HAYDN POWERS

The power of the press! As an undoubted result of our own Haydn Fitz-Williams' recent campaign on the Express Mail pages, Channel 4 have announced the long-awaited commissioning of a TV series for computer and video gamesplayers. The ten weekly programmes in the series will last for half an hour each, and the first one is scheduled to be screened in January next year. The show will be called 'GAMESMASTER' and will feature 'competitions between top players, new games reviews, international games charts, plus tips on how to crack the difficult bits in your favourite games'.

The series will be produced by an independent production company called Hewland International, and director Jane Hewland has spent over a year developing, researching and selling the idea. Announcing the project, she said, 'It has been frustrating at times. As the mother of an 11-year-old son, I could see quite clearly the enormous growth in popularity of video games, and therefore the potential for a TV series. At the time we were developing our series, I was terrified someone else would spot what we had spotted and move in ahead of us. But we were lucky and Channel 4 have been fantastically supportive. They always said they would commission the series as soon as they could find the funds and they have kept their word.'

A video gaming show has been long overdue, and it finally looks like the huge numbers of gamesplayers in this country are going to get their share of airtime. One thing seems sure, it's going to be smashing TV...

SMASHING TV

...which, by a staggeringly fortunate coincidence, leads me tidily into the next piece. When Ocean acquired the licence to convert the stunning Williams coin-op Smash TV onto the home micros, there were loud murmurs of doubt about the possibility of doing a good job on it (especially on the 8-bits). The doubts look like being dispelled though, if the C64 version is anything to go by. I saw a fairly early preview copy this week, containing just a few levels and one end-of-level boss, but the quality is quite amazing. All the baddies are present and correct, and the action doesn't slow down when lots appear at once, which bodes well for the truly genocidal later levels. All the patterns of movement have been correctly replicated, and though the firing system could benefit from a bit of tweaking (the programmers would do well to look at the direction-locking system used by Jeff Minter on his 16-bit shareware game Llamatron, another derivative of Smash TV's arcade predecessor Robotron), the conversion looks like being a major triumph.

BEG, BORROW AND BURN

This week you'd have to be off your head not to:

BEG

A copy of R-Type II (Activision), the shoot-'em-up that takes arcade emulation further than ever before. Of course, after all the to-ing and fro-ing with Activision recently, it'll probably have been delayed for another two months as I write, but if you see it, get it.

BORROW

A copy of Beast Busters (Activision again). This Operation Wolf-type scrolling blaster looks pretty close to the original, but many people will find it far too easy. Slowing down when the action hots up is a bit crap, too, but there's still loads of zombie-splattering fun to be had.

BURN

Any copies you might happen to stumble across of Champion Of The Raj (Imageworks). This latest game in the Defender Of The Crown lineage takes the minimum-gameplay and maximum disk-accessing formula to new heights (or should that be depths?), to produce one of the most breathtaking wastes of £26 yet perpetrated on the games-buying public.

HERE IT COMES AGAIN

This week in Rereleaseville, Arizona has seen the second wind treatment given to, amongst others, several one-on-one fighting games, so what better time to see just what's available at budget price in the world of...

BEAT-'EM-UPS

IK+ (The Hit Squad, £7.99 for 16-bits and £2.99 for 8-bits)

System 3's oriental rumble was regarded by many people as the ultimate game in its genre when it first appeared around four years ago. All versions of this 3-player epic of single-minded mayhem are excellent, but the Amiga one really takes the biscuit, with wonderful music, bone-crunching sound, variable speed, instinctive controls and more than a touch of humour all thrown in to make this the perfect beat-'em-up for people who hate beat-'em-ups. Our sister mag Amiga Power recently named this as No. 60 in the All-Time Top 100 Amiga Games, and it's a game every single games lover worthy of the name should own.

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

Initially released on the back of (or should that be on the front of) a rather dubious Maria Whittaker promotion, this neanderthal slasher was nevertheless a game good enough to sell in its own right. The 16-bit versions looked distinctly like C64 ports, but that was okay, as the C64 version was, like all the others, a highly entertaining hacking (that's 'hacking' in the original sense) game with some rather bloodthirsty effects and, again, a few laughs, in the shape of the dwarf who came on and dragged the defeated warriors away, booting their recently-separated heads in front of them. Having an ultimate objective makes the game a bit limited in terms of lasting appeal, but it'll take you a while to get that far.

Street Fighter (Kixx, £7.99)

Just to dispel any dangerous myth of quality control on their budget label, Kixx have also unleashed this software atrocity on the public a second time. One of the most astoundingly inept examples of 16-bit programming ever seen, this truly unplayable game also features pitiful animation, minimal player interaction (your character seems to do pretty much whatever he feels like most of the time), scrolling which stretches the bounds of credulity to their very limits, and graphics which might just tempt the unwary into believing that this was actually a halfway decent conversion of the reasonably entertaining coin-op. Don't be fooled.

PLAYING TIPS

ATOMINO (Psygnosis, ST and Amiga, £25.99)

If you've been getting your molecules in a twist over this tricky electron-manoeuvering puzzler (Not another bloody puzzler -Ed), fret no more, just try some of these passwords to the later levels.

10 - ACID

20 - ARROW

30 - EMISSION

40 - LAVA

50 - CAVE

60 - ELIXIR

70 - BONE

80 - WOOD

90 - FOUNTAIN

100 - GETWISE

GAME REVIEW

NAVY SEALS (Ocean)

Amiga, ST £25.99

The Spectrum version of this movie licence game was released quite some time ago to considerable acclaim, and the C64 and Amstrad cartridge versions have also garnered some highly respectable reviews. 16-bit owners have been waiting a long time to see it, but it's finally out, and it's...average.

The game involves you taking the parts of a team of Navy SEALS, America's elite troops, in an attempt to destroy a large number of U.S. Stinger missiles recently stolen by Arabic terrorists. Along the way, you should find time to release a captured helicopter crew, and zzzzzzzz... Sorry, dropped off for a moment there. Behind the hackneyed-to- the-point-of-absurdity plot, (for which we have to forgive Ocean as it's based on the execrable movie of the same name), Navy SEALS is a fairly standard platforms-and- ladders game, disturbingly similar in several ways to Robocop 2 and Total Recall, Ocean's other recent movie licences. Your Seal (sorry, SEAL - stands for Sea, Air, Land, apparently) leaps athletically around, shooting the bad guys and planting time bombs on the crates containing the half-inched missiles, all against a very tight time limit.

And, er, that's it. (copyright The Big Book Of Reviewer's Catchphrases, £25.53 from newsagents absolutely nowhere.) You see, there isn't very much to Navy SEALS at all. The most remarkable thing about it is the dinky little bits of animation when your SEAL swings along underneath a platform, or leaps up to surprise a terrorist from below. In every other way (graphics, sound, design, presentation), the game is average at best. The strength of the game lies in its playability and difficulty, for this isn't a game you'll complete on day one, and the undemanding nature of the purely arcade skills involved make it easy to pick up for a quick zap when you can't be bothered thinking.

HATSTAND CORNER

Top comedian and entertainer Bruce Forsyth is one of the nation's most celebrated wig-wearers. What isn't quite so well-known is that he actually chose the style and colouring of his hairpiece with a computer program similar to an identikit game once given away with ST Format. The game allowed the player to feed in a digitised photograph of a face and then add various features, and Brucie simply tried out a few different designs on top of his pixelised head until he found the one that looked the most natural. It's thought that the relatively primitive nature of the technology at that time is responsible for the atrocity which currently graces the star's otherwise shining pate.