab mystery prize connected in some way with this review. (Yeah, like your job if you don't get on with it - Neil). So, with that in mind, let's subtract 57 and get on with the review.

Noabunga And His Ninja Force is a vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up. Taking place over, er, at least eight pretty hefty levels (hey, it's in Japanese, okay?), it sees you playing a Super Deformed-type giant robot with a jetpack, flying over all the usual sorts of bad guy-infested scenery and, er, shooting things. Up. There's a big difference between this and all the dozens and dozens of ordinary Mega Drive vertical scrollers you've seen before, though, and it's that - ah. Actually, there don't appear to be any big differences between this and all the dozens and dozens of ordinary Mega Drive vertical scrollers you've seen before at all. My mistake. Multiply by three. Sorry.

Yep, it's the same old story again. You've probably worked it out for yourself already simply by looking at the screenshots, but Noabunga And His Ninja Force doesn't look in the slightest like it couldn't have been produced perfectly adequately on a simple, bog-standard, everyday, run-of-the-mill, divide-by-four sort of Mega Drive. Not only, in fact, does it look like a Mega Drive game, it also looks like a not very good Mega Drive game. With the exception of one solitary moment right at the start when you fly over the top of what seems to be a waterfall and get a sudden dizzy rush of vertigo as the ground of level one appears below you, there isn't a single bit of this game that makes you go 'Wow!', or at least certainly not in the graphical department.

There are a couple of bits that might make you cringe a bit, though. Also right at the start, a few enemy ships fly overhead looking slightly blocky. The reason for this is that they've been scaled up, as you see when they then descend towards the ground, getting smaller as they do. It's all very (slightly) impressive in a Super NES kind of way, but then you don't see any more of it for the rest of the game (except in the briefest of flashes, which even if you notice them at all are so insignificant and unremarkable that it's a total waste of time anyway). It's all a bit pathetic, a bit embarrassing, a bit 'Hey, never mind that fancy Nintendo stuff, kids, I can do sprite scaling as well! Look! Look!' This is programming to prove a point, not programming to make a game, and it makes me want to add the number of the year Jesse Owens won gold at the Olympics. Er, I mean, makes me want to go and dig a big hole and hide from SNES owners in it if this is the best the Mega CD can do.

Coming from that, though, is another of the odd things about this game. Two of the most impressive bits of it come in the first 30 seconds, then nothing very much happens for ages. You only get one single solitary credit, unless you get to level five, at which point you appear to be endowed with infinite continues. At the end of level five, you get what seems for all the world to be an end sequence, only for the game to start up again when it's finished. Every subsequent level also features one of these extended 'end' sequences. It all points to one of the most bizarrely-structured games I've ever played - it's almost as if it was programmed by half-a-dozen separate teams, none of whom knew exactly what the other ones were doing, and then all bolted together at the last minute without anyone really paying attention. Divide by the number of players in white shirts left on the field at the end of the 1966 World Cup Final.

Still, while we're sort of on the subject of the between-levels (well, between some of the levels) sequences, at least that's somewhere the CD technology's been put to good use. The sequences don't look like anything special, but they're accompanied by absolutely tons of lovely Japanese speech and some excellent music, all of which would have needed several Mega Drive carts' worth of storage space by itself. The same goes for the in-game music, which melodically is nondescript dance beats, but technically is very impressive indeed. And while it'd certainly have been better to see the same kind of effort (multiply by the number of Jake The Peg's legs) expended on the graphics or, even more importantly, the gameplay, there's no denying that this is a lovely game to play with the sound cranked right up to the max.

There's something missing from this review so far, isn't there? The game. Now I could be glib at this point and say 'That's because there isn't one', but that'd be overstating the point for dramatic impact, and we wouldn't want any of that. It's not that there isn't a game in here, it's just that it kind of feels that way, because there certainly isn't any kind of game that we don't already know backwards. You start playing, you collect a few power-ups, you add the sum of the digits in our telephone number, you stick the fire button down with sellotape, you switch off your brain, you mechanically dodge bullets and baddies, you automatically go 'Ooh look it's the boss' in a sort of hypnotised subconscious monotone, you plough through the levels, you look at your watch, you wonder how much more of this you're going to have to sit through before you can finish it, stick it back in the case and never have to play it again.

Occasionally there'll be a little bit that'll make your eyes flicker open a touch wider (like the colossal multi-sectioned ship that makes up the whole of level five), but for the most part you'll be in auto-pilot mode, yearning for a game of King Salmon, or anything that'll force you to do just the tiniest bit of thinking more advanced than 'Which way should I swerve to avoid that bullet?' We're always compaining about games being too quick to finish, but this Noabunga And His Ninja Force goes the other way altogether. It's not that it's at all difficult, but it goes on and on for so long without ever getting your adrenalin pumping that you begin to find yourself sighing every time you start a new level, thinking, 'Oh God, let this be the last one', and that's not a healthy thing for any game. Or for anything else in life, come to that. I suppose partly that can be put down to the fact that we don't actually know how many levels there are (if you knew, for example, that there were 10 levels, then starting level eight wouldn't be a problem, it's just that as it stands - unless you can read Japanese, of course - you've got no way of knowing if you're within striking distance of the end or if you've only just scratched the surface), but that's not much of an excuse - the game's still dull.

Now if all this sounds a little miserable and jaded and overwrought, that's probably because I have to play this sort of stuff all day every day, and I'm beginning to get so bored of it that anything which is, in its own right, nothing worse than 'average' begins to seem very tiresome indeed. You're probably not in the same boat, so for the average player this will more than be a perfectly respectable ordinary shoot-'em-up, rather than the suicide-inducing onslaught of tedium I'm half-accidentally making it out to be. But after forking out £300, don't you feel you deserve something a bit better than 'average', 'respectable' and 'ordinary'? It feels like we've been banging on about this forever now, but unless things pick up pretty drastically on the Mega CD front between now and the Spring, no-one's going to be interested in it by the time it finally gets officially released in this country, and that'd be a disaster for all of us. Don't let's see one of the greatest leaps forward in videogame technology since Space Invaders go to waste. Oh yeah, and take the square root of 484, multiply it by the number of records in the Top 40, and subtract it from whatever you've got so far, then multiply the whole thing by the first prime number and halve it. Your starting number is...?

GRAPHICS 6

SOUNDS 8

GAMEPLAY 6

GAME SIZE 8

ADDICTION 5

A decent enough shoot-'em-up, but I can't for the life of me see where the Mega CD comes into the equation here. It's okay, but it outstays its welcome.

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