***** - Batman

**** - Superman

*** - Spiderman

** - He-Man

* - Piltdown Man

BLINDED BY SCIENCE

Fired by techno-lust, I set off last week for London to play Sega's latest Big Thing, the hologram game Time Traveller. Expecting, well, big things, I dropped a pound coin into the slot of the very New Age-looking machine (all clean white surfaces with the minimum of embellishments) and got ready to play...Dragon's Lair. Yup, what we've got here is another laser-disk game where your control of the hero is limited to multiple-choice actions at critical points in the game, and every mistake gets you killed with no chance to save the situation. It's not quite as timing-sensitive as it's legendary predecessor, making it easier (in fact, almost too easy) to make progress in it, but the feeling of only partial involvement is exactly the same.

As for the much-trumpeted holographics themselves, they're pretty impressive but perhaps not quite as stunning as you might have expected. Considering the enormous size of the machine, the area where the action takes place is actually very small, and the pictures are just a little fuzzy where fine detail is concerned. Don't get me wrong, this is a fabulous-looking game, and it's almost certainly a vision of the future of video games, but anyone who bothers to stick at it to the end won't find they've actually spent too much money (there's not a lot of it, and what there is isn't very taxing), and they're certainly unlikely to want to play it again. The extremely bitty nature of the gameplay lacks the dramatic flowing storyline evident in Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and the other games of that era, and once the initial buzz dies down I don't think you'll find the crowds around this machine that were always to be seen near it's ancestors. (Partly, it must be said, because the angles of visibility around the game are pretty narrow, so if you're not standing more or less in front of it you don't get to see very much, which discourages mob interest).

In fact, in the two busy city-centre arcades where I saw it, the machine was often left unattended for long periods of time in favour of the latest bog-standard beat-'em-ups and zappers, which is a bit of a worrying sign for what's supposed to be a revolution in video gaming. The real worry, though, is that if Time Traveller isn't a huge success (and I fear it won't be), the flurry of excitement will fade away and, as happened with the first laser disk games, a potentially incredible avenue of development will be left unexploited.

PREVIEW

Very close to completion now is the Amiga release of Storm's conversion of the Jaleco coin-op Rodland. Billed as a game 'so cute it'll make you puke', Rodland actually features a fine line in Tom & Jerry-style slapstick violence, as the two fairy characters the players control despatch the game's bad guys by grabbing them with a magic rod and battering them from side to side repeatedly. It looks great, as well as having tactical uses (you can use it just to flip a baddie away from you, or deflect attacks from other enemies by smashing the trapped one down on their heads.

Although the game looks like a platformer very much in the Rainbow Islands tradition, closer inspection reveals that what we in fact have here is a game strongly reminiscent (in a number of ways) of what was possibly the first cutesy arcade game ever, Mr. Do. Although platforms and ladders have replaced the underground tunnels of the early classic (converted onto almost every conceivable gaming format since, and due on the Game Boy any second now, trivia fans), much of the basic gameplay format is the same, and that's no bad thing in my book. As for the graphics, they certainly live up to the promise in the ads, in that the cute-o-meter reading goes right off the scale. Fluffy bunny rabbits, crying sharks, and the most adorably menacing squirrels you've ever seen are just a small proportion of the line-up of nasties ranged against you, and you'll love (killing) every single one of them. Game graphics in general are gorgeous, with searingly bright colours and extra little bits of animation that didn't feature in the coin-op, and the sound effects are excellent too. All that remains to be done now is the in-game music, and if that's up to the standards of the rest of Rodland - and I can't see any reason to believe it won't be - we could be looking at one of the very best games of the year.

BEG, BORROW AND BURN

HEAD OVER HEELS (The Hit Squad)

8-bit owners have been enjoying this absolutely classic piece of arcade adventuring gorgeousness for years now, but after many delays the ST and Amiga versions are finally with us too. Nothing's been changed, except for the addition of a bit of extra colour, but what that means is that this is exactly the same unfeasibly magnificent game that it always was. Whatever your machine, go out and get this today.

BUBBLE BOBBLE (The Hit Squad)

Pairs of players have been enjoying this absolutely classic piece of platform dinosaur-related fun for years, and now it's available on budget (or in Ocean's Rainbow Collection compilation) at a giveaway price on all formats. Played solo, though, you're likely to tire of it quickly, so be wary if you don't have a good friend to hand on a regular basis. Go out and take a look anyway, though.

ARMALYTE (Thalamus)

C64 owners have been enjoying this absolutely classic piece of arcade blast-'em-uppery for years, but now Thalamus have brought it bang up to date for the 16-bit machines, and what a pig's ear they've made of it. The graphics are lovely but the game is so tough that almost no-one will be able to see many of them, and presentation is stupidly thoughtless into the bargain. Just go out.

HERE IT COMES AGAIN

Under my bed I keep a huge box of faxes I've had from people saying 'Yo, Stuart, I've been chillin' in the area for months now, but I still haven't really managed to find any games with the letter 'V' in their names. Rave on.' I haven't actually got a fax machine myself, so I haven't been able to reply to them until now. I think it's time I put that right with a round-up of all the top re-releases in that very category...

GAMES WITH THE LETTER 'V' IN THEIR TITLES

VIGILANTE (Kixx, £7.99 for 16-bits, £3.99 for 8-bits)

An arcade beat-'em-up most remarkable for having the objective of rescuing a kidnapped Madonna, Vigilante was all the same a pretty respectable kickin' and punchin' potboiler in the Kung Fu Master tradition. While this conversion captures the look almost perfectly, someone obviously decided at some point that the less-than-breathtaking speed of the original was still just a bit too much for your average punter and slowed the whole thing down to a point where if you weren't careful, you could actually find yourself going back in time while you were playing it, ending up at the finish sequence of the game some three hours before you'd actually got up that morning. While this temporal quirk did have its advantages (Missed the bus? Forgotten that important appointment? Just put on your suit, have a couple of quick games of Vigilante and bingo!), it failed spectacularly to provide anything very much in the way of entertainment. A veritable day trip to Dullsville, in fact. *

BEACH VOLLEY (The Hit Squad, £7.99 for 16-bits only)

One of the first 16-bit only games from the Manchester software behemoths, Beach Volley was most interesting for the fact that Ocean picked for this groundbreaking step a game so simplistic that it could have run on a VIC-20 without expansion. Two-a-side volleyball doesn't allow for a lot of scope in the gameplay department, and indeed you don't get any. Scope OR gameplay, that is. The graphics did the state-of-the-art machines proud, but the controls were appalling and the characters leapt around so enthusiastically that to be able to anticipate their movements well enough to hit the ball at any point called for the skills of a crystal ball reader and the reactions of a Siamese twin. This was the kind of game people loaded up and left running in computer shops to impress passers-by, but no-one ever actually played it very much. There's no reason for that to change now. *

DEVENDER OF THE CROWN (Mirror Image, £10.99 on 16-bits only)

No, sorry, this is a joke. In both senses. *

GAME REVIEW

DARKMAN (Ocean)

Spectrum, £9.99

Seasons come and seasons go, but in these ever-changing times of attempted coups and global uncertainty there's always one thing you can rely on - Ocean movie licence games. The latest one to hit the Speccy (and of course all the other formats, although the actual game differs from machine to machine) is Sam Raimi's Darkman, the not-all-that-big pseudo-superhero 'hit' from a few months back, now languishing on video shop shelves all over the country. The Spec game takes the usual format, lots of little sub-games themed on various parts of the movie, with the standard mix of beat-'em-up bits, platform bits, beat-'em-up platform bits, you know the story.

The first section puts our disfigured hero in Chinatown (heavily disguised as a burst-scrolling Double Dragon-ish fighting sequence), where he finds himself pitted against a motley crew of villains who - gallantly, I think - always take him on two or three at a time. Other hazards include dogs, deadly blobs which drift across the screen in pairs, and the complete boredom which inevitably sets in after half-a-minute or so. Next there's a quick throwaway shooting gallery sequence (though nominally you're taking photographs, it still amounts to the same old Op Wolf stuff), and then onto the platforms-and-ladders section.

This features much the same shallow and simplistic beat-'em-up stuff as the Chinatown level, but with less colour and more danger. The difficulty level is in fact one of the better things about this game, it's certainly not easy, but the problem is that there isn't any incentive in the way of exciting or involving gameplay to make you want to stick at the challenge. The truth of the matter is, by the time I'd made it to the next level (the none-too-thrilling rooftop 'chase') I was already playing the game purely out of duty. After losing my last life and having to restart right back in Chinatown I though 'Bugger duty, I'm not playing this old tosh any more' and binned it. It could be said that Darkman was fighting a losing battle from the start, being based on a not-very-successful film, but there really isn't any excuse for such a tired and unrewarding game as this. Justice may have a brand new face, but it's the face of a clown. **

OSCAR CORNER

Oscar The Grouch, that is. You'll have noticed that there aren't any playing tips in the column this week, and it's because I've got a question to ask. There's something that's been puzzling me ever since I started doing this job. Why do people send in game cheats that don't work? Every day our mailbag bulges with letters from people claiming to have 'discovered' some password or code for some game or other, only to have it checked out and found to be completely useless. (Like, someone actually sent in a 'cheat' the other week for Xenon 2 by the Bitmap Brothers, a team who've gone on record as saying they never put cheat modes in their games. Needless to say, it didn't work.). What do they get out of it? Is is some sort of sad cry for help, a little 'notice me' plea, or is it all some incomprehensible joke? I don't get it. Even if one slips through unchecked, all it achieves is to make the sender look stupid when 20,000 people try it out with no success and think 'Hmph, what a prat'. Please don't do it.

FISHPASTE CORNER

More strange-but-true snippets that the industry would rather you didn't know about.

- Top Bitmap Brother Eric Matthews is really a woman, and only appears in moodily-lit publicity shots wearing shades to conceal his true identity.

- Image Works' top god game Mega lo Mania is actually based on a concept stolen from a 1979 Commodore Pet game called 'Mussolini'.

- The Amiga version of top classic puzzle game Tetris was programmed in a drunken haze one night 'for a joke'.

- Roger Bennett of top industry watchdog body ELSPA was once a chimney sweep, but gave the job up for health reasons.

- Top dead industry figure Gary Penn's last words before his grisly murder were the prophetic 'There's nothing big or hard or clever about enormous guns', uttered after playing a preview copy of US Gold's Alien Storm.

- Author of Populous Peter Molyneux was once refused an entry visa to the USA on the grounds of being a suspected top Communist.

- There weren't many interesting games released this week.