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Sorry, Team 17. It's me again. Anyone else might not have noticed, but I'm sad enough to remember Cardiaxx the first time round. It was an old Electronic Zoo game we reviewed back in issue nine, and without going and looking it up I reckon it scored somewhere around the 59% mark. Oh, well the hell, let's go and look it up... Hey! 59%! Truly. I am the Master of Memory! Er, anyway, then as now, Cardiaxx is a horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up which differs from the norm in that, rather than chucking wave after wave of baddies at you, you take them on one at a time. Blow a wave away, and the screen tells you whether to go left or right to find the next wave, and you have to do each level against a pretty tight time limit.

The changes Team 17 have made in buying this one up for budget release have mostly been improvements in your ship's handling and control (as well as slowing down the game's slightly unmanageable pace a bit), which means that most of Cardiaxx's major design flaws are still wedged in there like big enormous spanners in the gameplay works.

The biggest problem with it is that very little seems to be happening most of the time, and you still have to do a ridiculous amount of faffing around with your ship in order to shoot the same baddie about 800 times. The scenery is featureless, so you're forced to wonder why you have to search around in it instead of just meeting the meanies in some sensible kind of way, and there's nothing in the graphics or sound to entice you to bother. Cardiaxx tries to pay tribute to the Defender genre, but you're better off sticking with the original, frankly.

Regardless of how much it might have been fiddled around with (and I didn't see much evidence, certainly in the early stages), it was pointless fiddly dull crap two years ago and it's pointless fiddly dull crap now. Sorry.