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This is another TV tie-in, featuring boats, buggies and assault courses (not to mention plenty of explosions). If you haven't seen it, it's a gameshow which features suicidal adventurists from all over the world, charging round tracks, being blown up left, right and centre. It's nearly as bad as a Japanese gameshow (well, not quite).

I was nearly put off by the appallingly bad pic of Martin 'Grey Sidies' Shaw (the programme's presenter). But nonetheless I hit the space, successfully managed to negotiate the multi-player section screen and wound up representing Australasia.

The game is separated into three stages, each containing three events which are randomly selected to make sure the game is different every time you play it. Ending up in the ultimate test, the Castle siege, a mixture of the land, water and assault course events (with still more explosions).

The road events feature Spacecats (slow six-wheeled vehicles) jeeps and quads, (four-wheeled bikes). Set over dirt tracks, hills and jumps feature prominently as the major hazards, though the opponent's vehicles don't help if you get too close.

In the water you're among jet bikes fast and easily controlled, speed boats - very fast and difficult to handle, and hovercraft slow and unmanoeuvrable bricks. The only real problem with the water event is the lack of a proper map - in the ensuing confusion you tend to wrap the vehicle you're in around an island or a buoy. Oh yeah, while all this is going, there's still plenty of explosions erupting everywhere.

On the assault course there's no protection, you're on your own with only the ubiquitous explosions to keep you company. Left/right movements enable your main to run forward and a jab forward makes you jump. Hurdle the logs or you'll end up with mud on your face, and use a rotary joystick action to clear the scramble nets.

Run The Gauntlet was one of those conversions I had expected to fail completely, but I was wrong, it is a very well programmed piece of software. The graphics are clear and precise all the way through and almost totally glitch free. More importantly, the computer-controlled vehicles are quite intelligent (as well as being immune to the explosions), making the game challenging in the right way.

The sound is not quite up to scratch, a funkier action tune could have been used, but the sound effects are adequate enough.

This is a solid game which can only be gently praised, though I must warn tape owners that I reviewed the disk version and it did have a multi-load which was spread over both sides. But if you feel you can put up with another multi-loader, you could do a lot worse than look here. After all, it's a lot safer than being blown up doing the real thing.

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As well as the sampled Martin Shaw speech at the start of the game, there are lots of nice distinguished pictures opening each event. The graphics for the games are substantially better, larger and more colourful.

The game tunes are quite racey and fit the mood of the on-screen action.

RTG comes on two disks, one containing the intro and the track racing games, like buggies and quads, the other disk storing all the water and assault courses.

The Amiga version doesn't play much differently from the C64, but there's still enough to make it a very playable, if unspectacular, 16-bit game.