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Here's a clever piece of marketing for you. Operation Wolf appears in the arcades and becomes an instant hit, so Ocean immediately rush out and buy the licence. Then Operation Thunderbolt appears and becomes an instant hit, so Ocean buy the rights to that too. In between these two appears another blood and guts game by the name of Cabal, and becomes the only serious rival to Operation Wolf in the arcade. Hmm, think Ocean, how can we stop this from becoming a serious threat to Operation Wolf on home computer? Easy, we buy that licence as well.

And thus they did, and it came to pass that on the 6th day of the tenth month, that being the nineteen hundred and eighty-ninth year of our Lord, a bundle of disks did weave their way into my hands, and from that did find a C64 with disk drive. Amen. And just to prove that there is power in prayer, the god Bracey of Ocean declared that Cabal would be good, and so it came to pass. It's bloody good.

The story is simple. As a one man army, you have to play a major part in the war against terrorism and fight your way through five levels of violence, blood and guts. Each level consists of four screens, all chok-a-blok with enemy soldiers, tanks, APCs, choppers, jets, the lot. And there's you, stood at the bottom of it all, taking pot shots at anything that moves.

As you run around at the bottom of the screen, a crosshair flies around the screen in time with your joystick movements, but four times faster than the main sprites. By holding down fire, your man stops running and starts shooting, and the only thing that carries on moving is the crosshair. Even so, this doesn't stop the bad guys from firing at you, so the only real way to survive is to keep on moving, which is hard to do if you want to keep firing.

As you play each level, you'll find there are lots of things to destroy. The easiest to kill are the basic enemy soldiers who run on screen, take a shot, and then run off the other side of the screen. Slightly more difficult are the grenade throwers, who, dressed in white, roll along the floor when you shoot at them, and take a couple of shots to kill. Then you have the tanks and APCs which roll out onto the screen, pause for a while and then launch high powered rockets. These take a lot of gunfire to destroy or a toss of a grenade - and both of these are limited. There are the airborne nasties such as the airplanes that bomb you, and the helicopter gunships that fly on, hover in the air and then strafe the ground. As well as all these, there are also bits of scenery that can be blown up. Bring this lot together and you've got a pretty destructive game.

The original arcade graphics weren't incredible, but Special FX have done such a good job in converting the game that it now looks great. Everything moves around smoothly, and at high speed. Even when there is lots of stuff on screen and you're firing all the time, I've yet to find a spot at which the game slows down. All the sprites are well defined, even the titchy ones in the distance, and all are clear and recognisable.

The problem I did have with this is that there's no longer a simultaneous two player option. Nevertheless, it looks like this Christmas could belong to Ocean, as they release yet enother great conversion.