Lazer Tag
(Go!, 1988)

In the year 3010, Lazer Tag is the ultimate sport. You are a new recruit at the Lazer Tag training school, aiming to progress through the ranks. Each level of the game consists of two stages – a shoot-out, in which you must shoot all the other players and reach the other side of the arena before your time runs out, and a target section, in which you move along a fixed path and try to be as accurate as possible in shooting the other players. The arena is made up of mirrors and walls which deflect your laser beams, and in some cases multiply them. The graphics are colourful while not being brilliant, although the music quickly becomes irritating and doesn't really suit the nature of the game. It's a reasonable game and fun for a while, although ultimately, all the levels are very similar.

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Leader Board took golfing to new heights in the 1980s and quite possibly was the franchise that made golfing computer games popular. The Amstrad CPC version, while resembling the original, is lacking in quite a few departments, as it looks and sounds rather bland in comparison. You pick up your clubs and can play from 18 holes up to 72, by yourself or with up to three other players, and you can choose from novice, amateur or professional level of difficulty. It's rather slow going drawing the hole on the screen and then re-drawing it for your next shot. Everything seems easy enough, selecting clubs and judging your power and swing on each shot, but putting is quite a challenge and this is probably where you will pick up your monitor and throw it out the window. If you manage to master all four courses, there's another set of courses available in Leader Board Tournament.

See also: World Class Leaderboard.

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Starting in an Ohio bar in 1936, and stopping only for a quick lavatory break, you are quickly incarcerated by the Leather Goddesses of Phobos as part of their grand plan to turn the Earth into their personal pleasure dome – and only you can stop them. Renowned for their adult-themed adventures, Infocom went the extra mile by making a game packed with sexual references that allowed you to play either a male or female protagonist (depending on your choice of bathroom at the beginning). As ever, Infocom's adventure is not limited to what you see on the screen; the original package included a comic and a 'scratch and sniff' card (that thankfully remains tasteful). With no graphics to rely on, the game depends on the quality of the text and here it excels, jam-packed with humour that keeps you coming back for one more go. Worth a go.

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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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Princess Kiri was walking in the forest with a young ninja called Kage when she was kidnapped by the evil Dragon King. Now Kage must journey to the Dragon King's palace and rescue her. Your quest begins in the forest, where you must kill twenty ninjas and face the Dragon King himself several times. Then you travel to the palace and must defeat ten more ninjas before you can scale the walls and confront the Dragon King for the final time. First impressions of this game are quite good; the screen scrolls smoothly, Kage jumps from tree to tree with gravity-defying ease, there's a nice lightning effect that lights up the sky, and the music suits the game well. However, if you lose a life, you have to restart the level all over again, which is very annoying indeed. The difficulty of the first level will put a lot of players off.

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Everyone has heard of this game, which came out on nearly every computer there is. It also scored 97% in Amstrad Action – their highest rating ever. In 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 of memory, there are over a dozen excellent tunes to hum to.

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This isometric space shoot-'em-up was apparently inspired by the music video for ZZ Top's song Rough Boy – though it's difficult to see what inspiration the authors drew from it. You control the Leviathan spaceship, and you must shoot waves of aliens as they appear on the screen. You are also armed with a small number of smart bombs which destroy all the aliens on the screen. You'll also need to replenish your fuel by shooting spinning cubes. To add a little variety, you can choose one of three landscapes to fly around – Moonscape, Cityscape and Greekscape. However, there just isn't enough in this game to keep you interested; it can often seem like ages before another wave of aliens appears, and your spaceship is incredibly awkward to handle, making it difficult to fire at, and avoid, the aliens. The only good aspect of this game is the excellent music (which doesn't sound remotely like ZZ Top!).

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Once again, Earth has been invaded by an alien army who have somehow arrived undetected – until now. Armed with an automatic machine gun that you managed to wrestle from one of the alien soldiers, you must reach their underground control centre and destroy it. This horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up takes place over three levels, and right from the start, a relentless stream of aliens will attack you from both sides. The sheer number of them severely hinders your progress as you are continually turning around to fire at them. There are power-ups available, but you'll be concentrating so much on firing at the aliens that they'll disappear before you can collect them! It's a shame that the difficulty level is so high, because the graphics are quite colourful, albeit cartoon-like.

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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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