Increasingly dominated by its Capcom and Sega licences, 'Japanese Yen' seems a more appropriate name for US Gold these days!

Nevertheless, the odd title does occasionally escape their cheque book, with Virgin's Golden Axe being the biggest hit of all the conversions here. The men behind the code, Mark Kelly and Steve Crow AKA Visual FX), shot to fame with Turbo Out Run and here aimed to revolutionize beat-'em-ups as dramatically as race games. That's a tough task to take on considering C64 sprite limitations - putting a lot of baddies on screen means you can't have nicely detailed sprite overlays and thus they end up looking very blocky, e.g. Shadow Warriors, Final Fight etc.

Visual FX went in the opposite direction, going for big, superbly detailed sprites with tons of frames of animation. Add in fire-breathing dragons to ride on, glorious backdrops, great sonics and stunning presentation, well "it's Gold Medal time" as Stu said at the time.

The price of this audio/visual showcasing is the lack of a two-player mode and limitation that only one baddy can be on screen at a time. This means gameplay can be a bit repetitive, although the baddies are fairly varied and building up magic - for some spectacular smart bomb FX - is good fun.

The worst problem is that putting the game on tape was left to some nameless duplicator and the multi-load isn't incredibly friendly, although better than Turbo and this version at least won't lack level five, as the first batch did!

Shinobi - also originally a Virgin game - takes the opposite approach to beat-'em-up action, although in truth it's more of a shoot-'em-up with shuriken rather than bullets or lasers. In this game there are no sprite overlays, but the graphics are so well done this isn't a problem with minimal blockiness and great end-level opponents. Gameplay is a tried and tested formula of left-right platform action but with shurikens, a good sub-game and very vicious difficulty level.

It's undoubtedly one of the best games on the pack, but at two years old there's been several compilation appearances already plus a recent budget release.

The rest of the games were all originally published by US Gold and by and large are workmanlike efforts which, unlike Golden Axe certainly aren't aiming to revolutionize anything. With Arc Development's Crackdown conversion this isn't so much of a problem. The original coin-op gameplay was rather dated - a split-screen variant on Gauntlet with two commandos sneakin' 'n' shootin' their way around sixteen varied levels planting bombs - and the C64 version captured this reasonably well. Particularly playable in two-player mode, it earned 88% in issue 60, although Phil's comment made clear his reservations.

Okay, it doesn't look stunning, or offer much gameplay innovation, but this stealthy Gauntlet variant will take a fair while to conquer and good two-player games are rare.

Super Monaco GP's only arcade innovation was its seven-gear gear-change - thankfully optional - and was otherwise very conventional. Probe handled the conversion, inevitably dropping the coin-op's huge side graphics, but Grant "SCI" Harrison certainly kept the speed up and the rear-view mirror works well, creating a real sense of being in the heart of a F1 race. It got a Sizzler in Issue 71, and if in retrospect it was probably a tad easy it's still great stuff for a compilation (on which it's arrived surprisingly soon).

Back on the beat-'em-up trail, we have Creative Materials' ESwat, a truly hideous version of a weak coin-op. The RoboCop-inspired gameplay could've made for a great C64 game but poor graphics, repetitive and programming glitches, such as baddies' legs and bodies not always being connected as they came on screen, made for a game that did the US Gold name real damage.

Golden Axe is the real star here, but Super Monaco GP and Crackdown are strong supporting acts even if the dire Eswat and oft-rereleased Shinobi aren't!