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Long considered the pool game to end all pool games, Archer Maclean's got a fight on his hands in the form of Team 17's Arcade Pool. Who will win, which one's better and do we really care that much? Stay tuned and read on.

The instruction manual calls this a virtual pool hall and, for once, the 'virtual' moniker fits. You're presented with a pool table floating in the infinite inky blackness of space (or a particularly dark maybe) and using the easy-to-understand icon menu, you can zoom in and out and alter your view of the table.

This is all very well and good, but you can never get a directly overhead view of the table, and when you're using a close-up view, you're left in the dark as to what's happening on the rest of the table. In fact, there isn't a single view where you can see all of the table, so boo to that, and big points to Team 17 for their top down view.

As far as the accuracy of the simulation, I'd say it was pretty close to the real thing. Hardened players can judge their shots by eye, but for us lesser mortals, you can opt for the line of travel option, which draws a helpful dotted line across the table, but sadly doesn't show you where you shot will go if it rebounds off the cushions (unlike Arcade Pool) which, depending of course on how you look at it, is either just like real life, or slightly annoying.

Both games have got American competition rules, British rules and so on, and both have a number of different computer opponents, but only Archer Maclean's has striped balls that glide across the table rather than rolling and that pull faces at you from time to time. This is fun, but it's just a bit too much of a pool sim rather than a game for my liking. Team 17's Arcade Pool is more of a trashy bung the disks in and have a go sort of game, which works for me.

A great game, and the definitive pool sim on the Amiga but somehow not as much fun as it really should be. For pure, arcadey pool antics, Team 17's pool pips it to the post, but hey, it doesn't stop this from being pretty great too.