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Follow in the footsteps of the Crafty Cockney or any of those other fine figures of personhood as you take to the oche in the quarter finals of the Mastertronic Darts Championship. The familiar pub sport of plump beer-swilling people throwing pointed obects at circular chunks of cork reaches your Amiga, with eight suitably chubby cartoon opponents pitting their skills against you.

Skill level, number of legs (that's rounds, not locomotory limbs), and suggestion on/off (an option which suggests what you should aim at!) are all set by you, and the computer randomly selects one of eight opponents for you to out-dart. In a two-player game it's beer belly to beer belly direct confrontation. Either way you control a hand wavering over the dart board (no doubt under the influence of certain alcoholic beverages!). So pick up th' arras an' get cobbin'.

World Darts is the Amiga version of the Arcadia coin-op which is in turn a conversion of the old C64 arra-chucker, 180. In the transition from C64 to coin-op, the designers obviously had to push the difficulty level up a few notches and it is this that proves the downfall of this verbatim conversion.

The matchroom and player graphics are atmospheric enough and sound is fine (I particularly liked the introductions by the digitised Master of Ceremonies), but in play the dart hand tends to wander aimlessly around the screen with almost complete disregard for joystick position, I'd much rather get my joystick around MAD's original Commodore 180 which was much more playable once familiarity was gained - the wild controls on World Darts make the 16-bit version a bit of a disaster.

There have been a number of darts simulations on home computers, which is rather surprising as I wouldn't have thought it a sport which lends itself very well to the format.

Anyway, it seems that once a workable game system has been worked out, all subsequent simulations are virtually the same. Arcadia's attempt has a couple of nice presentation points, like the chalked up scores and the sampled Master of Ceremonies introducing the game - but, yet again, it adopts the same format as every other darts game.

At the price, you wouldn't expect anything world-beating, so only look into this if you're a darts freak or you haven't got any darts games already.

Presentation 42%
Annoying delay as computer opponent is loaded, aggravated by a terrible control system.

Graphics 71%
Nicely drawn, especially the dart and chalk hands, but a glitch scars the opponent section.

Sound 63%
Some suitably accented speech but nothing special.

Hookability 41%
With such bad control, a straightforward darts game becomes very dificult to get into.

Lastability 32%
You won't want to spend much time at the oche.

Overall 31%
A poor interpretation of everyone's favourite pub sport.