The Mega Drive's seen so many great platformers (well, five or six anyway) that you'd imagine nobody would bother trying to follow something like Sonic 2 unless they'd got a game that was really a bit special. And yet it's not the case - every second game we seem to see here at MEGA is yet another tedious leap-around-aimlessly-and-twat-some-token-baddies effort, and sad to report, Bob's another one.

It's not that this is a particularly bad game, heck no. It's easy to get into, it's actually got a halfway interesting character for once (well, I'm using the word 'interesting' in a context of relevance, obviously - you wouldn't want to take Bob here down the pub and have a good old chinwag about Gorgozneyev's classic drawing-room comedies of the early 1820s or listen particularly closely to his theories on how to solve the world's economic crisis, but you could probably put up with his company without too much trouble if you somehow got yourself zapped, Tron-style, into a strange parallel video game universe after an especially rough night in front of the TV. As long as he didn't do his amusing comedy death sequences all night long, that is. But I digress.), and it all moves along at a moderately zippy pace.

It's just that it's all so lifeless - I played this for hours and I can't remember seeing a single innovative feature, or even a remotely clever combination of old ones. Bob is, if you switch your brain off when you switch your Mega Drive on, perfectly entertaining in its own insignificant and undemanding little way. It's just that 10 minutes after you start playing it, you begin to wonder why you're bothering. 10 minutes after that, you realise that you can't think of a single reason to continue - nothing's changed except the colours of the backdrops, and you couldn't really care whether Bob saves the world/rescues the princess/burns the cakes/whatever or not. Another 10 minutes in, and you've actually stopped playing, and 10 more minutes on you've forgotten that you even started. Life's too short.

40 PERCENT