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Games set in the "Wild" West pop up fairly frequently, and it seems a particular genre of choice for the budget software houses. If you like donning your sheriff's hat and shooting cowboys, the Electron's got Dead Or Alive, Gunfighter and Kane to keep you busy. Not that Kane will keep you busy for very long though. It's one of the worst games of all time.

In this travesty of programming, Kane is the sheriff of a town in the mountains and must, alternately, shoot birds (or "birdies" as the game calls them) and outlaws. It starts with a backdrop of the mountains and Kane runs off on from the left, looking more like Charlie Chaplin than Walker Texas Ranger. He then takes up a position with an arrow pointing at the sky. You then move a crosshair around (very slowly) in the air above his head.

Pressing RETURN looses an arrow which then flies (very slowly) from Kane's outstretched arm to where you placed the crosshair. The "skill" of the game, if you please, is to mentally calculate the speed of the bird, the speed of the arrow and the exact moment to fire it. A successful hit will see the birdy drop to the ground. Three dead birds equals one "peace token" (i.e. life, although why the game doesn't call it a life I don't know!) in the second section.

Compare Kane with Birdstrike and you've got two ends of the spectrum where it comes to a fun bird-based shoot-'em-up. Where Birdstrike is relentless and demands much arcade skill, Kane is boring and demands much patience. On some occasions, no new birds fly onto the screen for several minutes!!

If you do persevere and make it to the second section, you're again faced with the Charlie Chaplin entry routine, but this time below a village. Tiny (and I mean really tiny) "outlaws" appear in its doorways and, again, you must move the snail-pace crosshair over to them and press fire to shoot them. They shoot back and Kane changes to a tombstone when hit. When you lose your last life he runs off the screen and the game starts again.

I vaguely remember playing Kane in my youth but revisiting it now isn't like reuniting with an old friend. The few minutes I spent in its company were enough to convince me that the best thing about it was the cover art, and how publisher Mastertronic dared to charge money for this clearly Basic-programmed snoreathon fair boggles the mind... even it was only two quid back in the day. As for being worth playing now, all I can say is it feels like the very embodiment of cheap and nasty. A&B said it best: Kane "fails to excite on any level". So, considering it's one of the better Mastertronic Electron titles, that probably tells you all you need to know about the quality of games it churned out for the Electron. If you go looking for it, expect to pay about £1.