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Oh whoopie-flip, it's this pile of tosh again! Why haven't they got the message yet? As a full-priced outing it was in the bargain bins weeks after hitting the shelves, in the exceptionally weak TNT 2 compilation, it was still the traditional turkey, and now Ocean has bought it for their "Hit" Squad label! How bad does a game have to be before it disappears up its own backside in a puff of pixels?

In the arcades, STUN Runner was a fair game. Guide your STUN craft through a 24-level tunnel complex, dodging indestructible drones, blasting various baddies, and swerving frantically to avoid bomb-dropping flyers. Colliding with enemy vehicles doesn't harm your craft, but does slow you down.

Like a bobsleigh pilot, you can ride the walls of the tunnels, sitting high on the turns to achieve maximum speed, hitting a turbo-boost pad increasing your speed to an amazing 900-odd mph. Ride over shockwave pads to collect a smart bomb, which can be activated whenever you please.

Although its 24 levels were far too samey to make it a classic, the coin-op's blinding feeling of speed made it good for a few players, especially the sit-on hydraulic version. Not so the C64 game - all the arcade elements are there, but it's so blimmin' boring! Robbed of the coin-op's mega-speed, design weaknesses are cruelly exposed, leaving gameplay that's thinner than Markie Kendrick's hair.

Acceleration is automatic, reducing the game to a simple left-right-fire outing. Your front-mounted blaster can be targeted on airborne or ground-hogging vehicles, but apart from this, aiming is a simple matter of making sure you're in line with the baddy before hitting fire. There's no choice of routes, no on-screen opponents to race, no terrain hazards, no nothing really - just reach the end of the track within a certain time, then start all over again.

The graphics are awful - your high-powered super-duper racing craft looks like a curling stone with water wings, doing battle with assorted supermarket trolleys, Zimmer frames and a brick. The backgrounds look more like the backdrop for a badly filmed Pink Floyd concert than a futuristic tunnel, and give no feeling of speed at all - if it wasn't for your speedo, you'd be hard-pressed to tell whether or not you're turbo-boosting. The sound's a joke too - ever sat in the middle of a lawn-mower factory while they were testing a new batch? Well, it's just like that. And to cap it all, when the sprites come together, there's horrendous amount of character clash!

At the end of the day, STUN Runner is a piddle poor conversion of an impossible-to-convert coin-op - five minutes after loading, you'll have seen everything the game has to offer, and that's virtually sod all. A disaster on the C64, a bore on the Amiga, our only consolation is that the chronic Speccy version makes it look almost good!