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"Shake, rattle, roll it!" went the attract line for the hottest coin-op licence of 1988 - and down it went in flames when it finally arrived (C64: 17%. Issue 47). The plot and gameplay was simplicity itself, just battle your way through enemy airspace to your waiting carrier, landing at runways and docking with tankers to top up your missile load en route. It was left to the ultra-fast speed of the coin-op to mask what amounted to minimal gameplay.

Without anything like a decent speed effect, boredom rules in the C64 version. While not chronically bad on the graphics front - drab with little detail is an apt description - the presence of character squares around missiles epitomises the crude programming. A pointless multi-load destroys any build-up of pace or exhilaration (and to think that Power Drift came out under a year later). Coming so soon after the budget release of First Strike, C64 Afterburner is a very sorry affair.

With Argonaut Software (Starglider 1/2) behind the 16-bit conversions, hopes were high and this was the most eagerly awaited version of them all. But yet again, the coin-op proved too much with a surprisingly lacklustre effort emerging on the Amiga. Multi-load (unless you've got 1Mb), poor runway graphics and a dodgy flying-down-the-canyon effect are some of the bugbears, alongside generally poor graphics which lack detail and anything like a decent speed effect (sacrilege!). The feel of the coin-op is lost in sluggish response, dubious collision detection and little of the coin-op's glossy presentation - very disappointing given Argonaut's reputation. At least the main plane graphic looks good, which is about the only positive thing that can be said.