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Commando is a conversion of the arcade original. Having played both this and Who Dares Wins!! (and seen Rambo) it's quite obviously the game to buy this season. Christmas saw the demise of the fighting game and before that was the decathlon era.

You control a little character who has the task of single handedly taking on the complete forces of an opposing army.

You carry a machine gun with a seemingly limitless supply of bullets and start with six grenades with the possibility of picking up more and more without becoming weighed down. The idea is that you attempt to fight your way up each screen either avoiding or killing the opposition.

Unlike Who Dares Wins, the screen in this version is continuously scrolling rather than being split into a succession of separate screens. Though the scrolling does stop when you eventually get to the screen at the end of each section which cannot be passed until all the men there are killed. Along the way trees and rocks are dotted about the place providing some protection. Pressing the fire button shoots your gun and because there is a limitless supply of bullets it's best to just keep firing continuously.

The instructions erroneously state that grenades are thrown by hitting the space bar - in fact they are thrown in an identical fashion to WDW2, that is, the fire button is held. If you don't own a joystick, there is a redefinable key option as well.

On the way to the end of the first stage the scenery is quite bland, just trees and rocks, though there is a bridge where it is a good idea to toss a grenade over the top before going through shooting on all barrels. The last screen in this section is a real tricky one. As you near the top the fortress doors open and hordes of troops pour out firing in all directions. The best tactic is to move up to open the doors then retreat so you can drop a grenade in among the troops that begin to appear.

If you get through them the scenery starts to get more interesting with motorcycles, troop carrying lorries and tanks littering the landscape. There are also pill-boxes and fox holes that hide enemy soldiers making them very difficult to shoot (though a grenade often proves effective).

Again, the third section has similar interesting things to be seen and no doubt so do future sections - if I ever manage to get there. 664 and 6128 owners will be happy to know that the authors have had the good sense to make this game compatible.

This game starts out really easy and seems like the perfect tonic for a real blast fan but the going very quickly becomes quite tough. Even the last screen of the first section took me about 15 minutes to get through. In desperation I had a quick look for an infinite lives poke - I managed to give myself 254 men and 256 grenades to start and this helped, though I still can't get through the screen at the end of the third section.

Without the pokes I could see people becoming rather disillusioned if they never managed to get out of the first section. Having played WDW2 I'm hound to compare the two. For my money the Alligata version has to be better because it doesn't get so difficult quite so soon.

However in that game - with infinite lives - it only took 45 minutes to get to the end of the eighth section, so it might lose its appeal sooner than this version.

When I first saw the arcade machine I was underwhelmed by the naff helicopter sprite which drops your man at the start of the mission. Thankfully Elite have not tried to reproduce this - it was a very large sprite and moving it on a 16k screen would have been jolly difficult.

The actual game play is pretty good, following the original quite closely, and as with the Capcom arcade machine gets too difficult too early. The graphics are reasonably good, the sprites smooth and the sound adequate. Most of the excitement comes from blasting as many baddies as quickly as possible.

If Who Dares Wins was more like this than Who Dares Wins II is then all the lawsuit fuss (which caused Who Dares Wins to be withdrawn on the Commodore 64), was justified. It would not be worth buying both. On balance I would say that Commando is the better game. Rambo is sufficiently different to escape the cries of "wadda con", but only just.

I could play Commando for hours. It starts off with lots of action, then there's more action - after a bit more action, you die. The game has just the right amount of difficulty where you are sure that if you just put in a bit more effort, and make a few less mistakes, you can improve your score and make it to the next next screen.

My only reservation is that the sprites are a bit flickery and when you die under the bridge it is not clear where you are starting from. I also get very annoyed when I blew myself up with a grenade I didn't intend to throw.