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Hey. it's 1993 and all the European barriers are down! I was thinking of doing a review in German as a bit of a celebration of the fact, but my German vocabulary is either obscene or "Sprachen sie Englisch". (Actually. it's sprechen' not sprachen'. Ed) Exactly. Anyway, just as I was ready to scrap the idea Linda gave me Pit-Fighter. Hmm, perhaps it's possible to do the review using the prior example alone...

Only joking there, YS is a family magazine in any country. But let's face it, Pit-Fighter is, well, crap! Jonathan managed to sum up everything last month in the review of the Super Fighter compilation, but hey! Let's think happy thoughts instead.

Pit-fighting is your average pummel-someone- to-death sport. It's more illegal than owning an Oric-1, and all the action takes place in a pit. Could this be where the name comes from, perhaps? You have six moves to your advantage. Kill your opponent and you go into a pointless Grudge Match, where you just hit a clone of yourself. To quote Jack Dee. "Huh!"

The graphics are huge, and keep rescaling (probably because the programmer's proud of his rescaling routine) so it takes an aeon or two to update each frame, and everything jerks. The view you have zooms in and out faster than me with a touch of botty trouble, and for absolutely no reason at all! It's ridiculously hard to line up with opponents and weapons due to all this, so when one kick hits 'em, don't move back or forth!

Another thing... I'm the first to admit that I'm crap at a lot of action games, but on my third go I managed to get through seven rounds and into the championship! My technique was unusual in as much as I just wanted to see the frames of animation, and wasn't really trying to play it! This says a lot about the difficulty level.

Finally (phew!) it only loads in 48k mode, but the inlay just says '128K-Select Loader option'. It doesn't work! Aargh! Disinformation! Basically, leave Pit-Fighter on the shelf, and buy Smash TV (or Steg if you haven't done so already) and make your Speccy feel happy. Me? I've already put in the bin, and now I think I'll scrape all the old powder from the drawer of my beloved Rinsamatic just to recover from the shock.