Quattro Firepower, eh? Sounds rather loud and action-packed, doesn't it? Or beepy and blurry, depending on how high your expectations of CodeMasters games are. Let's find out...

Jump into your helicopter and snatch back eight POW chums in this mono, overhead-scrolling shoot-'em-up. Hardly the most thrill-packed scenario, I'm sure you'll agree, but Op Gunship's got a few surprises up its sleeve, not the least of which is its real arcade-game style.

The circular-scrolling islands you fly over always have something extra and unexpected round the corner, and the enemy are so ridiculously prevalent that if you want to get out safely it's best to wreck most of the landscape. The graphics get a bit hard on the eyes after a while, but it's still a terribly addictive game that's been well-designed in all departments. In fact, it's so sharp you could give it a suit and call it Mister Sharpy. Ouch.

An inoffensive shoot-'em-up in which you're travelling around at ground level and bumping into lots of things. The playing area's a huge vertically-scrolling maze affair, with a liberal sprinkling of bonus tiles. Unfortunately one set of tiles 'time shifts' you all the way back to the start, which might have been a good idea when they thought it up, but ends up being just plain crap. Still, once you get into it, TCog is quite addictive. Basically, you wonder what's going to happen next. And the graphics are less cluttered than they they usually are. I like it!

Mig 29 is basically an Afterburner clone which tries to go one further than its 'inspiration'. This means that you get limited ammo and add-on weapons as well as ground and air opponents. Alas, it doesn't succeed. Its more fun to watch someone else zooming about than having a go yourself. Dodge! Fire! Dodge again! Then go and do something more interesting instead.

Starfighter's got lots of, erm, starfighting bits, with you blasting down a corridor in a similar style to, erm, Star Wars, actually. Apart from the vaguely strategic element of having to give different ships different cargoes (or something), and also the inclusion of a simultaneous two-player option, it all gets very tedious. A miss methinks.

So - worth buying for Op Gunship and Terra Cognita. The other two are duds, but for such a small payout you're hardly going to be breaking the bank, are you?