Label: Virgin
Author: various
Price: £9.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Now Games 3 is the latest compilation from Virgin, with a pretty fair quality level if no real winners.

Titles included are Nick Faldo Plays the Open, Sorcery, Codename Mat iI, Everyone's a Wally and a View to a Kill.

A View to a Kill was, it was generally agreed awful, an astoundingly bad three-part exercise in flickery sprites and dull plots featuring a James Bond who appears to move like a ballroom dancer. Well worth totally avoiding.

Codename Mat II was inferior to the original game, and came over as a poor man's Elite with sprite graphics and simpler gameplay. It looks reasonable on screen with the effect of ships moving towards you achieved by using updated sprites. Not actually a bad game but not going to keep your attention for long - for space game addicts only.

Sorcery is not the same as the near legendary Amstrad version. Lacking the wonderful graphics what you are left with is a reasonable broomstick bash 'em up in which you zoom around finding keys to locked doors and being killed plenty. The version of Sorcery on the compilation is a beefed up one which has never seen the light of day before with souped up graphics and more locations. It's the equivalent of those infuriating compilation albums where there is one unreleased track by your favourite group.

Everyone's a Wally is well, a Wally game, which means it has enormous sprites and massive attribute clashes. The entire Wally family is here and you shunt them around solving problems and collecting objects. Deeply irritating or a lot of fun depending on your perspective.

Nick Faldo Plays the Open is perhaps my favourite program here but then I have this strange weakness for golf programs. This is one of the best with strong graphics and a lot of inventive touches. Particularly noteworthy is your know-it-all caddie who comments sagely on your choices of club and generally criticises your performance. My only complaint is the game is so designed that at the last stages of the hole, when it's down to short puts, finishing becomes something very close to a matter of luck or the resolution of your TV.

Not a mega value compilation but certainly a couple of titles there worth catching.

Virgin
£9.95

Old games don't die, they just turn up on compilations! (or on budget labels).

Seriously though, I think this is an excellent way of offering programs which have outlived their shelf life. The essential point is are they still worth having? On this cassette I would say a definite yes and the collection comprises of:

Nick Faldo Plays The Open, this was a Mind Games original and provided one of the most enjoyable golf games that I've ever reviewed, graphics being good, the holes a fairly accurate representation of the Royal St. George's golf club and the control being by an icon style graphic window system.

Sorcery is a graphically excellent arcade game of the "work it out yourself" type in which you are challenged to complete some 30 screens within a time limit, it sounds simple but believe me it ain't!

Everyone's A Wally was the second of the MikroGen classics featuring large well animated, near cartoon quality graphics. It also featured very few details of what you had to do and resulted in almost frantic pleas for help from many readers and provided quite a lively post bag for a few months.

Codename Mat 2 is described as a lively shoot 'em up. This is an understatement. It is an extremely complex game demanding strategy and concentration to cope with a wide range of details as well as the hectic and high speed battle sequences it's much more than a simple 'zap them all' game.

View To A Kill, Domarks much hyped and eventually disappointing three part program. Not that it was bad, just that it was rather tacking in any real atmosphere or technique and appeared dated at the lime of its launch. As part of this collection it is worth having for the occasional play.

If you were to purchase these separately they would have cost you over £30, so in pure monetary terms this cassette represents good value. There is a good selection of games and they should provide something for most gamespersons each of the programs is still worth having in its own right.

My only criticism is the instructions which are provided on an expanding insert. Apart from MAT 2 which takes up at least half of the insert, they are confused in places and edited to be almost useless in others. WALLY takes only 11 lines and I can imagine some players simply not bothering trying to play it as it is without even the basic plot!