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Enter Sylvester "Stallion" Stallone in possibly his biggest movie flop yet: Cobra. The cassette inlay has a big macho picture of Stallone on the front, swinging a laser-sighted HK about, and with a Colt .45 jammed down the front of his trousers. Better be careful on quick draws with that, and when replacing the hot barrel. "Squeaky-voiced" Stallone, they'd call him.

At any rate, forget the shooter for the moment - when you start the game you begin with the humble fist. Weaponry comes off your opponents, via (no, I didn't believe this either) hamburgers. Kinda hard to swallow is that. Mind you, so are the first Casey-burgers of the morning at Liverpool Street.

Like I said, you do for a baddie or a booby-trapped window and it gets replaced by a hamburger. Go past said snack and your weapons and ammunition are miraculously replenished. I've heard they're full of iron, but shome mishtake shurely.

Nevertheless, bash in your sniper or offensive French window and there will be a pulsating hamburger waiting there. Hang on, hamburgers don't pulsate, not even at Casey's.

You'll never guess what the windows are boobytrapped with either. No? OK then, it's a parrot. It is an ex-parrot, it has hang on, wrong sketch. This parrot is an excreting parrot. Get my drift, or should I be dropping more hints?

Apart from the flashing burgers and the pooping parrot, the scenery is just mediocre (for games that is, not the real world), consisting mostly of brick wall with the occasional staircase or window bunged in it.

Oh yes, and the not-so-occasional whore in the background. These can be shot, especially by the wife, but you lose 500 points in the process.

Other colourful inhabitants of this typical American township are knife, RPG, pistol and machinegun toting thugs, and a head-butting duck. I kid you not. As Stallone, you have an extremely sound constitution, and can take several direct hits from an RPG, bullet, psychotic duck or whatever, but it's much healthier to dodge them.

Being a veteran of many "Rocky" movies, you can leap, punch and duck with ease. Unfortunately, so can the duck. What you really need is a large-bore orange shooter. That'll fix the beggar. Further evidence of the Rocky heritage is the fact that lives remaining is counted in boxing gloves.

The point of this all? There is one, you know. You have to rescue the traditional blonde WAFF (if you're not into acronyms, read weak and feeble female here), she's called Ingrid, as if it mattered.

The contemptible dirty rotten ratfink who swiped her is called The Night Slasher, which is equally unimportant, but makes for a better storyline. And the story is all you'll get, 'cos there's no high-score table to impress your friends with.

Essentially, this is a good old-fashioned piece of mindless violence that you might pick up more than once to relieve boredom. Just thought I'd give you a snake preview.

The streets of America may be dangerous but nowhere can they be this unsafe. It's a good job that you can kill assailants with your bare fists and withstand the force of a rocket launcher. Confronted by such hazards I'd run away very fast.

Unfortunately whichever way you run you are confronted with more of the same. Overall Cobra is monotonous, boring and poorly designed. Another licence exploitation prog. Don't let it exploit you.

Standard procedure for every game is to pick up the joystick and start playing, Then when you get stuck - and only after you've pressed every key on the keyboard to see if anything happens - you read the instructions.

I started playing Cobra and it seemed reasonable. I figured out the hamburger bit and was confused by the way you need to jump first up and then sideways to get on to a higher ledge. So it seemed reasonable to read the instructions and sort out what was supposed to be happening.

Then my opinion changed. There was no more to it. Worraripoff. The sprites are poor and jerky, the plot as credible as your average Stallone movie and the whole thing overpriced.

Wot a load of old cobras, I've never seen such confused trash in all my life. Hamburgers my armpit! I know Stallone's supposed to be a bit of a beefcake, but this is ridiculous.

I couldn't help noticing that the screen occasionally went into a quivering fit after passing booby-trapped windows. Also it seemed to halt for a while at it's own convenience. Nothing about that in the instructions.

This looks a bit like someone took Green Beret and ran it through some kind of zanification process. The result? For some peculiar reason I found it enjoyable.