***** - Anthony Perkins

**** - Dennis Hopper

*** - Anthony Hopkins

** - Jack Nicholson

* - Robert Englund

MAGIC POCKETS

16-bitters will doubtless already have noticed Prism's Pocket Power range of Amiga, ST and PC games at the astonishing price point of £2.99, but many have turned up their noses at the old and often very creaky games available. All that's set to change though, as the company have just added a whole swathe of new titles to the collection, and some of them are of an extremely impressive nature. Archipelagos, Quadralien, Prospector In The Mazes Of Xor, Star Goose and Star Ray (all originally from Logotron) are just some of the names which have previously attracted 80 and 90% reviews in the computing press, and all of them are games which would command a respectable following in the ordinary budget market.

To be able to pick them up for less than the prices charged by some PD libraries, then, has to be regarded as a bargain of the very first order. My personal favourite is probably Star Goose, a simple but classy pseudo-3D vertically- scrolling blaster with echoes of Gremlin's H.A.T.E. (recently given away on the cover of this very magazine), but Star Ray is a well-loved Defender clone with graphics which are still pretty striking today (although they do obscure the action a smidgen), a good three years after the game's original release. If Prism can keep up this kind of quality at this price (and with another load on the way very soon - including a number of games from the now-defunct Hewson label, and the original version of the all-time classic Boulder Dash - there's no reason to suspect they won't) , I think there are going to be a lot of very worried software houses out there by Christmas. Do yourself a favour and splash out - what have you got to lose?

(PS Top Tip of the month - if you're an ST owner, buy Star Ray first...)

LOST YOUR MARBLES?

Then why not check your console? Atari's vintage cult coin-op Marble Madness has suffered from a few terrible conversions in its time (the Spectrum version being particularly lamentable), but it looks like things could be put right this year. Virgin are hard at work on the almost-complete Sega Master System version, and Mindscape hope to have the game running on the Game Boy by Christmas. It's going to be interesting to see how the original's trackball movement system transfers to the console joypads, but if the control (which, let's face it, is the all-important thing in this game) works out well, we could be looking at a couple of smash hits.

LIKE A HURRICANE

Digital Integration is a name that hasn't been heard in software circles for a few years now. Best know to older gamers as the creators of Fighter Pilot, the first successful action flight sim (ie one where you got to shoot things), DI released a number of 16-bit titles over the years without notable success. Now they've gone back to their roots with Tornado, a flight sim based on the top NATO aircraft of the same name. There's not much to see at the moment, but DI promise a 'new generation of flight simulator', with high density of ground objects (a welcome change from all those games with stunning buildings separated by miles and miles of featureless green), 'exceptional detail', intelligent enemies, and all the usual techie nonsense. Watch out for it on the 16-bit formats in the middle of next year.

DI have been active in other areas, though, as the name behind budget label Action Sixteen. This re-release vehicle has seen some quality software, most notably North & South and Super Gridrunner, and now DI are looking to capitalise with the setting up of a 'Premier' collection within the range. Coming in at the higher price level of £9.99, the Premier name will cover higher-quality, multiple-disk games and allow for more extensive documentation. The first titles will be 3D shoot-'em-up ATFII and the strategy RPGish Iron Lord. The normal Action Sixteen range will continue as previously, with the Loriciels duo of Tennis Cup and Tintin On The Moon also hitting those much-battered streets any day now.

GAME REVIEW

Dragon's Lair (Nintendo)

Game Boy, £25 (import)

Dragon's Lair. Now there's a name to bring a lump to the throat of videogaming veterans everywhere. Still probably the most 'gosh wow' thing ever to happen in an arcade, the original laser disk coin-op featured Disney-quality cartoon animations (not surprising when you consider it was done by Don Bluth, an ex-Disney artist) in a 'rescue-the-princess-from-the-dragon' fantasy epic which didn't boast anything very much in the way of gameplay, but was still an experience never to be forgotten for anyone who played it. You might think, then, that the very last machine it would suit conversion to would be the Game Boy. And you'd be right. Game Boy Dragon's Lair bears no resemblance whatsoever to the arcade monster, being instead a pretty traditional scrolling platformer in the Mario/Castlevania/Gargoyle's Quest style that's so at home on Nintendo's hugely successful hand-held. The only link with the original is the central character, Dirk The Daring (despite a box illustration showing him posing happily with Princess Daphne and Singe the dragon from the first game, his two companions don't make an appearance this time round), and really, he could have been anyone. But enough history.

This new Dragon's Lair carries one tradition over from its ancestor, and that's the stunning graphics. Beautiful, detailed and atmospheric, these are quite possibly the best backdrops the little machine's ever seen. A fairly slow pace avoids blurring problems (you can choose fast mode if you prefer, but it's close to unplayable), but the level of detail is such that it actually causes some confusion over where Dirk can safely stand and which ground features are deadly to the touch. Matters aren't helped by the very imprecise and inconsistent collision detection where platforms are concerned (Dirk frequently finds himself standing on thin air with the floor going through his chest), but you do eventually get used to it. Not that that means it's an easy game, in fact it's one of the trickiest I've encountered, but the addictive qualities suffer when you lose a life by falling through a seemingly-solid platform that you were standing on quite safely a moment earlier.

I don't want to be too negative, because Dragon's Lair is still loads of fun, but from Sullivan Bluth I would have expected just a little bit more care than this. Take a look, anyway. ***

DESPERATE HASBEENS CORNER

The games industry reeled with confusion this month as the nation's news-stands saw the appearance of two publications both boasting to be the country's best-selling Amiga games magazine. One of the mags (a pretty feeble low-budget effort by all accounts) claimed the honour on the rather sad and pathetic grounds that the other didn't actually have an official ABC circulation figure (not having been on sale for long enough yet), but as the first rag's ABC is a cobbled-together thing made up of figures dating from a time when it was a multi-format mag selling to Amiga, ST and PC owners, and is currently the subject of an investigation following a series of complaints from several other publishers, it seems likely that a humiliating climbdown may be imminent. NCE says: wake up and smell the cat food, boys. You can fool some of the people etc.

POPULOUS (Tecmagik)

Sega Master System, £34.95

Synchronicity city! No sooner do I run a load of level codes for the re-released 16-bit version of Bullfrog's classic god sim, than Tecmagik come up with the official release of the Master System version. Now before all you ST and Amiga owners scoff and say 'Populous? On an 8-bit console? Don't make me laugh', it should be noted that this particular version features 5000 worlds, some 4500 more than the originals. Now numbers aren't everything, but when you discover what an excellent copy this is in every other respect also, it's time to sit up and take notice.

The Teccies (as absolutely no-one has ever called them) have done a stunning job of translating the graphics to Sega's ageing machine, and the control system has been tweaked to be rather more accessible (as well as more suitable for the Master System's yukky joypad), making this version the easiest one of all to get into. The gameplay has survived the journey completely intact too, and this is generally an all-round programming triumph.

The game itself you should all be familiar with by now (and if you're not I haven't got the space to go into it all now anyway, so I'll just say that it's original, challenging and mightily addictive), so you shouldn't need any further recommendation to go out and add this to your Master System collection this very minute. The one downer is the slightly alarming £34.95 price ticket (even more jarring now that the Amiga and ST versions are available for a tenner), but if you're going to spend £30 on a cart anyway, you might as well go the whole hog and get something really special. The MS hasn't seen anything like it before, and with 5000 worlds, I don't think we're going to hear many complaints about value-for-money this time. *****

PLAYING TIPS

ARMOUR-GEDDON (Psygnosis, Amiga)

On the HQ screen, when a message is showing and highlighted in yellow, click on the first letter of the message while holding down the Escape key. 'A strange message' (according to a Psygnosis spokesman) should now appear, and you will be endowed with infinite fuel and shields. Also, if you load up one shell or missile, you'll get infinite amounts of those, too.

Tangram (Thalion, Amiga and ST)

If you're really, really bored, and in a fit of temporary insanity you decide that you'd really like to spend some of your life playing this pointless and tedious conversion of the ancient Oriental board game, you might have a slightly less miserable time if you access some of the more interesting (in the loosest possible sense) levels using these codes. Then again you might not, but in that case it serves you bloody well right for loading up the dreadful lump of crap in the first place. Do I look like a social worker?

10 - 07274

20 - 14278

30 - 81093

40 - 47672

50 - 27277

60 - 02675

70 - 47274

80 - 91281

WARTY ROCK GOD CORNER

An unprecedented number of entries for the 'Ace Of Spades' competition in issue 147, but the lucky winner is the very rock'n'rollishly-named Nigel Crooks of Middlesborough, who cleverly saw through my elaborate bluff and correctly stated that the Motorhead song featuring the line 'Moving like a parallelogram' was, in fact, 'Motorhead'. A surprise package of software will be winging its way in your direction, Nige, as soon as you give us a call and tell us what kind of machine you've got. (But I hope it's an Amiga...) This week's incredibly elaborate and involved competition has been postponed until next week, when the Games Week prize-buying budget has recovered from this unexpected shock.