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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Tarzan's girlfriend Jane has been kidnapped by tribesmen and you, as Tarzan, have three days to explore the jungle and find seven coloured gemstones and return them to the chief of the tribe so that Jane will be released into your arms once again. Along the way you will encounter spiders, spear-throwing tribesmen, tigers (well, they look like tigers to me), snakes and pits of quicksand, all trying to slow you down. Grahpically it's quite poor, but there's a decent enough in-game tune playing. However, the gameplay is boring, the fighting is just annoying, and why isn't Tarzan swinging through the trees? That would be much more fun and more like the real Tarzan!

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Snide Gantree and his minions have overrun a military base in the South Pacific, and he 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 that 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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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.

See also: Academy.

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8

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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Technician Ted
(Hewson, 1984)

Ted starts his shift in the chip factory at 8:30am, and has to finish 21 tasks before he clocks off again at 5:00pm – but the tasks must be completed in a certain order, and before a certain time is reached. The 'tasks' involve pressing one or two flashing buttons in a room in the right order; actually reaching them is another matter altogether. This is a very old platform game and it really shows, with its primitive graphics and simple sound effects. Bizarrely, this actually makes it a bit appealing, but unfortunately, it's really difficult to complete any of the tasks.

See also: Costa Capers.

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5

You're a police cop in the 21st century, and you must force your way through the ranks by arresting and killing criminals. Each level has two parts; you have to drive to the building and arrive on time, and then seek the criminal before he leaves. If you obey the orders you're given, you can collect power-ups for your car. The game is OK – the graphics are reasonable (check out the digitised pictures of the criminals on the bottom of the screen!), as are the sound effects, but there's not a lot of variety in the game, and the part where you drive to the building does get tedious.

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Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles
(Image Works, 1990)

The Foot Clan have kidnapped the Turtles' friend, April O'Neil, and their mentor, Splinter, and the four Turtles – Leonardo, Raphael, Michaelangelo and Donatello – have to rescue both of them by fighting monsters in the sewers and exploring buildings. You can change which Turtle you control at any time. The graphics are colourful and are actually rather impressive, but there are very few sound effects and they're rubbish, anyway. The game is also too easy; many of the sewers have pizzas for the turtles to eat, and there's another pizza waiting for them each time they enter that sewer. It's still worth a few goes, though.

See also: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: The Coin-Op.

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7

Cowabunga, dudes! This game is radical, as the Turtles would say! As the title suggests, this is a port of the great arcade game by Konami, and you'll be surprised how near to the original it is! The basic plot has no surprises; as any of the Turtles (or any two, as this game has one of the best two-player modes the CPC has ever seen) you must walk the corridors, streets and sewers and rescue your master Splinter and your friend April O'Neil from the clutches of Shredder, beating up his henchmen along the way. Bebop, Rocksteady, Krang... all the old favourites are here! The graphics are great and colourful, the difficulty level is perfect and the two-player mode is brilliant. The sound could be better, but even so this is an absolute blinder of a game.

See also: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.

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10

Take three guesses as to what sort of game this might be. Yes, it's strip poker! Actually, this game has much better graphics than the other strip poker offerings on the CPC (and how do I know that?). As with all other strip poker games, when the girl loses all her money, she takes off an item of clothing and you get to see a picture of her. As I've already said, the graphics are very good indeed, and a soothing bit of music on the title screen sets the atmosphere well. However, I'm no good at any type of poker, anyway – and why are only 32 cards used by both players instead of 52?

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