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In the Eighties there were certain styles of game that you don't really see now, and Joe Blade is a good example of one of them. You could call them large sprite flick-screen graphic adventures set in identifiable "real world" locations with a lot of walking back and forth. Most of the examples that I can think of were licensed games - Garfield: Big, Fat, Hairy Deal, Snoopy and Andy Capp - and the style of graphics reflected the comic strips the graphics needed to resemble.

Joe Blade isn't a licensed character and he doesn't have a cult following apart from the one that Players Software made up for him. For upon the inlay, we find that Joe Blade is a "mean, tough and fearless teenage pin-up and pop idol... trained in a Tibetan monastery". Yes, hold that thought... Seems Joe Blade is a sort of Johnny Rotten crossed with Kill Bill's Uma Thurman, so quite dissimilar to a fat cat, cool dog or layabout alcoholic. He is, however, the ideal man to send into the base of Crax Bloodfinger. Why? Well, apparently Crax has kidnapped six world leaders! A hard mercenary needs to liberate them and teach little Crax a lesson.

The first thing you notice upon playing the game is just how little it seems to fit the background scenario. You've got an inlay with a soldier holding a gun bigger than a whale penis on the cover and yet the game is non-violent. You've also been assigned to infiltrate Crax's "base" but we've got rooms filled with trees, prisoners in cages, offices and jail cells. It's a strange flick-screen world indeed!

In the first room you enter you'll find a patrolling soldier and, importantly, a soldier's uniform. The soldier himself will react to this incredibly famous, armed thug not by shooting at him, but by bimbling over to him and walking quickly left and right 'over' him. This will decrease old Joe's energy bar which is shown at the bottom of the screen as a single vertical line in an unbordered area. All very weird indeed.

Fire once and the soldier will begin flickering and will, very slowly, be removed from the room itself. However, as long as he remains on-screen in any way, he will continue to drain Joe's energy when touched. This means you need to keep well away from all soldiers. The noteable exception to this rule is if you pick up a soldier's uniform. If you do, you will be "in disguise" and will look exactly the same as all the other soldiers... and so they won't bother you. That is, until the disguise "wears off"; a feature which makes no sense whatsoever!

Apart from walking left and right and firing his gun, Joe can jump. However, this must be the only game ever written where jumping is completely pointless. Firstly, you can't jump over the soldiers because the arc of your jump isn't high enough to clear them. Instead you pass through them and lose energy, even if they're flickering because you've already shot them. Secondly, you can't jump over the objects scattered around either - you'll pick them up even if you don't want to. Cue yet more bafflement.

Anyway, these six world leaders that you have to rescue. You'll find them wearing shades and lazing around in certain places throughout the garden - oh, sorry, I meant evil genius' base - and rescuing them is as simple as walking up to them, whereupon they disappear and the "Men" counter at the base of the screen is incremented by one.

The objects littering the rooms are picked up using the same technique. They consist of keys which can be used once and open doors throughout the area; and bombs, which must be defused by means of a little logic sub-game that appears when you walk into them. The game involves shuffling the first five letters of the alphabet into alphabetical order.

Overall, Joe Blade is certainly something rather unique. From the scenario, you think it's going to be some sort of Commando variant. The last thing you're expecting is a monochrome Joe pacing through a park, shooting at soldiers, waiting for them to disappear, moving to another room, collecting a key, using it in the next room, shooting again, picking up a disguise, moving again...

And yet, all the bizarre gameplay quirks aren't particularly bothersome. They really make the game what it is. What it is is interesting, primarily because it doesn't play by the rules you'd expect it to.

Joe Blade was a budget game and early budget games became synonymous with dross. Joe Blade isn't dross. It's the type of game that might just as easily have been released by Audiogenic or Superior as a £6.95 title, so £2 for it in the Eighties was a real bargain. Indeed, it's quite fondly remembered by those who had Electrons at the time, and well worth tracking down one of the many physical releases of it that Players shifted. Expect to pay around £1-£2.