Players Premier
£2.99

Four outlaws are on the loose and must be caught. Seeing the huge rewards you take up the challenge to track 'em down and give 'em a showdown at high noon. Outlaw is played in a very similar fashion to the cowboy shoot-'em-ups that used to proliferate in the arcades. The playing area scrolls towards you and you're free to run your gunslinger around the area pumping lead into the seemingly neverending army of opponents. Obstacles also litter the route and crashing into one loses you one of your lives. But do look out for helpful objects: there are extra lives, extra speed, weaponry, ammo and more.

Outlaw is a difficult game to master: the main problem is that the ground is speckled so it's almost impossible to see enemy fire, or your own bullets for that matter! There have been a few games of this type before and none have worked especially well on the Speccy. Outlaw is pretty much the same as the rest. A good looking game but when it comes to playability it's a greenhorn (ie: not much cop).

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Once again RICH PELLEY leaps into the driving seat of a number 39 bus and zooms off to Cheap City...

Players Premier
£2.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

Arkansas, 1880. Your name is Braithwaite. Will Braithwaite (well, it would be!), and you're broke. Not a sausage, nor indeed a dollar. Oh dear. The only solution is to pick yourself up out of the horse trough, slip on your holster and go bounty huntin' for one of the roughest, toughest, fluffiest outlaws in the west to get enough money to lose in another gambing game. So. pausing only to order yourself a gravestone, off you trundle.

Ho hum. What we have here is a rather thinly-disguised Ikari Warriors rip-off. Y'know - a vertically-scrolling overhead-view 'move a little man about and shoot everybody else in sight before they shoot you' job. Thing is, Ikari Warriors was really good. And this isn't.

It's extremely monochrome, the graphics are poor, the scrolling is really slow, it's completely repetitive, not addictive in the slightest, the sound's crap and it's more than a little bit unplayable.

Oh dear A complete waste of time. Why have this when you could have Ikari Warriors (or even Commando) instead?

Yee haaay! Annie get your gun and see if you can blow the belts off them thar chaps. Or alternatively you could try to blow them thar chaps off their belts. Then agin' you all could star in a daft musical and collect more bounty than you'll find in this game.

Outlaw casts you in the role of the roughest, toughest, most billious bounty-hunter in Arkansas. Your task is to gun down gun totin' gangs of bandits and finally take on the head honcho. There are four rounds to complete; each round offers a higher bounty than the next, but you can tackle them in any order, choosing villains such as Butch Moonwalk or the Man with No Name from the opening selection menu.

Sounds good fun. Trouble is, it looks awful, the animation is poor and the gameplay is monotonous and unsatisfying (other than that it's fine).

The backgrounds, varying from Western towns to gulches and back again, scroll jerkily past in a downwards direction, as your little man, viewed from above, scuttles up, left and right avoiding bullets fire from the sidewalks and from the attacking bandidos. Your ammunition level is shown at the bottom of the screen, and you can collect extra bullets and other bonus objects by shooting barrels as you fight onwards.

The problem is that while your gun seems to have a very limited range. you have to get right up close to the baddies before you can off them - their bullets fly at you from all directions and ranges, so it isn't long before you get cut down. Things improve if you find a rifle or extra pistol, but it takes some time to get to this stage.

Even more annoying are what seem to be wagons and boulders which roll towards you - your man moves so slowly that in some cases it just isn't possible to get out of the way in time, and you get squashed (turning into a collapsing skeleton more suited to a vampire game).

As a big fan of B-Westerns I didn't enjoy this game one teeny bit; despite some decent music it's a big disappointment for a mean-eyed, ornery, bean-guzzling, snake-wrestling crittur like myself. I think I'll stick to watching re-runs of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.