STAR RATINGS

***** - Jupiter

**** - Neptune

*** - Venus

** - Mars

* - Uranus

CUTER THAN CUTE

Cute game fans (that's fans of games which are cute, not game fans who happen to be cute themselves) will be acutely thrilled to hear of the new compilation just released by Ocean. The Rainbow Collection (£19.99 on 16-bits, £12.99 on 8-bits) features the extremely cute New Zealand Story, the cutely extreme Bubble Bobble, and the best (and quite possibly cutest) game in the world, Rainbow Islands. The pack comes under the banner of Ocean's cute new Addicted To Fun label, and when we spoke to a cute Ocean spokesman, he said 'We think this is cuter than the cutest thing ever, in a cute kind of way.' Rumours that the compilation was being marketed on the back of a 'cute' motif were unconfirmed at the time of writing.

EVEN CUTER STILL

...is a phrase which has never in recorded history been used to describe Lemmy Out Of Motorhead, top warty slime god with the nation's most durable and most-loved heavy metal band. Nonetheless, Lem and the boys are soon to be the subject of a computer game, the licence having recently been acquired by rock'n'roll software house Virgin. The style and structure of the game is as yet undecided, but is almost certain to feature lots of the band's unique humour, as well as some snippets of their inimitable music. You'll have to wait until next spring to see anything approaching a release, but for now you can compensate by entering this week's Prize Competition!

Yes, you can win all the prizes that we didn't give away when absolutely no-one got the answer to the last prize competition right, just by answering this simple Motorhead-related question. Which Motorhead tune features the world's best-ever line in a rock song, 'Moving like a parallelogram'?

Easy, eh? Send your answers to 'Ace Of Spades Competition' at the usual NCE address.

BEG, BORROW AND BURN

THUNDERHAWK (Core Design)

This was described by Amiga Power's Jonathan Davies this month thus: 'I'd hesitate to call it the best flight sim ever, simply because it isn't one, but if it was it definitely would be.' Which pretty much says it all, I think. Thunderhawk (or AH-37M Thunderhawk to give it it's utterly nobby full name) is an all-action shoot-'em-up which just happens to look like a flight sim, and if airborne blasting capers are your thing, this is as much an essential buy as R-Type II.

SWAP (Palace)

Puzzle games are ten-a-penny these days, but really good ones are becoming rarer than hen's teeth with gold fillings in them. This unusual effort isn't in the same league as, say, Sarakon, but it's a novel idea which takes a less restricting approach than most, and while tension and pressure are lacking somewhat, Swap is still pretty engrossing. Which of those qualities are most important to you more or less defines whether this is a game you should get or not. Definitely too expensive, though.

LIVING JIGSAWS (The Software Business)

And talking of puzzles... The jigsaw is one of the oldest puzzle concepts in the world, with a basic, natural appeal (putting broken things together again) which makes it something of an eternal pastime. It's also pretty much a physical thing, which is why putting it onto a computer is such a damn-fool idea. All this particular version gains is some cute but inconsequential animation and the ability to cheat. Cheat! At a jigsaw! What next? What's happening to the world? Where will it end? What possesses people to do this? Why are we here? What's the point of it all? Who - (Snip!)

HERE IT COMES AGAIN

Many's the time I've been phoned up at 3.30 in the morning by complete strangers with a burning question on their minds. The question is usually something along the lines of 'How come Gods/Brat/Street Fighter/whatever got such a great review in Amiga Format/Sinclair User/What Hi-Fi/wherever when it's actually so totally awful? I hate it, all my friends hate it, I've never heard of anyone liking it except magazine reviewers.'

What I normally say in reply is 'Bloody hell, have you any idea what time it is? And who are you anyway? Why don't you sod off and leave me alone?', but it has to be admitted that sometimes, for a wide variety of reasons not all of which involve free drugs and sex, the most appalling rubbish does manage to garner the most stunning testimonials from the industry's hard-to-please software critics. So, just to set the balance right a little, this week I'l be taking a look at some re-releases which all fit neatly under the umbrella title -GAMES WHICH EVERYBODY SAYS ARE GREAT BUT WHICH ARE ACTUALLY COMPLETELY CRAP

XENON (Mastertronic, £7.99 on 16-bits, £2.99 on 8-bits)

The game which launched the Bitmap Brothers onto an unsuspecting world, and also the first really big, high-profile 16-bit shoot-'em-up. In fact, one magazine of the time called it 'the first home arcade game', to which the only sensible reply is 'and hopefully the last, if the rest are going to be anything like this.' Xenon featured gorgeous metallic graphics of a kind which had never really been seen before, and gameplay of a kind which had been seen a hundred times on every machine since the Acorn Atom. Most of the time Xenon was simply tedious, but on occasion it could be truly infuriating, such as when a particularly dramatic burst of manouevering led to your ship turning into a ground-based tank at the most inopportune moment and being blasted into a thousand pieces by the little bad guys you'd been cruising safely over the heads of just seconds before. Really, Xenon was the first game to turn 'style-over-content' into an artform, and gamesplayers are still paying the price for it's success to this day. **

TV SPORTS: FOOTBALL (Mirror Image, £10.99 on 16-bits only)

I have to admit to a bit of bias here, as I think American Football is probably the second most tedious sport ever invented by man (after cricket, of course), but even allowing for that, this is a non-event of a game. The mind-numbing number-crunching of most computer American footie games is partly avoided, but not to any great advantage as far as the gameplay is concerned, and Cinemaware's usual lush presentation (read: lots and lots of impressive-looking memory-intensive static graphics meaning endless disk swapping and accessing) serves only to break things up and make the game even bittier than the real thing, with its ad breaks every five minutes. TV Sports: Football undeniably looks absolutely beautiful, but for details on the value of aesthetic prettiness relative to lasting playability of a game, see Xenon. *

PASSING SHOT (Mirror Image, £7.99 for 16 bits and Hit Squad, £3.99 for 8-bits)

'Passing Shot is a corker of a game' - Amiga Action

'You will more than enjoy this game, you will love it!' - Amiga Action again

You know how I said not all of these cases involved free sex and drugs or some other form of bribery? Here's the exception to the rule. Just say no. *

MONSTER BUSINESS (Eclipse, ST and Amiga, £19.99)

Tacky continental packaging, singularly unimpressive screenshots on the box, and the very fact that it's a European game (you know, like Ghost Battle, Cougar Force, Lupo Alberto, Metal Masters, Quadrel etc etc), filled me with a grim sense of foreboding when I first saw this game. Feeling a wave of xenophobia rising like bile inside me, I decided that for the sake of my own ideological soundness I'd better sit down, bite the bullet, and give it the closest thing I could manage to an objective review. So here goes with an objective review.

This is the most fun I've had with a computer game since I started writing for games magazines, all of seven months ago. In fact, I was so impressed with it, I did something I haven't done with any other game ever, and took it home with me so I could play it some more. It's basically a cross between the creaky old Atari coin-op Dig-Dug and the brand spanking new hardly-seen-at-all Toaplan coin-op Snow Bros. You find yourself on a screen of platforms and slides infested with nasty bug-eyed monsters, and your objective, unsurprisingly, is to get rid of them all. What makes Monster Business so fun is the way in which you have to do it. Armed with a glorified bicycle pump, you have to pump the baddies full of air, until they become so inflated that they float away off the top of the screen, throwing out bonus-point objects as they do.

While they're floating up, you can biff them one and send them flying horizontally across the level, where they'll knock out any other nasties they happen to collide with. These are the first two gameplay rules. The third gameplay rule is...there is no third gameplay rule. Yes, it's even simple enough for Jimmy Greaves to understand, but with 45 levels of gradually-increasing difficulty, new and tougher monsters to contend with, and deviously-designed screens which will having you throwing the joystick around the room in frustration, you won't find beating it quite as easy as playing it.

But the magnificently-designed gameplay isn't all Monster Business has got going for it. Cute and endearing graphics help too, as does the fact that the whole graphic style changes after 15 levels or so, just when you thought it might start to get a bit repetitive. Also, the fact that it's set in that classic of computer game settings, the building site, somehow makes it better still. The best feature of this game packed with great features, though, is the sound. On the Amiga it's excellent, decent tunes played with the skill you expect from continental programmers (always technically good, if often lacking in melody), combined with subtle effects, although the jingle when you lose a life is over-loud and jarring. On the ST, though...

In ten years or so of playing literally thousands of computer games, I can count the number of times I've simply sat and listened to the music, unwilling to actually press fire and get on with the game, on the toes of a three-toed sloth. When I loaded up Monster Business on my ST at home (the game comes, groovily-beyond-belief, on a dual-format disk), I was expecting to play the same game, but all set for the usual sonic disappointment.

What I actually got was music and sound effects superior to the Amiga on all counts (ie melodically and technically), with thumping bass and phased drums that even The Jesus And Mary Chain would be proud of. The tunes on the ST version are loaded in randomly every four screens (this takes about three seconds, though they're all nearly four minutes long), and on catching a particular one, I sat for quarter-of-an-hour staring at the 'Game Over' message so that I wouldn't have to stop it playing. I've never heard anything sound this good on an ST, and nothing this good actually during a game on any machine. At this price it's almost worth buying Monster Business just for the sonics, but when you get such an utterly superlative arcade game thrown in at the same time, then you better get yourself a copy or have small girls laugh at you in the street for the rest of your life.

*****

PLAYING TIP

NAVY SEALS (Ocean, Amiga)

Is this game So Hard you just can't cope? Do the tough terrorists make your elite crew of commandos look like a bunch of West End Girls? Does your Heart leap into your mouth every time a mean-looking Arab wanders onscreen? Such problems are Always On My Mind too, but now there's a solution. It's A Sin I know, but you can cheat at Navy Seals simply by entering your name onto the high-score table as PSBOYS. From then on, pressing 'Esc' during a game will advance you to the next level.

HATSTAND CORNER

Okay, so you all know by now that EMAP have bottled out of the CES show at Earl's Court this year, leaving only a yawny old trade show and denying thousand of punters the opportunity of forking out seven quid to meet Jakki (sic) Brambles and some grumpy shortarse in a foam-rubber Turtle suit. (Hey, you'd be grumpy too if you had to wear something like that in the inferno of sweat and neon that is the average consumer show). What you might not have known is that the real reason for the pull-out is not, as previously stated, lack of industry support. Nope, the true story behind the sudden switch is that EMAP's MD Terry Pratt had a dream on the eve of his recent wedding that if the show went ahead, his lovely bride would grow a bushy black moustache, put on three stones in weight, shrink to less than four feet in size and develop a worrying predilection for eating unpredictable mushrooms, jumping down pipes in the street and speaking in an Italian accent. Terry swiftly decided that this was a fate which had already befallen quite enough of his employees, and gave the word for the whole plan to be swiftly abandoned. When asked to comment on the allegations, an EMAP spokesman would only say 'Mama mia, what-a da load of old-a bolognese.' Rumours of a replacement show called Super Nintendo World 4 were unconfirmed at the time of writing.