This French shoot-'em-up (known as Bob Morane: Science Fiction over there) takes place in a space station, where you must shoot enemy soldiers and various dangerous creatures before they attack you. The gameplay is much like that of Prohibition from the same developer. A little arrow on your cursor indicates the position of your targets. You only have a few seconds to spot and kill them before they open fire. There are many levels, which are very similar; only the background colour and a few details change from one screen to the next. The speed increases as you progress forward, making the game more and more difficult. The graphics are very good and the scrolling is really smooth. Overall, this is a good shooting game that unfortunately lacks variety and quickly becomes boring.

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The Legend of Apache Gold
(Incentive/Medallion, 1987)

The cowboy Luke Warme is broke, but after hearing tales of gold around the Indian burial ground, he sets off in pursuit of riches. After being captured by Apache Indians, he finds himself and his horse in their settlement. This is a text adventure written using GAC – in fact, it's one of the adventures that Incentive sold in order to showcase how good the program really is. The graphics are fine by GAC standards, and it's an easy adventure to get into, although one rather annoying feature is that most objects can't be examined – instead the message "You see nothing special" is displayed. It's still OK for newcomers to text adventures to play, though.

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Everyone has heard of this game, which came out on nearly every computer there is. It also got 97% in Amstrad Action – their highest rating ever. With hindsight, it doesn't deserve that much. In each of the 60 levels, lemmings fall out of a box and just walk around until you tell them to do something. You have to get a certain number of lemmings to the exit to complete the level. It's fun to play, although it does move at a rather leisurely pace, and even though the lemmings themselves are extremely blocky, the graphics are great, and if you have 128K, there are over a dozen excellent tunes to hum to.

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James Bond is on the trail of the drugs baron Franz Sanchez, after his friend Felix Leiter is kidnapped at his own wedding. In doing so, M, the head of MI6, revokes his Licence to Kill. The game consists of five levels, each based on a scene from the film. Among the scenes are a helicopter chase where you blow up Sanchez's jeep while dodging bullets, a shoot-'em-up section in the grounds of a warehouse in which you try to scare off Sanchez's henchmen (the best bit of the game, which requires some strategic thinking), and the tanker chase in which you must ram the tankers transporting Sanchez's drugs. This is the best of the five James Bond games that were released for the CPC, with great graphics and music, and a wide variety of action-packed gameplay, although the first level is a bit too tough.

See also: Live and Let Die, The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me, A View to a Kill.

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Tron has always been a classic game, but this is an uninspiring version of it. You have to play against the computer light cycles and try to trap them and cause them to crash into their own trails. The first level contains only one light cycle, with another being added until there are five; after that, you play the five levels again, but at a slightly faster pace. The graphics are good when you consider other versions of this game, but it's much too easy, since the computer-controlled light cycles are quite stupid and will trap themselves without you having to do it for them.

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In the year 3147, Jake Stalin was sent to the planetoid of Souzel to serve a life sentence for murder, and he now wants to escape... but how is he going to do it? This is a text adventure created using GAC, and let's just say that it's not very good at all. The locations are laid out in a very illogical manner and it's easy to get lost, and the first few commands that you need to type to make any progress are really obscure (the answers are to send an SOS, lock the pilot in the store, and send the droid to the ship – so now you know). The graphics are OK but it's very hard to know what you should do.

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Breakout gets a twist here as you bounce a ball down a never-ending corridor full of barriers and obstacles. Along the way, there are several types of power-ups to collect, and every four levels, there's a task to be solved, such as aiming the ball at a target, or hitting it several times; only when you complete it within the time limit can you progress to the next set of corridors. The graphics are impressive, and if you have 128K, there are several excellent tunes, and you even get some digitised speech. In addition, there's the facility to design your own corridors, and a code for each corridor means that you won't have to play the ones you've completed over again. One other thing – select 'fast control' from the options menu; the game is much easier if you use this.

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Light Force
(FTL, 1986)

The planet of Regulus is under attack by alien forces, so the GEM council sends out their entire army, which consists of exactly one Lightforce fighter, to destroy the aliens. Guess who the pilot of this fighter is? This is a vertically scrolling space shoot-'em-up which is full of action from start to finish. There is a wide variety of aliens which approach in waves, and thankfully it's easy to learn their formations and the best way to defeat them. Control centres also appear every so often, and shooting them all gives you extra lives at the end of each of the four levels. The graphics and sound effects are both excellent, and it's a challenging game, whether you're a novice or a hardened shoot-'em-up fan.

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You've infiltrated enemy lines and captured their secret, high-power machine gun unit – but now you're going to need to use the weapon to fight your way out, as you enter the line of fire. The game uses a perspective view, and enemy soldiers and vehicles come towards you. You must simply shoot them, or use smart bombs to kill everything on the screen, although you only have two of these available at the start of the game. However, more can be collected by shooting caskets, and shooting first aid kits allows you to recover some of your energy. The graphics are poor and very messy, and the scrolling is slow and jerky. The few sound effects that exist are also bad (although the music on the menu is good), and all of this makes the game dull and unexciting.

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There are bizarre games, and then there's this one – but can you call it a game at all? When you first run the game, you are assigned your own Little Computer Person (it's always male), and you watch him and his dog move into his house and settle in. Then, in subsequent sessions, you just leave the computer switched on as he goes about life, doing exercises, watching TV, playing the piano, using the telephone (who does he talk to?), and so on. You'll also have to watch his food and water supply, and you can also type in commands to get him to play games or write a letter to you. It is fun to watch him at first, but the novelty will wear off sooner or later.

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