The Golden Talisman protected a faraway city from evil, but it has now been stolen and broken up into five pieces which have been scattered throughout a deadly labyrinth. You must enter the labyrinth and find the missing pieces, so that the Wizard's curse on the city can be removed. The labyrinth consists of more than 500 screens; it's big! There are objects to be collected, including coloured keys which open portcullises of the same colour, candles to help you see where you're going, and flags which increase your firepower, which will help you defeat the dragons. The graphics and sound effects are primitive and the controls are rather frustrating, as is the need to position yourself absolutely precisely when trying to bounce off the walls and on to a ledge lower down.

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Morcar and his legions of Chaos have taken over the empire, but four men have undertaken the task of defeating him. You control the party – a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf and a wizard – as they attempt fourteen quests. In every room and corridor, there are things to be discovered; secret doors, hidden treasure, potions, monsters and traps. Many of the quests offer rewards for completing them successfully, which you can use to buy extra equipment for the later quests. It's a classic role-playing game which is based on a board game of the same name, and the graphics and sound are very good (if you have 128K of memory, that is). The pace can be a bit slow, but there is a real urge to explore further, and when you've completed all the quests, there are ten more for you to try in Hero Quest: Return of the Witch Lord – but they're much tougher!

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Four levels of an underground complex have been contaminated with radiation, and it's your job to manoeuvre a tank around each level and find eight lead blocks to shield the radiation source with. However, the complex contains many obstacles, such as doorways, one-way conveyor belts and force fields. Your tank also needs to be refuelled and rearmed constantly, and then there are the mutants... This is a simple game with very colourful graphics, and it's quite appealing at first, but your tank moves very slowly, and given that there's a lot of trudging around to be done, it will take ages to complete each level. It would have been a lot better if passwords were provided, to allow you to skip levels that you have already completed.

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Connor MacLeod was born in the Scottish Highlands in 1518. After surviving a fatal wound in 1536, he learns that he is an immortal – a group of people who can only be killed by decapitation, and who fight each other through time, in a quest to gain The Prize. This is a sword-fighting game with three levels which each load separately. Each level sees you fighting against a different opponent. In the first level, you fight your tutor, the swordsman Ramirez. Aman Fasil is your opponent in the second level, which is set in New York in 1985, and in the third level, you face Kurgan, who by this stage is the only other immortal remaining. All of the levels are more or less identical in terms of gameplay, and the graphics, music and sound effects are nothing special at all.

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4

You're a builder who belongs to a company which constructs skyscrapers. On each level, you have to build floors using the girders and bricks supplied by the overhead crane. Each floor requires a row of at least five bricks. When you've created a floor, you can climb up the girders to build the next one. But this building site is overrun with strange creatures who will make your life difficult, and you must also watch out for bricks falling from the sky! Some of these hazards will merely knock you out for a short time, while others cause you to lose one of your three lives. The graphics are colourful and cartoony, and the music is cute as well. It's a nice game once you understand the rules, although by the fifth level, the amount of monsters becomes overwhelming.

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Highway Encounter
(Vortex, 1985)

A nasty collection of aliens has invaded a planet, and they've brought a powerful weapon with them. Only the Vortons can stop them. Your task is to guide the Vortons and their counter-weapon, the Lasertron, through a series of obstacles spread over thirty zones, and only when you reach zone zero can the Lasertron be activated. The graphics are quite good, even if none of the sprites are multi-coloured, but there isn't much in the way of sound effects. Nonetheless, it's still a challenging game which requires a lot of thought as well as good reflexes.

See also: Alien Highway.

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Ever fancied being a police cop and driving around the highways of America in pursuit of criminals? It sounds thrilling, but this game is one of the best cures for insomnia I've ever played! Your car is fitted with a guide that tells you how far away the criminal is, but it's very difficult to find him, and all you end up doing is driving around, looking at the same flat scenery all the time, and occasionally seeing a car pass in the opposite direction. The animated sequences played before and after the game are very good – in fact they're the best thing about this awful, monotonous excuse for a game.

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Hi Rise
(Bubble Bus, 1986)
Reviewed by Guillaume Chalard

A simple but funny game where you control a little character running on complicated structures. Two policemen try to catch you, so you must escape by climbing ladders and trapping them with glue. Though it seems simple, this game isn't so easy because you must walk along every inch of the building to complete a level, so you have to find the best itinerary and avoid dead ends. Graphically it is basic, but this isn't the most important aspect. The gameplay is good and there are hundreds of levels, but controlling your character is sometimes difficult because you must be exactly positioned in order to turn around or to climb a ladder.

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5

The late Douglas Adams' book of the same name is one of the best known science fiction novels of all time, and this text adventure version (which is one of the best known text adventures of all time) mostly follows the plot of the book. If you've read the book, it'll certainly help you with a few of the puzzles, some of which are very clever and require some bizarre logic; the puzzle where you try to get the babel fish is the stuff of legend, and you could even buy T-shirts saying, "I got the babel fish". The game features some extremely well written prose filled with Adams' unique sense of humour, and is a must, even if you're not a fan of text adventures!

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9

Los Angeles in the year 2125 is ruled by the evil Emilio Bocker. It's up to the Hit Squad – a group of four young men and women – to find his lair and kill him. At the start of the game, you choose one of the four members to play as, although it makes very little difference to the gameplay. Each of the twelve levels consists of shooting monsters and jumping from platform to platform in search of a teleport ticket, which you will need in order to teleport to the next level. You can also collect boots to make you jump higher, food, and tokens to give you extra lives or better weapons. The graphics are simple but colourful, and the digitised pictures of the Hit Squad and the programmers are a nice addition as well. While the gameplay may be the same as nearly every other platform game you've seen before, it's still a fairly good game.

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