The evil Sultan of Saladin has captured Prince Imrahil's sister and taken her to Baghdad, and you must rescue her. Starting on one of the Sultan's ships, you must collect seven jugs in the correct order, spelling out the word 'Arabian', before you can travel along the river Anhil to a cavern, where you encounter some genies and must again collect seven jugs. Once you've done that, you fly across the desert to the gates of Baghdad to - you've guessed it - collect seven more jugs. This is a mediocre platform game that has dated badly. The graphics and music are fairly primitive, but the collision detection is poor and ruins the game completely, and the second and fourth levels are far too easy.

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5

Another horizontally scrolling space shoot-'em-up to look at and play. What's this one like, then? Erm... it's not that good. Just control your spacecraft and fire at the oncoming waves of aliens, spaceships and rocks, while facing the occasional large alien which will take a lot of shots to kill, and collecting a few power-ups on the way (which seem to have little effect). I've seen it all before. The graphics are OK - they're rather colourful - but the sound effects are rather basic, and the scrolling is relatively slow and jerky.

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5

Tank Busters
(Design Design, 1985)

You've somehow been marooned on another world and have to shoot all the blue objects to escape. However, there are tanks who are out to get you, and each time you shoot one, another will appear. On the screen, you can see a radar map showing the location of the tank and any missiles it fires. Unfortunately, since the graphics are so minimal, finding that last crystal can be frustrating, but in fact you should be able to complete any game in under ten minutes. Despite it being one of the easiest games I've played, there's still something about it which makes me go for it whenever I feel like a quick blast.

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7

Can you help the bartender serve all the customers as they flow continually into your bar? The bar consists of four long tables, and customers move along the tables. Once any of them reach the bar, you lose a life, and the way to avoid this is to throw a mug of beer along the table to the customer, which hopefully will send them out of the bar altogether; if you completely clear the bar of customers, you go to the next level. You also have to collect empty mugs as the customers throw them back to you. The action is frantic, but the controls are rather unresponsive when there is a lot of action on the screen, and by the third level, the amount of customers becomes so overwhelming that it seems to be impossible to progress any further. Still, it's an entertaining game with colourful graphics.

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7

As the name suggests, this is a target shooting game that requires MHT's Gunstick; you can't play this game without it. There are two games you can choose from. In the first one, you must shoot insects and prevent them from eating a chicken that is sitting on a table - yes, you read that correctly. The pace is rather slow and boring, and it's a silly idea anyway. The second game is a clay pigeon shooting session in which discs are thrown into the air and you must shoot them to score points; the further away they are, the more points you score. You won't play the first game for long, but the second game is a bit more interesting.

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6

Target Renegade
(Imagine, 1988)
Reviewed by Ninja Wonderboy

Renegade's brother Matt has been brutally killed for snooping into the affairs of gangland boss Mr. Big, and now our hero must set out once again, this time to avenge his brother's death. Basically what we have here is an almost total clone of Renegade. The level settings are similiarly urban (there's the run-down car park and the seedy city streets), the bad guys have the same moves as their Renegade counterparts, and so does Renegade himself! However, there are a few differences; apart from the ability to pick up weapons dropped by the thugs (a welcome addition), there is a pretty good simultaneous two-player mode. It has decent graphics, some lovely music, but just isn't quite as good as Renegade - also, it gets very difficult and has the strictest time limit in gaming history!

See also: Renegade, Renegade III: The Final Chapter.

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7

Targhan is on a quest to defeat a powerful lord known as the Evil One, whose castle lies beyond the mountains of Clorg. The quest will take him through forests, caverns and villages. The game is a mixture of fighting action, killing enemies with your sword and shurikens, and adventure; you'll encounter scrolls which give you clues, and other objects to help you in your quest. The graphics are breathtaking - some of the best I've ever seen, and I mean that - and there's some excellent music on the title screen as well. Unfortunately, it's a big game and you can only save your position at specific points, and I found that exploring the caverns became rather boring. Stick with it, though, and you might find that it's a pretty good game.

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8

Snide Gantree and his minions have overrun a military base in the South Pacific, and has also managed to hack into the computers which control the missiles that are stored at the base. You have to fly around the base and collect documents which will prevent the missiles from being launched, although when you find a document, you have to complete a Tower of Hanoi-style game where you shift rings from one column to another. You are armed with a large number of power-ups, including a limited amount of invulnerability, and you can collect more of them as you explore the base. There's nothing original about the game at all; the graphics are very good and very colourful, which I like, but the amount of aliens is overwhelming, and it's quite difficult to select the right power-ups in the middle of a battle.

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6

Tau Ceti
(CRL, 1986)

The former colony of Tau Ceti lies desolate after an epidemic, and then a meteor smash. It has been decided to re-colonise Tau Ceti, but the robots remaining there have run amok. You have to disable them by finding nuclear rods and shutting down the main reactor. The cities on Tau Ceti are navigated using jump pads situated at the corners of each city, and there are buildings you can enter and search. Of course, you'll have to watch out for the robots, and some cities have better defence systems than others! This is the sort of game that takes a long time to work out, but it's worth sticking with it.

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7

You have decided to replace your current spacecraft with a new, state-of-the-art one - the Foourd T-Bird. You go to the nearest dealer and ask for a test drive - but you have taken a wrong turning somewhere and ended up in the heat of battle against some nasty aliens! Four levels await you in this space shoot-'em-up. The action is viewed in perspective, with the waves of aliens coming out of the screen towards you. If you shoot all of the aliens in a wave, you can collect a pod which gives you a power-up, or you can ignore it and select another power-up the next time you collect a pod. The graphics are quite good and the scrolling is fast, but there is no music and hardly any sound effects. Overall, it's a fairly average shoot-'em-up.

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6