Activision/Core
£9.99 cassette only

Little Lucy's out in the garden playing with her pal Bin - a duck - when suddenly out of thin air the evil wizard Achacha (who?) appears and casts a spell which traps poor Lucy inside a bubble, whisking her off to another dimension. So it's down to Bin to search the game's six levels, rescue Lucy and return her to the real world.

Easier said than done: Achacha hates it when a plan doesn't come together, so he sets his weird and very dangerous minions after this Donald Duck reject. Bin seriously lacks any offensive weapons apart from a three-strength punch.

Luckily, Bin finds weaponry (stones, bombs and guided missiles) as he travels across the varied scenery of deserts, towns and forests.

As with all bash-'em-up' exploits, poor Bin comes up against the obligatory really BIG nasties, but to be a complete pain Achacha has stationed two on each level. Bin must reach level six where Achacha lurks and you beat him to rescue Lucy. The arcade original with its cute graphics was very popular, and the Speccy version is graphically quite good too, except for the juddery background. The rather lengthy loader on the cassette version (there won't be disk game) is a bit of a bore. As to the game, my feeling is that while initially playable, its appeal may fade due to lack of combat options (ie just hit or shoot everything).

MARK [72%]

What's this? A cutiefied beat 'em up? Yup, it is. You'd expect these little Daffy Duck look-alikes to be all sweet and innocent, but instead they go round dealing the most incredible punches the Spectrum's seen. The sprites are very cartoony with lots of appealing characters and backgrounds, but unfortunately no colour: Each of the MULTI-LOAD (arrggh!) levels has it's own monochrome shade to enjoy. The game is quite hard with the nasty creatures being very difficult to kill, especially the big end of section ones! Luckily you can collect the odd weapon such as a water gun or bomb. Dynamite Dux is a fun beat 'em up, for a while at least, but the lack of variety soon has you diving for the reset button.
NICK [69%]

Activision
£9.99 cass
Reviewer: Matt Bielby

Cute coin-op conversions - they're like bloomin' buses! You don't see any for ages then a whole load come at once. There are platformy ones (like the The New Zealand Story and Rainbow Islands), shoot 'em uppy ones (Mr Heli), arcade adventurey ones (Super Wonderboy) and, erm, even waddling-along-the-street-punching-thingsy ones. And guess what? As far as twaddling-along-the-street-punching-thingsy games go, the don't get much better than Dynamite Dux!

Activision has done a pretty sound job on the conversion. You play a duck (of course), a duck with a mission - your friend Lucy has been kidnapped and you're out to rescue her. She's trapped somewhere at the end of six horizontally scrolling, cartoon-style levels. So let's waddle off and see how we do.

Hmm. It all seems pretty easy so far. The first level is just like a twisty suburban road, nothing too dangerous here. Hang on a cotton-picking minute though! What on earth are these?? A bouncing team of formation dog heads!?! They're not really going for you - it's quite easy to get out of the way if you want to and let them bounce merrily past - but nah. It's just too tempting to quickly jab the fire button and - pow! - your massive Popeye-style fist socks the mutt in the mush.

Blimey! Here comes a herd of sproinging moose heads. Biff! That sorted them out. Uh oh! It's a pig on a trolley - he looks a bit tough. Better hold down the fire button for a bit longer - your hand now spins around Popeye-style, building up energy before delivering a devastating upper cut. Whammo!

And so it goes on. There are sandwiches and other foodstuffs to pick up (extra energy) and extra weapons too. What's that? Looks like a (smiling!) bomb. Now I can chuck these at the bad guys instead of punching them. And this one? It's a rocket launcher. Eat strontium death, surreal cartoon animals!

Boxing crocodiles, rocket-boosted cows, moles, big fire monsters (which appear twice a level) and similar creatures all gladly line up to be knocked into next week by this unstoppable feathered fiend. There's only one bit of strategy involved - making sure that out of the many weapons that present themselves along the way you're carrying the right one to deal with the next nastie. Throwing eggs at the fire monster won't do much good, but squirting that water pistol might!

And that's it. Basically, then, a cartoon beat 'em up which looks as much like a Loony Tune or Merry Melody as you can get. The fist punching comes from Popeye, the duck himself is just Woody Woodpecker with webbed feet, and you can even see the word 'Pow!' written in the air when you punch someone out. Graphics are in clear monochrome, with well-defined sprites, smooth animation and perfectly acceptable four way scrolling.

The only problem is that it is a bit of a one note game. All you really get to do is waddle along punching things which isn't really all that interesting. The bad guys aren't very intelligent either. Most of them just bounce past taking little or no interest in you. Its easy to punch a few of them out, but only when you're really swamped by sheer numbers that you need to.

The other limitation is that there are only really two combat moves - standing right in front of a baddy and punching, or standing a few feet away and throwing something at him. Even if we're generous and count the windmilling mega-punch as a third move, there isn't much variety here. I always think of a cute character as a good excuse for some platform and ladder shenanikins, but since there aren't any platforms, let alone a jump option, you obviously don't have that here.

I had fun playing Dynamite Dux. It's a birrova laugh, but take away the bizarre characters and neat graphics and you've got a very samey beat 'em up with a severe lack of combat moves. Add the fact that the Speccy version doesn't get the two player option that made the coin-op such fun and I'm not sure how long you'll be playing it after the novelty has worn off.

Label: Activision
Author: In-house
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

Quack! You've seen our cover. You've played the coin-op. Now read the review of the most off-the-wall, round the bend game this side of Toon Town. Dynamite Dux is upon us, and you'll flip over it.

If you thought you'd seen the ultimate in cutesy graphics in the likes of Garfield and Bubble Bobble, you'd better think again, 'cos Dux beats the lot.

It has to be said that assuming the character of a duck that looks suspiciously like Woody Woodpecker didn't entirely sound like the kind of game for me. That's when they told me about the Dynamite.

Duck is lost in a seriously hostile environment, surrounded by fiendish dismembered woodland creatures, hellbent on putting an end to his quacking hi-jinx. Thankfully he has access to the most amazing arsenal of weaponry known to man (or bird). It's like a cross between Bambi, Evil Dead and The Terminator.

Initially the Duck has at his disposal a pair of extremely handy fists. We're not talking flappy wings here. These hands like hams, big enough to shame Pop-eye in prime spinach-guzzling mode. The bad guys drift toward you with unmenacing lack of direction, floating around and looking goofy. It's like a dream come true to crank up your punch and knock the dullards into the middle of next week.

Each of the weapons you can pick up behave in a slightly different manner; sometimes the rockets woosh off unpredictably, but they've got a much more serious impact than the highly accurate Swiss army knife.

Life starts off easily enough, with a few punchable characters drifting around in order to get you in the right sort of mood. You'll quickly learn a few basic lessons. The response is occasionally a little slower than you'd like, so the name of the game is anticipation and forward thinking. If you're faced with a screenful of moose-heads, there's no point building up a huge power-punch (achieved by holding down the fire button) to bump one off, or you'll be swamped.

Some of the bad guys are capable of dealing with certain weapons, but not others. You can't carry them all at once, so you'll have to prioritize. There's a good deal of getting to grips with the maze layout involved. You'll always find that you're in the wrong place, facing the wrong bad guys armed with the wrong weapon at the wrong time.

Later levels take place in even rougher terrain and the deeper into the game you go, the more bizarre and dangerous the inhabitants become.

Graphically, Dux is a real treat. As monochrome as it can be, the pix are clear, cute and big. And the animation is flawless. Although some of the views look a little quirky, with slightly strange angles, and occasionally dodgy perspective.

The action is pretty well all-directional; as well as left and right, you can move vertically into the screen, across the path (if you know what I mean). And the scrapping takes place across all these planes too. You've got bad guys coming at you from all directions at once.