Code Masters dominate the £2.99 slot this month with three games, the first of which is yet another of their famous cartoon adventures. This time it's called Bigfoot (47%) and stars a furry monster who goes by the name of Footsy! The graphics in the game are just mindblowing, not because they are any good, but because you just can't tell what's going on. There are three colour options to try but they are all pretty bad and cause clash unless you them totally monochrome. There just isn't enough in this game to keep me occupied for long and I don't recommend it unless you are a hardened Code Masters fan.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Another trip to Lowprice Lane with the king of the skinflints, Marcus Berkmann!

Code Masters
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

What, another Code Masters game? What are they up to in Leamington Spa? This one, not surprisingly, is described on the back as 'BRILLIANT FUN' but in reality it's more of a near miss. Bigfoot (who's this huge hairy thing, a bit like Mike Gerrard) is trying to rescue his girlfriend, which involves running around the millions of screens picking things up... yes, it's an arcade adventure! (Like the 210 bus, they obviously come in six-packs.) The tottie has been locked up in a cage by a sadistic madman, and Bigfoot has to blow the lock on the cage by connecting high voltage wire to it, But there are two breaks in the cable..

Sounds like fun, and indeed the design of the game is sound enough. But the execution, I fear, has gone away somewhere along the line, and the result is substantially less gripping than it might have been. The graphics are detailed but a little tatty, and the whole thing looks very pre-Monty Mole. As for arcade action, this is mostly a case of damage limitation, as the various hazards are very hard to avoid and you have only a very limited amount of energy. In truth I'm quibbling - Bigfoot's not bad, but it's not a patch on Treasure Island Dizzy, for instance, or indeed Antiriad. All in all, not quite.

Label: Codemasters
Author: Talbot/Northcot/Day
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

When you're a seven-foot tall hairy anthropoid with a thick skull and protruding jaw, you don't get much choice when it comes to the girlies (you're right I don't - JD); so in this game our Bigfoot gets understandably mad when his beloved is kidnapped and locked in a cage. Cue lots of whacky hilarious zany spoffy madcap (that's enough adjectives - GT) adventures as the hairy hunk tries to find his shaggy sweetheart.

As you'd expect from any Codemasters game, there's a fair amount of programming expertise and fairly complex gameplay of the find-oneobject-and-stick-it-in-another-object variety. The graphics, though, aren't too hot; despite a choice of display modes (full colour, half colour and mono), the backgrounds are just too bland to raise much excitement. Bigfoot himself is reasonably well drawn and animated, but tends to get lost among the backgrounds if you're in colour mode.

For some reason, many of the clues you need to solve the puzzles are given away in the instructions. As you swing through caverns and villages, your aim is to blow open Mrs Bigfoot's cage using TNT. But to do this you need to repair a broken power cable, collect six pieces of fuse wire, cut a piece of wire from a neon sign, and so on...

Along the way you have to jump over lakes of bubbling lava, throw rocks at swarms of bees, and keep picking up fairy cakes and spinach to pep up your energy. Yes, I know, it's all a bit jackanory isn't it.

One slightly irritating aspect of the game is the object handling menu; it's activated by using DOWN/FIRE, and gives you the options of picking up, putting down, or selecting an object for use: For some reason I found it difficult to get out of the menu once I wanted to return to the game; the joystick movement you feel OUGHT to do the job, doesn't. Still, it works, though it's a bit fiddly.

Sound is unremarkable; perhaps a more skilled soundtrack programmer could have given the game a bit more gloss, but it wouldn't have added to the overall playability. Bigfoot is a pretty minor game, and seems to be very easy to solve. But it's not hideously bad and has a few amusing moments, so check it out if you're starved for entertainment.