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By rights, this review should have been written from within the safe confines of a mental institution, for never has your reviewer been closer to eating his own head in a state of maddened frustration than after two hours in the vile company of this pseudo-gangster yarn, Crime Does Not Pay.

It's not that I think there's anything wrong with doing a game based on the undoubted thrills and spills of a gangster's life - where would the movies be without The Godfather or Scarface, say? - simple that I think making such a hopeless game out of such a gift of a subject matter should be a felony in itself.

So how does it work? Well, you are the head of a criminal organisation - the game is 'endorsed by the Mafia' it says on the box - and it's your job to kill your enemies (i.e. just about everyone else in the game), make pots of money and finally become major of a major American city. This plot, desperately weedy as it is, takes you through a series of inane arcade sequences and unworkable 'pick objects up and use them' scenes.

The arcadey bits promise much at first, with some reasonable graphical representations of urban sidewalks, but get underway and you soon realise the horrid truth - gunplay is useless, killing boils down to a matter of waggling your joystick vaguely in every direction you can think of until some thug hits the deck, scrolling is juddery, loading is slow, gameplay is trashy, the manual is a mess, the so-called humour is fatuous, and... well, I'm sorry but enough is enough. I just can't take any more.

No doubt you'll be able to read a very similar review to this one in six month's time when the game finds itself a home in our Oh Dear - I only hope I won't be the one who has to play the darned thing all over again.

Pick up a thesaurus. Look up the word 'rubbish', and then read the next ten synonyms. You'll get the general idea.