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Dragon Spirit is one of those little-known arcade games which came and went without too much fuss, although it went down well with almost everyone who played it. Dragon Spirit then resurfaced in Japan as a very successful PC Engine game, and now it's over here on the Amiga.

At first glance, the coin-op doesn't appear as anything more than your standard vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up - kill the bad guys and collect the weapons. It's not until you sit down to some serious gaming that you really find out how good it is, but it has to be said that the Amiga version does lose out in translation. The original's strength was its fast graphics and quantity of weapons. The armaments are there, but the speed has disappeared. Each level contains a variety of mythical dragons, phoenix's, to name but a few. Once again, there's the standard end-of-level foe to defeat.

You power up by collecting pods. These cause you to weirdly mutate. You can get three heads, breathe fire, gain electric shields. Wow! Unfortunately, some of this does you more harm than good - one thing in particular reduces your dragon to a pigmy sized with homing missiles which wears out leaving you unarmed.

The graphic conversion of Dragon Spirit is near to arcade perfect, but it's not until things actually start happening that you realise how sluggish the gameplay is. The graphics are neither complicated or overly large, so why does it play so slowly?

Apart from the lack of speed, Dragon Spirit is still a good game and a good shoot-'em-up, though there are slack periods when you wonder if something is missing.

It also seems like a good opportunity to make a contribution to the Amiga/PC Engine debate: having now played both versions of the game I can conclusively reveal that the PC Engine version is head, shoulders and ankles above the Amiga's graphics, speed, colour and sound. So there you go - a good game which falters in the conversion.