Dress a mediocre Defender derivative and a levels and ladders game up with fancy lots and put them on a hot new machine to pull the punters who're just dying to play any software for the PCW, that's what Alligata's trying to do.

Blagger is the neatest of the twosome and if you've ever owned a Commodore 64 in a past life you may have seen the title.

You're Roger the Dodger whose life ambition is to loot his way through an endless stream of banks, shops and houses. The owners of these high risk properties aren't too bright though. The highlight of each caper is to collect the golden keys and bounce your bulbous belly against the safe on each screen. The MOs are the same, only the screen layouts are different.

Several games I've seen which lack imagination always make up with it by making the game impossibly difficult to play - dull but difficult. Blagger's the same and I for one didn't want to invest the time and effort to get to the last screen.

Guardian, on the other hand is a Defender game whose aliens have no guts. They look like senile money spiders floating across the screen. Your ship moves above the planet surface, destroying the twee aliens-flying pods, swarmers, and deadly baiters to name a few - and saving the little stick refugees who're in danger of being captured.

The game's key controls are more complex than Blagger, but that's not to say that Guardian is more complex.

Alligata has produced a package of two reasonable games. Unfortunately, reasonable is just not good enough as this software does not stretch the PCW to its limits, nor try to.