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Banish those Hill Street Blues with Tengen

Officer Bob's a friendly sort of chap, but he's also a cop patrolling his beat with some tough arrest quotas to fill for his bonus pay. Everyday Bob gets a new quota, each one bigger than the one before. To fill it, Bob must arrest a set number of litterbugs, drunks, hitch-hikers and such like. These aren't likely to resist arrest, but to find them you need an eagle eye and a good patrol pattern in a very big city.

Occasionally you'll get an All Points Bulletin which means a criminal a notch above your average lager lout is on the loose. Keep your eyes peeled for a master criminal such as Sid Sniper or Freddy Freak and standby for a fast chase. If you catch the felon, it's back to the police station for a spot of interrogation. Needless to say, the criminal has the right to a lawyer, to remain silent etc... but if you can get a confession out of him - before the chief arrives at the cell - you can forget about quotas for the rest of the day! So when the scene switches to the police cell waggle your joystick as fast as possible to shake some sense into the fiend.

While on the beat you can arrest an offender by touching him (or her) with the Steering Wheel cursor which is fixed just ahead of your police car. Press fire and the siren should force him to pull over. Hardened criminals may ignore the siren for a bit - A.P.B. offenders need to be rammed off the road - and later on in the game you'll need a gun to shoot up their cars. But if you shoot an innocent bystander, or crash into a vehicle with the siren off, or fail to meet a quota, then you'll gain a demerit point. Collect enough demerits and you're kicked off the force.

Tracking down all those criminals can get a bit tiring, so why not stop off for a doughnut to extend your time limit? Then there's the money bags which you can pick to boost your revenue, very useful for the Speed Shop where you can buy better brakes, radar, turbo-charge your engine and top up your gas tank.

Tengen coin-ops are always great to play and the conversions of A.P.B. bring home the humour that really made the coin-op for me. After C64 Xyboys, Tengen have got right back on track with good presentation and strong gameplay - it's great to see that right from the start you've got freedom of movement to explore and pursue two types of objective (quota or A.P.B. suspects) at the same time.

While the Amiga game has that faithful cartoon look, the C64 game edges ahead with a slightly easier-to-control car and some excellent car graphics (I personally found the side graphics at times a little dull though!). Put this one on your Most Wanted list now!

This is great. The feeling of satisfaction when you bang one of the fifteen most wanted felons behind bars is immense. Chasing them is certainly tough, whether you're bashing into their car or blasting away with your gun you have to be careful of innocent bystanders.

It's really good how you can use donuts to extend your time limit to look for felons, rather than just filling your quota of little louts. Surviving 32 days on this Police Academy police force is one tough task, but I reckon I'm going to persevere until those tough streets are safe for women, children and, yes, even hedgehogs!

This is one of those rare recent coin-ops that concentrates more on playability than graphics, packing in lots of cartoon humour too. Thankfully, most of the playability has been preserved by Domark, resulting in two superb conversions.

The ability to wander around such a huge city is excellent, and if the time limit seems a little tight you can always increase it by visiting the donut shop. Similarly you can uprate your car by spending cash at the garages, though zooming around at top speed is always a bit dangerous on busy roads.

Both versons play very well, but the C64 game makes better use of the host machine to nab a well-deserved Sizzler.

Presentation 80% A tolerable amount of disk accessing between levels, tape version is promised to be a fast multi-load.

Graphics 89% Background graphics are a little repetitive, but all the main sprites are top-notch.

Sound 88% Poor engine noise, but tunes are good and the siren okay.

Hookability 90% Can start on any of the first eight days, starting with arresting traffic cones!

Lastability 92% It's a truly massive city, bursting with criminals to be arrested and a good progression in difficulty over the 32 days.

Overall 90% The C64 effortlessly handles another superb coin-op conversion.

Presentation 88% Hilarious intermission screens.

Graphics 78% Only adequate sprites and no full-screen scrolling, but lots of nice touches like the speech bubbles.

Sound 80% Adequate tune with some good arcade samples.

Hookability 90% As on the C64, you can choose to begin on any of the first eight days.

Lastability 90% A huge city, lots of APB felons and 32 days to survive before you can retire.

Overall 89% An immensely playable coin-op loses none of its addictivity on the Amiga.