Having just said that Robot Attack might be the worst game on the tape, I must eat my words, because Bullseye simply defies belief! The graphics are reasonable enough, but the sound is terrible; the game's much more fun without it! Naturally, the game is based around the TV quiz, the object of which is to throw darts at special boards and answer some trivia questions. You use the gun to fire the darts, which is quite good fun; you aim the gun steadily at the bullseye and wonder whether it's going to hit the board at all. The darts are very inaccurate, the question answering method is awful, with keyboard responses too slow to get answers in quickly. The whole game is dull, flat and feeble. Just like the TV show, but this one hasn't got Jim Bowen to take the p...(SNIP - Ed).

The five darts games on this tape comprise 501, Cricket, Round the Board and Noughts and Crosses, all of which can be played on any one of four difficulty levels.

Monty: The graphics are below average and the colour is only a little better. But the speed is what really lets this game down; the whole thing is written in Basic. It also has a tendency to 'crash' unaccountably. MISS

Frank: This will probably appeal to older gamesters, but might be a bit tedious for youngsters. Graphics, speed and colour are all fairly average and the absence of a crowd-roar for a high score is disappointing. HIT

Ian: Darts is a difficult game to transfer on to a computer, and is probably a bad idea anyway. But this could have been improved by a speeding-up and better use of colour. MISS

NEVER MIND THE QUALITY

GNASHER
Memory: 16K
Price: £1.99
Joystick: Kempston

SPECTIPEDE
Memory: 16K
Price: £1.99
Joystick: Kempston

BULLSEYE
Memory: 48K
Price: £1.99

Cut-price software inevitably begs the question of whether the games are any good. Mastertronic produces what, at £1.99, are the cheapest so far.

Gnasher is a Pac-Man derivative. The graphics are the conventional ones of maze, yellow Pac-Man and multicoloured ghosts. All the usual features are included - power pills, bonus fruit, two- player option and so on. The joystick response was slightly slow and sticky but if you must have Pac-Man in your lounge, you might as well save a few pounds and buy Gnasher.

Spectipede is rather more exhilarating to play, although that might reflect the virtues of the excellent arcade game Centipede rather than those of Mastertronic. Again, there is little of originality but the game is a fast version of the standard, with spiders, toad- stools and multiple levels.

Also available is a darts simulation, Bullseye. The game is slow to play, much of it being written in Basic, and it is not very user-friendly, as it is possible to get into Basic by making a mistake when pressing the wrong keys.

That said, the game provides five versions of darts including Cricket, 501 and Killer. There are also three ways of playing a shot; you can either state what you are aiming at, position a cursor on the appropriate part of the board, or enter the angle and distance of your shot.

The cover picture shows three dart-shaped spaceships homing-in on a red star, When you realise the nature of the game you can understand the point of the cover but it might well tempt the incautious lover of space games into buying something unwanted.