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It's wild: it's wacky! It's, no it isn't, yes it is... it's a platform game.

Butch Hard Guy is, believe it or not, a spoof of the recent spate of Rambo, Commando, Cobra-types of game - in order words it's just another combat game with a few funny names thrown in. Spoofs are meant to be funny, but in this case the hilarity begins and ends with the names of Butch himself and his opponent, the evil Dr. Tie Fu (that'll have 'em rolling in the aisles). Once you've recovered from the rib-splitting uproariousness of all that you've got nothing left to do but play the game.

Butch is an old war veteran whose task is to rescue a number of other vets who have been captured by Tie Fu and locked up in his castle in the south Pacific. The cages that they've been locked in are situated in platforms on each of the games 20 screens, and, as Butch, you have to leap from platform to platform, kicking the cage doors open and enabling the prisoners to escape to Butch's helicopter (see, I told you it was a platform game).

Once all the prisoners have escaped from a screen you can then start on the next one, but there is of course a slight snag. Each screen is patrolled by Dr. Fu's robot guards, which are coated in a poison which kills on contact. Not only can these robots kill Butch, they can also recapture the prisoners which means that he'll have to go back and rescue them again unless he's very fast. You can defend yourself from the robots by either punching them, which just makes them sit still for a second or two, or kicking them, which can blow them up (but you'll have to get out of the way or be caught in the blast).

The movement of the robots isn't predictable, and I found that you could attempt to hit one of them and still end up dying, which made the game a little irritating at times. The twenty screens are arranged in a fixed order and you'd have to be amazingly quick-fingered to get to the end (and the game won't accept Sinclair interfaces, so if you've got one, or a +2 then you'll have to use the keyboard), but the game wasn't so addictive that I particularly wanted to.