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I think Firebird must be trying to corner the market in the very, very tedious wave after wave genre of arcade game. The kind of thing we used to have to endure before people discovered how to program properly. Last month it was Cosmic Firebirds or some such, this time we have Buccaneer - 'you must shoot down all the aliens before progressing to the next wave,' it says in the blurb. They tell no lies.

We have aliens in various shapes including rabbits, cooking equipment and. most horrible of all, frogs. All seem to follow exactly the same attack formation (the bouncing up and down one), all fire missiles on a sporadic basis. Every so often a deadly heat seeking metallic thing comes flickering towards you. It's very threatening.

Sometimes you have to refuel by docking with a sort of silver boomerang, in later stages deadly meteors and Rota-droids which cannot be destroyed by your photon blasts (they look quite weedy actually) come hurtling towards you. By this time you probably won't care either way.

Graphics are tedious and can barely even be described as animated since all they do is waft up and down. The central playing area is blue, and the top and bottom edges depict a scrolling landscape that seems to belong to another game. I was so enthralled by Buccaneer I found myself reading the foreign translations of the box artwork. Did you know the Dutch (maybe it's Swedish) for "Shoot" is "Schiet". Seems appropriate.

Label: Firebird Author: Team Price: £1.99 Joystick: various Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Graham Taylor

*

Terminally dull, completely tedious, repetitive and thoroughly unoriginal. Don't buy this game.