Mega Drive cartridges cost, apparently, around £10 to manufacture, helping to explain the high price of games. CDs, however, are something closer to a quid (helping to explain why the latest Michael Jackson album doesn't cost £40). When people first heard about the Mega CD and suggested that these lower costs might help bring the price of software down a bit, Sega and the software firms were quick to pooh-pooh the idea, claiming that with so many hundreds of megabytes of storage space to fill with game (odd how they suddenly stopped referring to the 'Megabit' around that time, wasn't it?), increased development costs would keep prices (coincidentally) around the same level. Where, then, does something like Wolfchild figure in the equation? To all intents and purposes, this is a game ported directly over from the Amiga (yeah, yeah, enhanced sound, a few more levels, blah blah blah), so development time must have amounted to, ooh, a good three or four weeks at least. On the Amiga, where nearly all of the involved and costly development work was done in the first place, Wolfchild cost £25. Now it's £40. Punters, someone, somewhere, is driving a Lamborghini Diablo at high speed down a private track, and you're paying for the petrol.

Anyway, let's get on with the game review. Or on second thoughts, let's not bother. This is a platform game so bog-standard that it makes Hook look like a picture of inspiration. It got mixed reviews when it appeared on the Amiga in the first place, and that was a year and a half ago. It's got nine levels (Wow! Nine! gobble up that storage space!) of which the first few are titchy (you'll go through the first one in two minutes, tops), graphics which look, well, like a year-and-a-half-old Amiga game, (and not a particularly good-looking one at that) the usual sound (save for a nice howl when your character changes into a wolf Ð the game is essentially Hook meets Altered Beast) and gameplay so hackneyed you could probably flag it down and get it to drive you around London for money. Still can't really see where the £40's going, unless it's on the ludicrous packaging, a huge triple-CD case with one CD and an instruction manual in it. Rainforests? Ozone layer? Who needs 'em?

We've complained before about games not making the fullest use of the Mega CD's advanced facilities, but this is really getting beyond a joke. Were Wolfchild to come out on cart (and I can't for the life of me see a single reason why it couldn't), it'd get a lukewarm reception and a swift trip to the back of the software cupboard. On £40's worth (yeah, right) of CD, and £270's worth of hardware, it's little short of two fingers flicked up at the game-buying public (that's you and me, folks). Come off it, JVC.

48 PERCENT