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Booty was released some time ago for the C64 on which it received a rather lukewarm reception. Firebird have deemed it worthy of conversion for the Commodore 16 and surprisingly it's not half bad.

You are Jim the Cabin Boy (ahar). For some strange reason the ship has been deserted and you are the only one left on board (hoho). Cabin Boy's wages being what they are, you decide to search the Black Galleon's holds for the treasure which lies therein (hehe).

There's rather a lot of treasure lying around in the Black Galleon, but it's not that easy to get hold of. For a start there are locked doors all over the place. To pass through these, you must first collect the appropriate key, each door is a different colour and has a key to match.

You can hold only one key at a time and some keys are behind locked doors of a different colour. This is not a game for fools. Ending up in the wrong place with the wrong key can spell disaster.

As well as getting locked out, there are numerous other misfortunes that can befall young Jim. He can be cut down by a cutlass waving ghost pirate, pecked to death by a parrot, ravaged by rats - terrible things happen at sea.

The graphics are great and dreadful at the same time. How so! Well, some of them are brilliant, like the portholes with blue sea floating outside. Others are not so hot. Jim himself looks more like an astronaut than a cabin boy, and some of the treasure is a bit difficult to make out. I saw the Eiffel Tower amongst other things, and I'd been well clear of the rum all night.

There is also that annoying sprite overlap problem, where everything around a moving character disappears momentarily. But that's hardly a criticism as nobody seems to have sorted it out yet.

None of this detracts from the game though, because the idea is a sound one and is fun to play. When the booty has been collected from all twenty screens, you have 45 seconds to locate the key which gives access to the next level.

For those of you who like the personal details, Booty was written by Kevin Moughton, a name I've seen before on Firebird Software, possibly Shark. Booty is a much better effort, more of this please Kevin.