They test your hand-eye co-ordination, your strategic development skills, your peripheral vision and your powers of lateral thinking. Good gameplaying is an art and a talent that's easily up there with the best of any 'proper' sport, and it's about time it was recognised as such. I mean, never mind all that Olympic crap where people get gold medals and untold fame and fortune for being able to run in a straight line for 10 seconds, what about a World Championship for, say, Super High Impact? Think how impressed the global TV audience would be with the amazing array of skills on display as players struggled against all the odds to make a touchdown by, er, pressing the 'A' button eight times.

I stuck this cart into the office Mega Drive, having never played the arcade game it's a conversion of. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't bother reading the instruction manual, just picked a couple of teams and got straight down to it. I lost the toss and received the ball from the kick off on my 30 yard line. I checked out the bewildering range of possible offensive plays, and plumped completely at random for whatever one happened to be in the middle of the screen at the time (I think it was called 'Flood' or something similar).

The two teams lined up, danced around a bit and shouted a couple of insults at each other ('Yer toast!' and 'Yer mommy's boys!', in charmingly butch sampled speech). I pressed the 'A' button (it seemed like a logical thing to do) and the ball snapped back to my quarterback. Flushed with success, I pressed the 'A' button again (hey, why muck around with a winning formula?). The quarterback flung the ball athletically up towards one of my receivers, who gratefully and just as athletically made a great catch before being brutally knocked to the ground by the opposing defence. Never mind, 19 yards gained and first down. 'This is a great tactic,' I thought, and promptly tried exactly the same one again for the next play. Bingo! Another 21 yards gained! Surely it couldn't work again, could it?

Funnily enough, it did. I was a bit slow on the button this time, so I only made 14 yards before getting clobbered, but it didn't matter because I was only 16 yards from the line. Breathless with the tension and excitement, I lined my boys up for one last push. Select that move! Press that button! Press that button again! Touchdown!

Now I don't know about you, but when I play a game I like to feel as if I'm actually achieving something. Road Rash wouldn't be any fun if the other bikes just sat on the starting line and let you ride off all by yourself, would it? It seems to me, then, that Super High Impact leaves just a little bit to be desired in the challenge and reward department. Fair enough, I was playing on the easiest of the three difficulty settings, but even so eight presses of a random button without the first glance at the instructions really oughtn't to produce such startling success in my book. I wouldn't have minded so much if I'd just been lucky, but it worked every single time I got possession of the ball.

It's a pity, because Super High Impact really looks the part. The graphics are big, colourful, fast and smooth, and there are some really nifty digitised animations and speech samples accompanying the game which do a lot for the atmosphere. For a bit of a break from the constant 'football' action, you even get a selectable 'fight' option, whereby every now and again the teams will suddenly leap up and start pummelling the living daylights out of each other. Batter the three fire buttons fast enough and you'll win the fight, with the opposing team sent flying onto the turf. Sadly, and a little confusingly, there's absolutely no point to it - you get no advantage of any kind from winning, and no penalties for losing. But what the heck, it's a bit of a chuckle anyway. Similarly, when you make a particularly crunching defensive tackle, you get a rating on the 'Hit-O-Meter' to show how tough you are, but it's got no other purpose than as a bit of window dressing.

Everything else about the game is pretty well thought out too - the control system and the method of choosing plays are both really easy and natural to use once you do read the manual, and even if you don't know the first thing about American football you'll pick up what's going on very quickly (certainly more so than you did in John Madden's). It's just that all the game's excellent features are rendered utterly useless by the fact that the gameplay just isn't there at all. I don't care how pretty it looks, I don't care how slick it is, I don't care how close it is to the arcade game, I don't care how great all the little extra frills are, pressing the 'A' button eight times to score a touchdown isn't top American football thrills and that's that.

GRAPHICS 8

SOUND 8

GAME SIZE 3

GAMEPLAY 3

ADDICTION 5

Why does anyone bother trying to outdo John Madden Football on the Mega Drive when they're so obviously not going to manage it? This is a good copy of the coin-op (we got someone to check), but it's a really dull game.

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