A lot of water's passed under the Mega Drive bridge since then, though - technical achievements have reached new levels with the likes of Thunderforce IV and World Of Illusion, and platform gameplay's never been the same since a certain spiky blue dude donned his hi-tops and exploded onto the Green Hill Zone. A rewrite of Strider in this day and age would look, well, a bit sad really. Unfortunately (you could see this coming a mile off, couldn't you?), that's almost exactly what we've got.

So what happens when you bung this in the old slot? Well, first up you think 'Blimey, they must have been up all night doing the intro sequence, I don't think.' Maybe we've been spoiled recently with Mega CD stuff like Cobra Command and Green Dog and the like, but these days you expect a little more from a Mega Drive game than this. It's hardly important in the great scheme of things, I grant you, but when you see programmers not bothering to give a game a halfway-attractive front end, you begin to wonder if they've applied the same standards to actually writing the thing. Matters begin to look up ever-so-slightly when you bypass the pathetic excuse for an options screen and actually get into the game. Oh sure, it just looks like another generic forest scene, but the way our hero materialises onto the screen is really neat, and it lifts your hopes (albeit completely irrationally) for the two seconds that it takes before you start to move...

Oh dear. Get bored halfway through doing the animation frames, did we? Strider moves along very nicely as long as you keep your feet on the ground, but launch Hiryu into the air and things all begin to go a bit horribly wrong. The 'animation' for the game's most complicated and dramatic move (the forward somersault) consists of about four separate frames, each of which glides frozen through the air for a few pixels until the program decides it's time for the next one, at which point it instantly switches. It looks like bloody Thunderbirds, on a day when the guy on the other end of the strings has had a couple of shandies too many at lunchtime. Pitiful.

But - hey! - cosmetics maketh not the game, or so goes the saying which - er, I've just made up on the spot. After a couple of minutes you get used to the assault on your eyes and you stop noticing it, so it doesn't affect the gameplay. Which is a bit of a pity, really, as after five minutes of playing this you begin to wish that something would. Well, that's not strictly true - you don't wish so much for something to affect the gameplay as for something to come along and introduce some. Strider 2 has to be the most lamely-designed game we've seen here at Mega since - well, since Batman Returns last month, to be honest.

You wander along through mazes of platforms, every now and again a bad guy appears out of nowhere for you to hack up (although if you simply walk along continually swinging your sword, you'll take care of most of the opposition before you even get a chance to see it), and occasionally, if you're really lucky, there'll be a ceiling-mounted laser or something frighteningly imaginative like that to worry about. Most of the time you're playing Strider 2, there's no sense of pressure whatsoever, at least not until the seemingly arbitrary time limit runs out and you inexplicably explode, and that doesn't half make for a boring 20 minutes (or however long you can be bothered to stick with it for).

Now of course, the wrinklies among you may well be saying at this point, 'Hey, this is just a conversion of the old Amiga and ST Strider 2, it's not the programmers' fault that the design sucks.' Maybe not, but so what? Does it matter whose fault it is? A terrible game's a terrible game, whatever the extenuating circumstances might be. I'm sick of people making crap excuses for their games being rubbish, like 'Oh yeah, it's crap, but the Mega Drive doesn't have the right kind of control pad for a decent version of Smash TV, so we couldn't really have done any better' (for example).

If you can tell from the start that something's going to be a bad idea (like converting a really dull old computer game onto a fab and sexy console like the Mega Drive), then you just shouldn't bloody well do it, and that's that. If you can't do a job properly, then don't do it at all, that's what we say. At 40 quid a throw, Mega Drive game buyers deserve to be treated with a little more respect than 'Oh what the hell, let's just chuck it out and see if it makes a few quid before everyone realises they're being suckered.' And not only do they deserve it out of plain courtesy, but, as we said last month with Batman Returns, if they don't get it, there's a very real chance that they won't be Mega Drive game buyers for much longer. I believe there's a proverb about geese and golden eggs that covers the situation pretty comprehensively.

GRAPHICS 7

SOUND 5

GAMEPLAY 4

GAME SIZE 6

ADDICTION 3

Basically more of the same, but without all the drama and imagination. Better than Batman Returns, but still crap.