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Roll up, ladies and gentlemen, and see quite possibly the biggest white elephant in the Electron's library. That's because Barbarian, a late conversion of the Palace Software beat-'em-up, arrived in a trail of publicity the machine saw only once in its lifetime. On the front cover we had the bulging biceps of Bradley Broadshoulders (OK, not his real name!) and the scarely concealed, and very ample, assets of Maria Whittaker. Now if that's not gonna shift a quarter of a million copies, my son, I don't know what is.

Now, far be it from me to point out the obvious, but when any company goes to preposterous lengths marketing its games, the one reason for that is simply that they are not very good. This bald fact seems to have completely bypassed the great majority of reviewers, and commentators, on Barbarian both at the time of its release, and ever since. Firstly, if you view the hysteria in the Acorn press that greeted the photo of the semi-naked couple on the Barbarian packaging, it's hard to conclude that all the "outrage" was actually real. Secondly, while most games got little more for "free" out of the magazines than a review, the feigned indignation over Barbarian's so-called gratuitous violence and contribution to the collapse of modern society meant it kept being mentioned for months after its initial release. But why?

Why, indeed! Anco's Strip Poker II Plus raised little more than the odd eyebrow, despite featuring real naked women on-screen (albeit hideously digitised ones) and a much more racy front cover. And yet, we're expected to believe that vicars, children and aunties across the United Kingdom were so incensed by the presence of a page three girl on the front cover of a videogame that they demanded the advertisements of her be censored... despite the fact she was actually wearing clothes! Yeah, right. Someone, somewhere wanted this game to get attention and gain sales and had decided sexualised imagery might well distract gamers from realising what a sad, boring little beat-'em-up it actually is. Personally, I don't reckon they succeeded. People may still talk about the so-called controversy around Barbarian to this day... but no-one talks about enjoying playing it.

In the case of the Electron, you're really left scratching your head as to whether anyone really wanted it in the first place; it's inferior by far to Melbourne House's superb one- or two-player beat-'em-up Way Of The Exploding Fist. And that's not because Barbarian on the Electron is a poor conversion of a trend-setting Commodore 64 game, the original is just as dull to play with jerky animation, a set of fighting moves that resemble John Travolta taking the floor in Saturday Night Fever and the odd decapitation scene which is beyond laughable. Whether you choose to play the Combat or Fight To The Death variant of the game, you simply get to fight ten variants of Conan the Barbarian, one after another. The only thing that seems to be different is the backdrop behind your battling brutes. At least on the Commodore original, the troll-thing that kicked the severed head of your enemy off-screen did it with a sense of relish, and the head bounced off realistically. But the Electron version has taken appalling shortcuts with the animation, making a mockery of what was, at the time, its unique selling point.

I genuinely struggle to see how anyone could be in the least entertained by Barbarian. At best it seems pretty vanilla, at worst it's bloody boring. The best that can be said for it is that you can play it against a friend if you wish, and the variety of moves (sixteen in all) offers some variety. If, of course, by variety you mean "learning which move defeats which other move". I also don't accept any sort of argument that this game might have been in any way better if you'd "been there at the time". I was there. Believe me, it wasn't very good then and it lives somewhere in the county of preposterous now.

When they weren't pretending to be appalled, or criticising its marketing to high heaven, both A&B Computing and Electron User did find the time to publish a review finding Barbarian "an excellent addition to your collection" and leaving them with "little to criticise". Interestingly, despite the magazines being rivals, the same review appeared in each magazine, attributed to a completely different author. Considering just how poor the game actually is, just regurgitating a load of puff as an independent review whilst simultaneously hyping up the sexual content in neighbouring editorials is almost enough to make you start to believe in conspiracy theories...

And they say fake news is a modern phenomenon, eh?

If you're looking for Barbarian, there were two easily distinguished releases of it back in the Electron's heyday - the initial double-sized cassette box by Superior/Acornsoft (with the famous Whittaker cleavage on display) and the later budget version by Superior/Blue Ribbon (with much more conservative cover art - boo). Despite the hundreds of thousands of copies you'd imagine Superior was hoping to shift on the back of all the free publicity, the infrequency with which you see a second hand Barbarian on sale reveals to me that it was all a dismal failure. But, frankly, when a game's this terrible, it's hard to even feel any sympathy for those involved.