Pirate Gold
£2.99
Reviewer: Nat Pryce

Murphy is a pneumatic hammer operator, who loves his job so much that he's built his own supercharged hammer, complete with laser gun! One boring Saturday afternoon he decided to go for a spin on his new wonder-machine.

After spending so much time working on his new hammer, I bet Murphy was well p***ed off to find himself in an inferior Kosmic Kanga rip-off. Okay, this isn't a straight copy. The programmer has taken only the worst features of that old classic, and added a few strange ideas of his own - try bouncing on half-naked girls to gain extra points, for example. (Yes please - Marcus)

The appealing graphics of the original have been replaced by drab scenery and messy sprites, and the scrolling is terribly slow. Even worse, Murphy suffers from the dreaded go-back-to-the-beginning-when-you-die syndrome - I thought I'd seen the last of that yonks ago.

Murphy is an absolutely dire game. I can't see the sense in releasing it with a three quid price tag when Mastertronic and Firebird offer excellent software at two-thirds of the price (How about greed? Ed). Steer clear.

Label: Pirate
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

As you may have guessed from the title, this game is about a little chappy called Murphy who has himself a turbo charged road digger so that he can bounce around.

Controls are simple, with left-right controlling his position across the screen and up-down controlling the height of his jumps. The game has two speed settings, though for some reason I found the slow setting is harder!

Not much more to be said really. Except it's rubbish, there is very little animation, sprite detection is bad and doesn't it remind you of Kosmic Kanga?