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They're big boots to fill - but anyone can be the next tough man of the Wild West in Gunslinger, where the player is a fully-fledged cowboy. Shooting cardsharps, robbing banks, saying things like 'howdy pardner' and generally being a nuisance to the very lapse law in them thar parts... you can do all the macho things those rootin' tootin' men did.

The player is a retired Texas Ranger, Kip Starr, whose friend is facing a Mexican hangman's noose. It's up to Kip to rescue him - but not before the obligatory shoot-out with the Dalton boys, a fight with them pesky redskins, and a perilous journey across treacherous wastelands.

Gunslinger is a game of trial and error - given the very limited vocabulary, the player has only to try the commands obviously pertinent to each situation and the correct instruction is soon found. Needless to say, this greatly reduces the interest.

The thrill of the poker game, Kip's fear as he confronts gunmen in a life-or-death shoot-out - Gunslinger fails dismally to evoke these feelings.

Most of the screen is taken up by a poor picture of the current location, and there's also an on-screen list of words available to the player (which are typed or input by selecting words with a joystick-controlled cursor). Below is a location "description" (extremely brief) - and each new location has to be loaded from the disk.

Fortunately, this takes surprisingly little time, probably because the pictures and text use very little memory, so it's by no means tedious.

It's a shame the same can't be said about the game itself. There's very little to do and see in Gunslinger, and once again the world of Commodore disk-based adventuring takes a giant leap backwards.