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There are ways and there are Ways. And now there is Gremlin Graphics ' The Way of the Tiger. Speaker of Truth Phil South chops his way through this king of combat games.

Here we go again - in martial arts combat against the forces of evil. So how does this new contender stand up against its rivals in the martial arts/ninja arena? What makes this game a chop above the rest? How does it play, and what does 'trigeminal' scrolling mean? Let's take a lool...

The new game is the first in a series of translations of The Way Of The Tiger solo role-playing gamebooks to an arcade format. You take the role of Avenger, a powerful ninja warrior, and control his exploits in the ancient world of Orb. You chop every chop, swash every buckle and Ahh every so in the valiant ninja's battles against the dribbling hordes of evil adversaries.

It is written that long ago a young boy was found abandoned on the mystical Island of Tranquil Dreams at the gates of a temple to the great god Kwon. A monk called Naijishi, a Grand Master of the fighting arts, took the boy in and became his foster father. He taught him all he knew, of combat and wisdom. Soon the time of testing approached, when he had to face many vicious foes to earn the title Ninja, Speaker of Wisdom, Protector of the Weak, and One Most Powerful. After that he had to face the Master Naijishi himself, for the ultimate test.

Gamebooks are a spin-off of the role playing game industry - you, the reader, take the part of the book's hero and follow one of the many different courses through the book according to the decisions you make for him. The Tiger books were an alternative to the dragonslaying type, and indeed one of the first to make a move away from the goblins, wizards and orcs that go grunt in the night type. The Tiger books chart Avenger's adventures and, by way of the multiple choices, decide his fate.

The three parts of the game form a training course for budding ninjas, and offer an introduction to the techniques you'll need to embark on the adventures to come. Not least of these is the ability to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent, and order your attack appropriately. Each foe is different, and one of the big strengths of this game over others is the variety of techniques you must use to beat them.

Some are short and stubby goblins. Some are giants whose very footfalls make the ground tremble. Some are spirits who float above the ground and cast a deadly fluence over you. It's this variation of attack that makes the game interesting - in most other games of the genre one repetitive move will usually see you through. You have to master all the moves and deploy them with great care to become a true master.

The range and quality of the animation in the game are first class. I'm told that a four person team worked solidly for seven months to produce the multifarious animated effects, taking in not only the main characters, but the scenery and background characters too! All of them exhibit amazing lifelike movement.

Take for example the ducks swimming peacefully on the lake behind the pole fighting, or the fish that arches out of the sate and plops back in again. And the owl lithe sword fighting scenario that flies from the middle distance right in to the front of the screen where it lands and revolves its head right round before flying off again. With such interesting things going on in other parts of the screen, its sometimes difficult to concentrate on the job in hand.

Another thing that sets this game head and high kicks above the mob is its 'trigeminal scrolling'. What this means in practice is that when you jump up, you see things from a slightly altered perspective. You can peer over foreground objects and take in details of the background.

Although this might sound a bit ho-hum to you, the effect it has on the 3D is quite startling. This is shown to its best during the samurai sword fighting sequence, where the scene is depicted as seen through the eyes of the master Naijishi himself. The screen moves around as he moves his head to take in different parts of the action.

The whole game takes up about 148K of memory. Yes, I know you've only got 48K in your little button box! The code is loaded in sections, giving you what amounts to three complex and different games on two cassettes, multiloaded through user-friendly menus.

Is it a hit? (Take that. THWACK!) Ahh so!