Dinamic, the Spanish team who programmed this game and originally released it (via the defunct Imagine label), got themselves quite a reputation back in the late-to-mid 1980s for games like this one. Game Over, Game Over 2, Army Moves, Army Moves 2, Navy Moves, Freddy Hardest (and several sequels) and more besides all boasted big, cartoony graphics, bold swathes of colour splashed around, multi-section design (indeed, the games were among the first to use multiloading), and some of the most frustratingly difficult gameplay around. Most of the time, the games were very simple, very fast, and very tricky, bumping the short-term addictiveness levels to unheard-of heights, but in the end proving just too demanding and annoying for the majority of players to bother completing them. Navy Moves is no exception to these rules.

There are several elements to the game, with Moon Patrol (anyone remember that?) -style scrolly-jumpy bits, horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up action, and platforms-and-ladders sequences, also with lots of shooting just to keep things interesting. Well, it keeps it interesting if you can get that far, anyway. The problem with Navy Moves is that your chances of getting that far depend entirely on how much provocation you can take before wrenching the cassette violently from your tape deck, hurling it with all the force you can muster against the nearest wall, and then jumping up and down on top of whatever's left for half an hour with your biggest boots on until you're quite sure the thing isn't going to come back to haunt you any more.

Yep, this is one aggravating game, and indeed the only reason I'm reviewing it is that nobody else on YS could get past the incredibly irritating first section where you have to navigate a jittery speedboat across a choppy sea littered with deadly mines. If you can muster the self-discipline to get through this section (and that's a pretty big 'if', if the truth be known), the rest of it isn't quite so bad, and the fast-moving action-packedness of things tends to take your mind off how many times you've actually been killed in the last five minutes. All the same, this is only recommended to those of you who find nailing jelly to the ceiling just a little bit too easy.

60%

BLIM!

The world's smallest navy is that of Switzerland. As the country has no oceanic borders whatsoever, the fleet in actual fact consists of one small canoe (paddled by the Grand Admiral-In-Chief) which patrols the ornamental pond of the government buildings in Berne, removing dead ceremonial goldfish.