Graphics 80%
Sound 40%
Playability 60%
Overall 60%

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In my youth (mid-80s) I bought a BBC Micro game called Subway Vigilante, a monochrome beat-'em-up contender for the worst game of all time. It was practically impossible to hit your opponent, difficult to turn around, had no music or sound, and actually defeating a bad guy involved getting in one lucky punch, retreating for about ten seconds and then repeating.

Fist-Ro Fighter is a brand new platform game for the Spectrum and is, to all intents and purposes, Subway Vigilante (with all of its flaws) infused with colour and transferred to a ladders and levels type game. You take control of one of Barcelona's top law officials and, accordingly to the daft instructions, are charged with utilising the power of "-RO! " to topple six different bad guys.

Actually, the instructions for Fist-Ro Fighter make the game seem a lot more exciting than it ultimately proves to be. They speak of a "-RO!" health bar which you can build up by hitting villains five times in a row; this will concentrate the power of your ancestors in your fist and allow you to make short work of later attackers. But to say that actually being able to do this is hit and miss is to be exceedingly generous...

It's not often that I read the instructions, start a game and end up being clobbered by the very first fighter over and over again for more than 15 minutes. However, that's what happened here. Indeed, the whole experience was so vexing that I was on the verge of reviewing it with "Fist-Ro Fighter is unworthy of even being loaded"...

The number of sins this game commits are astronomical but let's take the most obvious.

Firstly, there are only three controls: Left, Right and Punch. There's an Up key, but that's not used in the fighting. As for the fighting itself, that consists of walking up to an adversary and throwing a punch at his face. Said adversary rarely stands still - you'll get two punches in at best before he fights back. Hence, raising the "-KO" meter by bashing him five times in quick succession can't happen; instead you must try and retreat without being hit yourself. If there were a Jump key, the game mechanics would change, and you might feasibly be able to escape. But there isn't, so you're stuck with running away from him, whilst he chases you Benny Hill style.

Your sprite, and that of your opponents are very similar - same size, same colours - so it's very easy to lose track of who's who. It's also difficult to turn around, the computer seems to only be able to cope with a direction key or punch. Add to this that you must play the game in a very cramped playing area. You can't move from screen to screen freely; you must complete them in a strict sequence. Failure sends you all the way back to the beginning.

After copying the techniques in FunkySpectrum's YouTube video of the game, I did manage to progress to the second screen and, after another ten minutes of frantically running left and right with the odd punch, I beat up two more adversaries and could proceed to screen three. I walked into it and found I was now standing on some spikes and was instantly killed. At this point I decided life was too short.

I would go so far as to say that Fist-Ro Fighter is virtually unplayable. Any "progress" I made was entirely due to the fact that more energy-giving bowls of rice appeared in some games than others. It is actually worse than Subway Vigilante, which means that it would make it onto my list of the worst games I've ever played. And if you're thinking perhaps it might make up for its flaws with superb sound and music, you'd be wrong. There are none.

The only thing I found nice was the animated expressions of the Dragonball Z clone on the right of the screen.

Sorry, Retrobytes, you'll have to do a lot better than this.

Graphics 20%
Sound 10%
Playability 5%
Overall 11%

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Finnish developer Pasi Hytonen has recently uncovered (and made available) his long-lost C64 platformer Little Knight Arthur (http://www.pasisbitstuff.net/). He has also, rather thoughtfully, made available Little Knight Arthur (Cheat Version). Neither is, alas, much to write home about.

The idea of the game is to navigate little knight Arthur around a succession of seven caverns. The mission for each cavern varies from simply making it through the room in one piece to rescuing one of your kidnapped comrades by taking an item in one part of the cavern to another.

The overall layout of the game is fairly pleasing, with some basic sprites set against a black background. There is also music on interrupt which is reasonably tuneful. Little Knight Arthur also reacts instantly to joystick or keyboard movement.

Unfortunately, however, the game is one of almost complete randomness - the spiders, rivers, bats and crab-bat things that inhabit each room don't follow any set pattern. This makes the game nigh on infuriating, as you need both pixel-perfect positioning and for the Gods of Retrogaming to move your adversary in exactly the right direction at exactly the right time (and keep him moving in that direction throughout your jump over him).

This is just too ridiculous; it doesn't even allow for any kind of increasing difficulty as you venture further into the game. From the very start, it's just ridiculously unfair. More irritatingly still, the third cavern - if you ever get that far! - is not quite as random as the first or second. Put this cavern first and players might be at least encouraged for a while...!

This game was written in 1985, which is when the Commodore 64 was coming of age. Nevertheless, in that era of Beach Head and Crystal Castles, it's difficult to imagine Little Knight Arthur would have competed well. At best, it would've been a budget title. This is more or less acknowledged by the author himself, who seems to have released the Cheat Version almost entirely to counter that criticism.

The Cheat Version includes an intro "trainer" where all manner of cheats (infinite lives, invulnerability, always have sword, etc) may be enabled, allowing you to at least see the later caverns. I've never been a big fan of such options and here they seem to be an admission that few will get far with the original version.

Do I recommend you download and play either of them? What do you think?

Graphics 50%
Sound 75%
Playability 10%
Overall 45%

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Alessandro Grussu has done it again! Largely known for bringing us the Spectrum games Funky Fungus and Cousin Horace, he's now released Seto Taisho Vs Yokai. And what a unique, barking madcap piece it is! You're tasked with beating, amongst others, the Bura-Bura lanterns, the Kara-Kasa all-seeing triangles and what look like huge pairs of breasts on legs. Thank goodness for the Vs in that title, eh? Otherwise, this would all be nonsense.

I've seen few new Spectrum games released in so many versions as this. Quite apart from its premise - which I'll get to in a second - and the amount of research that has gone into its creation, it seems the entire ZX community has got behind this project. It's available with English, Italian, Portuguese, German and Spanish instructions and, if a certain key combination is hit, you'll find the opening screen later rendered in Japanese too.

Like all the greats, the game itself is amazingly simple and is a little like Pang. Pang is (in case you don't know) an oft-forgotten classic whereby a number of spheres bounce around the screen and must be blasted. Seto Taisho effortlessly moves this concept to a platform environment, and replaces the spheres with Japanese monsters and goblins, aka the Yokai. A Spectrum 128K only game, Grussu utilises all of that extra memory to pack in fourteen Yokais and three background symphonies; all of which perfectly complement the action. Indeed, the jangling Eastern tunes have a charm all of their own.

So, what do you actually do? Well, as if it needed saying, you keep well out of range of the bouncing Yokai and run left and right, jutting out the spear you carry at right angles. A prick of the spear on any Yokai will give a satisfying puncture sound, and may cause it to reverse direction. You then run or jump after it, and prick it until it explodes in a cloud of smoke. When you've cleared the screen of Yokais, "GANBARE!" (Go On! in Japanese) appears in the centre of the screen and you proceed to the next room. Different Yokais require different strategies but none are so obscure that they can't be worked out with reference to the inlay card and a bit of applied common sense.

I don't have anything negative to say about Seto Taisho Vs Yokai; it's very responsive, gorgeous to look at and has easily taken a team the best part of two years to produce. It would be easily worth the average �4.99 price tag of a new Spectrum game. The icing on the cake has to be, therefore, that it's being given away completely for free.

The tragedy of this is simply that it doesn't have a lot of exposure; I literally just stumbled across it on a World Of Spectrum forum post. Hopefully this review will remedy that situation somewhat, because this is one that, once you've played it once, you'll definitely be coming back to.

Graphics 85%
Sound 90%
Playability 90%
Overall 88%

Regular readers will remember that this column used to contain a Soapbox and, considering recent (and rather dubious) Kickstarter events (of which retro fans are probably well aware), this month it very nearly made a return. Not for the first time, all things retro were tarnished by the activities of alleged cowboys, and it has left some with a bitter taste in their mouths.

However, as I've said before, the Retro Round Up is primarily a software round up; it is a place where those who have produced games for the retro formats can see their work criticised. I even don't give column space to Works In Progress, only to completed games. The Coleco Chameleon is a good illustration of why; sometimes even paying passing regard to a potential new retro machine could be interpreted as an endorsement.

See you next month!