**** - Terminator

*** - Predator

** - Pumping Iron

* - The Jayne Mansfield Story

FALLING IN LOVE

Some of our older readers may remember the heyday of the 8-bits. Way back then, when dinosaurs (the VIC-20, the ZX81, the Electron) still walked the Earth, there was a game called Head Over Heels, an isometric-3D-puzzle- arcade-adventure in the mould of the legendary Knight Lore. An absolutely wonderful piece of software, it took its genre to the very limits, and quickly became one of the most-played games ever. Since the rise to prominence of the 16-bits, there have been rumours of impending conversion, but only now has it finally happened. Ocean's programmers have finally almost completed the ST and Amiga ports, and the Manchester giants are, admirably, releasing the game straight onto their £7.99 Hit Squad label. Nothing much has changed from the original versions, the graphics, sound and map layouts are all the same as before, and my sentimental old heart would like to think that Head Over Heels is set to enjoy a whole new lease of life, as 16-bit gamers discover what things used to be like in the days when you couldn't bury tedious games beneath a mountain of pretty graphics and samples in order to make them sell. Much more than just another nostalgia trip, Head Over Heels is simply one of the best games you're ever likely to play. Start camping outside your favourite software shop today.

ALL TOGETHER NOW

Blimey, it must have been at least six weeks since Domark released a compilation. Surely it's time for another couple? And sure enough, a quick peek at the release schedules show that right about now you should be able to find on the shelves not one, not three, but two collections of 'classics' all bunged into one box for your composite gaming pleasure. Grandstand is a sports set, comprising Pro Tennis Tour, Leaderboard and Continental Circus, with Gazza's Super Soccer taking the filler position. Virtual Worlds contains three re-released Freescape games (Driller, Total Eclipse and Castle Master) along with one unreleased Freescape game, the Castle Master follow-up The Crypt. Prices are £29.99 for the 16-bit packs, and £14.99 for the 8-bit versions.

BEG, BORROW, AND BURN

BEG

Mega-lo-Mania (Imageworks)

Described by some as 'Populous with laughs', Mega-lo-Mania manages to rise above both its obvious origins and the ridiculous hyphenating of its title to prove a maddeningly addictive god sim which doesn't have to take itself seriously to be a seriously great game. Extremely tough but enormously rewarding, Mega-lo-Mania treads the fine line between compulsion and frustration perfectly.

BORROW

The Simpsons (Ocean)

Okay, so you don't actually have much option with this one, as the only other way of getting a copy is to go and fork out £400 on the new Amiga Cartoon Classics pack. But if you've got a new-Amiga-owning chum, you can have some pretty excellent fun with this surprisingly good Bart licence. Ocean have pulled their socks up a bit after a recent poor run and produced a game which, while by no means stunning, is just a little bit more intelligent and entertaining than most of us had been expecting.

BURN

Metal Mutant (Silmarils/Palace)

Everybody likes it, I don't care. This tedious scrolling beat-'em-up is slow, repetitive, unimaginative, incredibly shallow, unpleasant to control and generally unimpressive at best in every area. Screen after screen of the same old yawn-inducing baddy-thumping action sends you into a stupor quicker than snorting Pernod, and if you're the kind of person who's likely to buy it, please stop now. Or preferably just kill yourself.

HERE IT COMES AGAIN

Y'know, dear hearts, I simply couldn't count the number of people who've come up to me and said, 'Stuart, I'm completely bored with playing the same tedious old shoot-'em-up/beat-'em-up/flight sim games week in, week out. Why can't software houses release something just a little bit different every once in a while?' That's probably only because I can't count past five, but in any case what I always say to people like that is 'Ah, but they have. Why, you only have to look at some of the great re-releases currently nestling on the shelves of your local software emporium to see that it's true.' At this point they invariably say, 'Tell me more, Stuart!', which is why, to save myself some time, I've decided that this week I'll be taking a retrospective kind of look at some games which are just a little bit...

OFF THE WALL

TOOBIN' (£7.99 on Respray for 16-bits, £3.99 on The Hit Squad for 8-bits)

Toobin' brings you the dubious pleasure of sailing down an alligator-infested river in an old tyre inner tube with your backside hanging out of the hole in the middle. The pneumatic nature of your transport makes you prone to all sorts of inflatable-rupturing dangers, including sharp rocks, fishermen's hooks and rotting logs, which you have to avoid by paddling away from them or throwing Coke tins at them. So far so pleasurably wacky, but when you come to the gameplay it all falls apart quicker than a wonky Lada. Control is sluggish, imprecise and unnatural, and the different levels change only in terms of scenery. You don't really feel that you've got much influence over the watery goings-on, and despite being (on all formats) a pretty decent conversion of the coin-op in most respects, Toobin' was simply never much of a game in the first place. *

ZANY GOLF (Electronic Arts, £9.99 on 16-bits only)

This is more like it, though. Crazy golf has always been one of the more inventive pseudo-sports around, and this computer version does a surprisingly good job of capturing the essential feel of the real thing. In fact, stick a big fan beside you while you're playing and get a friend to chuck some sand in its general direction, and you'll be hard pushed to tell that you're not really on the promenade at Southport at all. Zany Golf also takes advantage of the medium to produce holes which would be impossible in real life, yet fit perfectly into the spirit of the genuine article. Play - for up to four players for that all-important competitive edge - is intuitive and slick, and apart from having a few more holes than the rather limited nine supplied, you couldn't really ask for more from this game. More enjoyable as a one-player game than most others of this ilk, Zany Golf nonetheless really comes into its own when you get a few pals in, and in that mode it's a classic. ****

NORTH & SOUTH (£7.99 on Action Sixteen for 16-bits....)

The French wargame is a very rare breed on these shores ('What shores?' 'Oh, a triple vodka and Drambuie for me, thanks'), indeed as far as I know it's a breed with only one member. North & South is a game set in the American Civil War, and lets you control either side in an attempt to capture the whole country, by means of some very simplistic board-game-style battling, supplemented by optional arcade sequences. The major strong point of the game is the beautiful, funny presentation, and indeed if you choose not to bother with the arcade sub-games the gameplay is very thin indeed, but all the same this is a fast-moving and entertaining game that'll bring more than the odd chuckle to the most weary of gamers' faces. ***

Nebulus 2 (Pogo-A-Go-Go)

21st Century Entertainment, £25.99 for ST and Amiga

The original Nebulus was one of the best games ever to grace any computer. It has appeared on the Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, Amiga, ST, Game Boy and Nintendo NES, and was received everywhere with critical delight. The simple climb up/fall down nature of the tower-ascending gameplay, coupled with the gorgeous rotation scrolling, cutesy characters, and lovely presentation touches ensured a monstrously addictive game which created armies of devoted fans everywhere it went. Now the resurrected Hewson label (er, I mean, the completely-new-and-not-in-any-way-connected-to-the-veteran- software-house-which-crashed-only-a-few-months-ago-with- horrific-debts 21st Century Entertainment label) have come up with a sequel, and it sucks so badly that I fear the summer recess is the only thing preventing questions being asked in Parliament about it.

So, how have they done it? How on Earth have they managed to turn such a magnificent classic into such a complete hound? At first glance, the original formula doesn't seem to have been tampered with too much, the old towers-and-platforms- and-baddies structure still seems to be intact, but with the addition of prettier graphics, new features, improved presentation, and power-ups. Peer a little closer, though, and you find that the incredibly compulsive gameplay of yore has been drowned under a weight of unnecessary new twiddles, so that nothing of what made Nebulus so great in the first place remains. The towers which were in themselves much of the obstacle to progress in the first game are now just somewhere to stick all the new enemies. They're miles too high, too, the essence of addictiveness is the belief that the completion of a level is just within your grasp but in Nebulus 2, you're likely to get bored before you get very excited at nearing the top of even the first tower, and you don't need me to tell you that that's not a recipe for lasting entertainment.

The new features are straight out of the Lazy Programmer's Guide To Sequels book, ranging from the pointless (locked doors with the key right beside them), to the plain crap (invisible platforms which don't appear until you walk onto them, leaving you to spend half the game speculatively walking into dead space and plummetting back down the screen to the bits you've trekked past 14 times already), to the absolutely absurd (the second level has you actually descending a tower, falling upwards when you get hit by an enemy! I mean, have these people got the faintest idea of what they're doing? They're missing the point by such a distance you have to wonder if they're actually aiming at the same target as the rest of us.). Even the little sub-games between towers are duff, lacking in character and life, and going on for too long into the bargain. And the power-ups! The power-ups are just SO crap I can hardly bring myself to write about them without screaming. Just as an example, there are little magnets which pull you up to a higher platform, except they only work in certain places, and half the time they don't work even then! Excuse me, I'm going to have to go for a lie down in a darkened room for a day or two...

Okay, having calmed down a bit, I can tell you that Nebulus 2 is somewhere close to tolerable if you treat it as a puzzle game rather than a Nebulus game, and though it carries none of the style, elegance, playability or compulsiveness, the presentation is quite good. If you were a fan of the original though, this is a disgrace bordering on the blasphemous. Steer well clear.

*

PLAYING TIP
TOKI (Ocean)

Amiga version

If you're in an 'infinite credits' kind of mood, and you also can't be bothered with all that tedious mucking around with having to play through one level in order to get to the next one, then take your head out of the oven, put the shotgun and razor blades down and turn the car engine off, because help is at hand. If you simply type in the word 'KILLER' while playing the game, those self-same infinite credits will be yours to squander at will, and pressing the F1 to F8 keys will allow you to select levels (or even the end sequence). What more could you wish for? A bit of zaniness, maybe? Okay then, simply hit the 'R' key to flip the screen upside down, for an 'interesting' extra element of challenge. If your eyes go funny after a while, just hit 'N' and everything (well, the Toki screen, anyway) will be back to normal.

ST version

What's that, ST owners? You say you want to be able to cheat at Toki too? Well, that's all right, 'cos I've got the magic word for that as well. If you hit 'Esc' while on the intro sequence, then type 'POORTOKI', then you should find that you're now also endowed with levelskipability, at a touch of the F1 to F8 keys.