Label: Top Ten
Author: Carol Sharp
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

I suppose someone had to do it; after the epoch-making failure of Macsen's Eastenders arcade game, some dummy had to come up with the idea of a spoof adventure. All the characters are here: Pete and Kaff, Arfur Foulup, Meechelle, Loopy, and Dirty Dan. The mystery surrounds the disappearance of Effi's little Willie (yes, that's about the level of the humour).

As PC Donald Dance, you must investigate Herbert Square, questioning the residents and trying to avoid hazards such as Smelli's hot dogs.

Graphics are primitive but pleasantly colourful and quickly-drawn. Text entry is pretty limited: more often than not, whatever you type in simply brings the reply, "You can't do that guv." The 'guv' gets pretty tiresome after about, ooh, eleven seconds.

Apart from the odd grammatical bog-up, the game plays fairly smoothly, but you can't actually say that it's funny, as such. If the very idea of an Eastenders spoof makes you fall over laughing, then you might get some fun out of it, but Deadenders doesn't have much to offer adventurers of normal intelligence.

Top Ten
Spectrum; Commodore 64; Amstrad CPC
Cassette: £1.99

This is a spoof of Eastenders, centred around the characters of Herbert Square. Effl's dog Willie has gone missing, and your first job is to find it. However, it turns out to have been literally flattened to death, and so the quest turns into a hunt for the killer.

To follow up the mystery involves asking people about things. Most questions fail to yield useful information, making this a rather hit and miss affair, although some answers are designed to raise a few smiles - providing you know your EastEnder characters, who appear in this game under recognisable pseudonyms. All very punny, and fiendishly unoriginal.

This is a GACked adventure, with a rather poor vocabulary that shows off the GAC's gaspingly long response time to unrecognised words to its best advantage. There are a few graphics, flat uninteresting pictures of such fascinating things as park benches, washing machines, and a pub bar. Every so often the text background colour changes at the showing of a different picture, and your eyes have to make a quick adjustment to read the text comfortably.

Cassette adventurers starving for a game to run on their machines would do far better to get hold of some older previously unplayed titles, from the likes of Scott Adams, Brian Howarth, or Stefan Ufnowski.