Byte Back
£2.99

Your name is Guy Manly, the roughest and toughest pirate in the galaxy, and your aim is to make crime pay in space. The 'council' have given you orders to hijack innocent space truckers and sell all the cargoes from them for a big profit. Not wanting to risk your neck by going out into space without knowing what's there, various mission simulators have been installed for you to practice on until you've earned enough points to get into the real thing. Have you got what it takes to satisfy the council and make yourself piles of dash? The first thing that hits you in Cosmic Pirate is the excellent presentation. The Byte Back logo wobbles up the screen at the beginning, and the layout of the whole game is good. The actual space fighting scenes remind me of Hunter's Moon, a Thalamus game on the Commodore 64 (ooo, swear words!), the graphics and way the ship is controlled are very similar.

The game isn't just shooting aliens that attack you occasionally. You can pop down onto planets and clear them of aliens for extra points, collect extra equipment to improve your ships capabilities and view data on each space truck before you attack it. All this is quite fun for a while.

Cosmic Pirate is a good shoot 'em up that will appeal to fans of this style of game. Others may find it a bit boring if they don't get anywhere after the first few goes.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

He's strong, firm but fair, extraordinarily good-looking and what's more he's been put in charge of the Bargs again. Jonathan Davies, my man...

Byte Back
£2.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

Guy Manly's your name and, predictably enough, killing people's your game. Innocent space traders, in fact, with the aim of nicking their cargo and selling them down the market, like, no questions asked.

What this actually involves is flying around a rather bland scrolling grid and shooting things. There are various ways of doing this, which are selected from a series of menus. It's necessary to do this several times in order to build up enough skill to progress to more important things, such as inter- planetary travel. Everything, naturally, revolves around amassing credits;

I didn't venture too far into the depths of the game, as it would seem to require a lot of patience, dedication, enthusiasm and all the other qualities I so visibly lack. The impression I got was of a graphically uninspiring but otherwise fairly sound strategy game which will probably appeal to a minority audience. I won't be returning to it, though, probably because I'm not a minority of any kind.

Byteback
Spectrum/C64 £2.99

Byteback's first release is a set of 8-bit versions of Palace's Amiga and ST hit of earlier this year. You play a space pirate, patrolling the spaceways on lookout for fat merchants. Zap the indigenous space-slimes to earn cash, then warp out through the toll gates. Once you've captured your prey, take him back to base and get the megacreds to soup up your old star-strutter into something hot.

Surprisingly enough, these three quid versions seem to have all the features of the twenty-odd quid 16-bit versions - even the ability to save games. Unfortunately, the Spectrum version has some nasty graphics glitches and moves ve-r-y sl-o-o-w-ly, so it doesn't get the thumbs up. The C64 version is much better - fast, smooth, and , pretty good fun - BUT it does crash occasionally, which is very annoying.