Coming in hot on the heels of the Falkland's Crisis, Durell software decide to grace our speccys with a kid-friendly, home version of the war, and unleash a cheap^ and cheerful shoot-em-up with more cyan than they know what to do with.

Their first release for the home micro, it doesn't have a lot of gameplay to speak of beyond the zipping back and forth à la Defender, and can get boring very quickly.

^It wasn't cheap. The game cost £5.50 in 1983, which works out to around £17 in today's money,

Watching the demo of this shows there is more than one type of level beyond the first's FPS shooter. A side scrolling one similar to the previous games, and a 2D jetpack romp. You'll never see them without cheating however, as the aforementioned opening level is impossible to complete. Its difficulty lies with the fact that the enemies can hit you while offscreen, and they do. You'll get a brief warning like "Danger! Punks advancing!" and a flashing arrow, but by the time you reach them in order to dispense your particular brand of testicle mauling justice, they've already hit you three or four times. Oof, right in the efficiency.

A real shame, as with a bit of common sense on behalf of the creators this could have been a winner. Its polish, tunage, and graphics are quite good, as you would expect from a stalwart of the industry like Ocean Software at the end of the system's lifespan.

I won't mention the movie if you don't.

Ocean's second attempt at the Nintendo classic after 1983's Kong, and this time they've got the official license. It really shows how far they'd come, for while the gameplay is just about the same as it was three years prior, now the whole thing has a polish that elevates it to a far more professional tier.

Unfortunately I think it's a trifle too slow now thanks to all the extra garnish, and worse, the jumping is broken. Where before you could clear the barrels with ease, now Jumpman can't get the height needed and making it over them is strictly luck based rather than skill. A real hairy shame.