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It's a scream! It's a cracker! It's a holler! It's ten years late! Yipee! Yahoo! Y... Ahem. Ah yes, I remember It's A Knockout.

Many's the time I sat, as a spotty little kid. chomping my way through a box of choccies (hence the spots), watching this Chinese water torture. Jeux Sans Taste was an endless parade of people battering themselves, slipping down greasy poles, catching pneumonia, and all this whilst suffering the humiliation of wearing a 'funny' animal suit in front of millions of viewers. It's a bit like being punished for some heinous misdeed, which is also the effect it always had on me as a viewer.

Now the powers that be have turned this embarrassing spectacle into a pair of spectacles; now you can embarrass yourself without getting wet in your own front room. Well, I suppose it beats being tied to a sixty foot inflatable elephant with an elastic rope... though only just.

It's A Knockout is a hastily crafted grab bag of arbitrary games, proving that the only frontiers that the games are without are those of taste, sense and playability. The Bronte Bash is a boring and repetitive waste of time. Harlem Hoppers is a game where you catch balls being rolled down a camel's back, so why it's called Harlem Hoppers beats me. Titanic Drop is a wacky game of falling in the water. Obstacle Race is Daley Thompson's Decathlon without any control. Diet of Worms turns your Spectrum into one of those drinking bird novelties, and finally... yes, the old pie in the mush returns with Flying Flans. If you've ever had a custard pie in the face, you'll know just how unfunny having your nostrils full of shaving foam really is. About as unfunny as this game in fact.

It suffers mainly from cramming too many games into the computer's memory, each one having a paltry 8K to be stupid in. This is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.