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The setting is the near future. Drugs have become a severe problem, so much so that a special police unit has been set up to bring down the criminal masterminds behind the dealing operations. Two officers, equipped with the very latest in military hardware and a flashy red Porsche with 20mm machine cannons, have been selected to travel into enemy territory, hunt down and eliminate the king-pin of the entire organisation.

The action is viewed side-on, with the two cops (garbed in red and blue) travelling from left to right, blowing away bad guys in spectacular fashion - if your trusty 9mm machine pistol doesn't do the trick, simply fire off one of your anti-personnel rockets, and blow the opposition into tiny barbequed fragments!

Of course, being a pair of humane and caring police officers, our heroes prefer arresting criminals to wasting them, and if you stand by a bad guy for long enough, he or she will be busted, giving you extra bonus points at the end of the round.

Further bonus points are awarded for any drugs or money collected from dead criminals. They also leave behind extra bullets and rockets to beef up the boys' artillery collection.

Later levels include some heavy-duty opponents, including psyched-out dogs that will go straight for the throat, a crazed clown with a warped sense of humour, and even a guy who'll throw hypodermic syringes in order to knock down your energy. If all the energy goes, one of your lives is down the tubes. If all three go, you've had it!

The Williams coin-op from which this is converted has got to rate as one of the most violent, not to mention one of the loudest, arcade games I've ever played, but its sheer addictive nature simply grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go.

Now the Amiga version is here, and it's just as vicious as its arcade counterpart, and just as playable. The graphics are not as polished or well-defined as you might expect, but they're colourful, and well animated - especially when you unleash a missile and the resulting explosion throws a conglomeration of severed limbs into the air (yeuck)!

Everything you'd expect from the coin-op is there, including the intermission screens telling you who you've got to bust, the funkadelic backing track, the booms and screams of gun and missile fire, and those pesky dogs which keep pestering you!

One minor quibble is the joystick control - the arcade machine had four buttons and a joystick, so cramming everything into one stick was obviously a problem - but once you've got used to it, the whole thing flows along so easily that you'll be addicted (if you'll pardon the pun) in minutes!

For what the machine can do, C64 Narc is actually better than the Amiga version!

Okay, the whole thing's multi-load, but the graphics are absolutely brilliant, the music is ace, and the whole thing is just as playable as the 16-bit game.

The digitised sound is gone (due to memory restrictions) but that doesn't detract from what is the best C64 coin-op conversion in ages.