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Oh the smell of the chase! The whine of the woo-woos! The scream of the pedestrians who... hang on a minute, haven't I read this review somewhere before? Yes! Because in time honoured tradition, the Amiga version has appeared long after the C64 version, and also traditionally, is ten times better.

In so far as the game goes, it's the same; after all it is a conversion. If you didn't see the last issue, for some unknown reason, then here's a run down of the story. You are a cop, and as a cop you have arious duties to fulfil, which usually consist of racing hell-for-leather across the busy streets of one of your typical US cities in search of a certain number of bad guys and crooks, the quota being laid down by your boss at the start of your day. Make it through the month, and you're a hero!

Crooks range from the cowardly litterbugs who give up at the slightest sound of a siren, through the honkers, yellow cabbies who constantly blaze their horns and take two bashes with the woo woos, right the way through to the dopers, who are so out of their heads they can't tell the difference between some woo-woos and a set of traffic lights. 'Wow, man'.

As you progress the bad guys get harder to find, harder to catch and there are more of them. To help combat the odds, there are lots of toys to collect such as improved engine, armour-plating, enhanced brakes and most importantly, a gun which you can use in place of the woo-woos to get the bad guys from a distance.

The graphics are a massive improvement over the C64 version with only one small gripe. The scrolling is still terrible. Jerky in all the 360 degrees, it only really becomes unnoticeable at high speeds. The sprites themselves have been very well translated from the arcade, as have the backdrops, and I love the little incidental screens that have been thrown in here and there, for example, the confession screen.

After you have arrested an especially dangerous criminal, you have to get him to confess to their crimes, and this you do by beating it out of him. The screen is a picture of the door to your office, with a steamed window next to it. In the tindow are silhouettes of yourself and the criminal. By waggling the joystick, you throttle the perp and a confession meter slowly climbs. The object is to throttle the confession out of him before your chief gets to the door. I thought it was funny but I think Dirty Harry is a comedian.

The sound effects are brilliant. All of your chiefs' "humphs" and "hahs" have been copied directly from the arcade, along with a bumbled "well done" and "thank-you-very-much" thrown in. All this plus a groovy soundtrack, great game effects and snatches of in-game speech with things like "I sure could use a doughnut" and "where's the gas station?"

An entertaining conversion of a great arcade game. By no means as good as it could have been, but still fun nonetheless. Worth buying.