The Wild West - I like the way that sounds. In fact, I think I might start getting everybody around here to start calling me 'Wild' from now on. So much more exotic than 'Neil', doncha think? And I'm the editor, so if they don't do it, I can sack 'em. Ha! But anyway, the Wild West - it's a great setting for videogame larks and japes, and I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen more cowboy games on the Mega Drive before now. Konami have done their bit to redress the balance with this coin-op conversion, and if Sunset Riders is anything to go by, in a year from now the idea of a game hero who doesn't wear sheepskin chaps will seem as ridiculous as, er, a superfast spinning blue hedgehog. Um. This isn't going well so far, is it? Let's try again.

Sunset Riders is a conversion of a Konami coin-op. It's a scrolling platform shoot-'em-up in the style of Rolling Thunder. It's got eight levels, and one or two players can plzzzzz - oops, sorry. That wasn't very exciting either, was it? Maybe a different approach is called for.

Bum! Wow! This is just the best game since, well, the last game we reviewed! It's brilliant! It'll make you wet your pants with excitement - I know I did! Its f - no, hang on, I've done that routine before. Another go.

Perhaps the best thing is if I just tell you how much I enjoyed playing this game. We see lots of platformers every month here on MEGA, and lots of 'em are perfectly decent, with even the odd one that you could describe as 'good'. Mostly though, even the good ones are nothing we haven't seen before, and hence the number of them that we ever load up and play once the review's done could be fairly comfortably counted on the fingers of one plastic football from Woolworths. Sunset Riders is a bit different, though. Y'see, Sunset Riders actually brought a smile to my face while I played it, not just once but, ooh, several times. Not just a laughing kind of smile, either (y'know, the kind of smile you get when playing G-LOC and thinking 'Hey, I didn't pay 40 quid for this'), but a good old-fashioned 'Blimey, this is a really good game - I'm enjoying myself' kind of smile as well. It's just... nice.

As I said, it's much the same game as Rolling Thunder at heart, which is to say you trog along the screen from left to right and shoot bad guys. The action takes place mostly on two vertical levels, with an athletic one-handed leap bringing you from one to the other, and the landscape is cunningly designed to provide lots of places for meanies to conceal themselves. It's an unusually interactive landscape too, in as much as that there are barrels suspended from roofs (for no immediately obvious reason) that you can shoot loose and drop on baddies' heads, telegraph poles that can knock you flying off the train you clamber across on level two, dynamite that you can pick up and lob back at the bad guys before it explodes, and stuff like that. Even the scenery conceals gameplay features, like the saloons on level one which house, er, 'actresses' who give you power-ups and bonuses before sending you on your way with a healthy smooch.

It's lovely to play, with responsive controls which make leaping into the air while simultaneously shooting diagonally below you seem like the easiest and most natural thing in the world, and butch, bright, glowing graphics that give you a real urge to get to the next stage. The gameplay IS pretty short on variety, but what kind of a criticism's that? Sonic 2 isn't exactly a new experience a second, is it? More tangible are the differences that have been made to the original arcade game - you only get to choose from two characters instead of four, and the bonus stage is different, being more like an entire horse-based normal section from the coin-op, which is also missing here. But at the end of the day, who cares as long as it's still fun, eh?

As if all this wasn't enough, there's even a fun little two-player VS game thrown in, where you and a chum take one character each and stand at either end of a single screen, leaping around and shooting at each other. There are three different screens of this, and first to two victories is the, er, victor. Okay, it's not Street Fighter II, but it's a smart little diversion from a game that doesn't really need to be diverted from.

There isn't a lot to this (almost by definition - it's an arcade game, after all), but if you compare it to something like Hook, which is pretty undeniably technically superior (better music, more levels, more depth, all the rest of it), you suddenly realise how little fun there is to be had from technical superiority on its own. I've finished this already (on Easy level, anyway), but I still keep going back and playing it, and the chances of Hook ever coming out of the game cupboard again are infinitesimal. I like this, and I don't care what anybody says.

GRAPHICS 8

SOUND 7

GAMEPLAY 8

GAME SIZE 6

ADDICTION 8

A simple arcade game for sure, but fast, funny and more simple fun than any Mega Drive platformer I've played in months.

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