The village of Nargoot was fairly prosperous, thanks to the Golden Shield – a shield with magical properties. However, the dark magician Amargol has stolen it. Enter Arn, a farmer from the village who has set out on a quest to find the shield and return it. This is a wonderful game with three levels which each load separately. Each level contains lots of monsters which must be shot, and several larger enemies which can only be destroyed with a particular weapon. You must also collect six objects in order to complete each level – if you reach the end. The most remarkable aspect of this game is the graphics; they are absolutely luscious, with really big sprites. As a result, the game moves a bit slowly, but it's nothing to worry about.

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A mediocre and very simple single-screen arcade game in which you move around the screen on your flying skateboard, using it to kill the monsters which float around the screen in a particular formation. There are four monsters to kill on each level – two waves, with two monsters in each wave. Bonus icons can also be collected when they appear. The graphics and sound effects are rather primitive and there's no appeal to the gameplay at all; it's the sort of game that you'll play a few times and then forget about.

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Skate around a city landscape, performing jumps and collecting all five letters of the word SKATE in order to obtain pieces of bronze, silver and gold skateboards. If you want to acquire bonus points, you can collect litter and either give it to the elderly ladies standing about, or put it in the nearest litter bin. You also have to dodge various moving obstacles such as remote-controlled 'planes and cars. The graphics are awful and the scenery is very drab with little colour used, which is strange considering that they're drawn in low-resolution mode. There is also practically no sound, and the skateboarder moves at a very slow pace. Because of this, the game has no atmosphere or appeal.

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Freddy wants to impress his roller skating friends with his skills, and he's going to do this by skating around several obstacle courses. The game is divided into two parts. The Car Park Challenge consists of four courses which have been laid out in a car park. You must impress the judges by performing stunts, while not crashing too much or becoming too tired. If you don't impress them enough, you must repeat the level. The Championship Course is more like a platform game in which you must simply reach the end of each level without losing all of your lives. The graphics are colourful and the music is absolutely marvellous, and although the Championship Course is merely OK to play, the Car Park Challenge is such great fun that you'll want to try it out again and again.

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8

Join Lester on five different skateboarding events – the ramp, high jump, downhill course, pool jousting (!), and the jam (a fight in a back yard). You can practice an event or compete in all five. They're all boring, anyway; there is a very limited number of moves you can perform on the ramp, and the downhill course and the jam scroll too slowly to make it exciting. These two events are in monochrome, while the rest of the game uses full colour (but still very poor) graphics. It gives the impression that the game has been put together in an inconsistent and rather slapdash manner.

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4

The Slime Rats are the coolest skateboarding gang in town, although I don't know why they call themselves the Slime Rats – the name doesn't sound very cool to me! To join the gang, you must tackle a series of courses, collecting eight flags in each. The graphics are appalling, there's no sound effects (although you have to listen to some irritating tunes before and after each course), and the gameplay is just as bad. The scrolling between screens is annoying and the collision detection is suspect as well. Maybe it's not quite as bad as it sounds, but it could have been a lot better.

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5

Tom Essex woke up one morning and found that all of his super powers had now disappeared, and he was no longer Superkid – but he continues his mission to clear the streets of criminals. Armed with his skateboard and catapult, Tom has to skate around six stages and collect nine banknotes on each one, while avoiding the muggers or firing at them. Contact with the muggers loses energy, and if you lose too much, the game is over. After completing a stage, there is a bonus stage which allows you to collect more points. The music is very good, and the graphics are OK as well, and Tom zooms around each stage at some speed. However, the muggers are hard to avoid and appear randomly on each screen, and progressing to subsequent stages is more a matter of luck than skill.

See also: Superkid, Superkid in Space.

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6

The Evil Sorcerer has captured several beautiful women, and your mission is to rescue them and defeat the Sorcerer, who adopts various disguises throughout the eight levels of this platform game. One Eye (and Red Dog if two people are playing) must board pirate ships, explore a variety of lands, kill a lot of the Sorcerer's henchmen, and collect lots of treasure in the process. Sword fighting techniques will not take long to master, although finding the right methods for dealing with some of the tougher henchmen will be a bit more tricky. The graphics are colourful, although the music doesn't fit in well with the pirate theme – and if you only have 64K of memory, you will only hear silence! Overall, this is a fairly satisfactory game, although the scrolling is very jerky, and the controls are slightly awkward.

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7

Skweek
(Loriciels, 1989)

Many years ago, Skweek's planet was contaminated with a blue skweekicide by aliens. Now you're going to change all 99 continents back to their original colour – pink! Each level consists of a board of tiles, and there are all sorts of hazards – monsters, arrow tiles, ice, and crumbling tiles are just some of them, but there are also a large range of bonuses. The graphics are extremely cute, and Skweek is so small and furry! There are two tunes to select, but they're rather too cute for my liking. You can switch them off, though. All in all, this game is so amazingly excellent that there's no way you can't like it.

See also: Super Skweek, The Tiny Skweeks.

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10

A legend tells that four people will one day bring peace to the kingdom of Belda. That day has come, and you control this group of people. The game is based on Qix (hence its name), where you must draw lines in order to fill in parts of the screen; when you fill at least 75% of the screen, you can go to the next level. To make this more difficult, there are a few monsters; a green mask which moves unpredictably and very quickly around the screen, and one or more other enemies which move along the lines that you have drawn. There are also apples which give you more time, and potions which make you behave in strange ways. The graphics are very good and the game is well presented, but the presence of the green mask makes it frustratingly difficult.

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