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Carnival is another Eighties Sega arcade machine now coded up on the BBC Micro by Richard Broadhurst of Retro Software. This man must never sleep...

Carnival is quite a simplistic game. The object of the game is not to run out of bullets. This equals instant game over. You start the game with 60 of them and a laser base at the bottom of the screen facing three stacked, scrolling rows of mixed ducks, rabbits, bullets and the letters B, O, N, U and S.

Ducks on the bottom row are a constant menace because they can, without warning, dive towards the bottom of the screen and munch away a random number of your bullets.

Shooting anything on the left hand side of the screen is riskier than elsewhere because, if you miss, you may find your bullet hits a penalty box, also erasing bullets.

Obviously, firing bullets loses them too. Only shooting boxes of bullets will replenish them.

And so the scene is set for a rather chaotic game in which you can employ a myriad of strategies to try and gain that coveted top rung of the high score table. All the action is set to a typical fairground piece, with bullets giving a satisfying squelch on impact.

This new game doesn't actually offer anything particularly new; there are at least two other versions of it already on the BBC Micro with comparable qualities. But it's enjoyable as, being a direct port of the arcade original, it's like playing the "official" conversion. Which is kind of cool.