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Success wasn't on the cards when Konami decided to break loose from the chains of Imagine and do their own arcade conversions. Konami have no track record in software, or more importantly, in conversions. Nevertheless I was overjoyed with I heard that Jailbreak and Nemesis (two of my all-time favourite coin-ops) were to be converted for the Commodore 64/128.

You play a prison officer who has terrible difficulty in trying to capture escaped prison inmates. The prison governors are pretty harsh (or lenient, depending on your politics) as they don't care how many you kill in the process. The problem is that the convicts too have guns, and they will not hesitate to blow your intestines out. What this all boils down to is a horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up in which your trigger finger does all the thinking.

The first level is set along a city street. The prisoners come at you from the righthand side of the screen. The first thing I found myself noticing were not the breath-taking graphics or the brilliant sound, as found on the arcade version. No, it was the fact that you couldn't move or fire diagonally as you could on the arcade version. It doesn't make the game any more playable, just downright irritating. Surely they could have bothered to include eight-directional play, even the worst of programmers can manage that.

After managing to come to terms with the niggly controls, I found out that all the great trucks and other little kinks on the coin-op were non-existent. The whole of the first level is just prisoners stopping to shoot at you, you waiting for them to stop and then dodging. Konami have surprisingly left in the convicts shooting out of manholes; but these look like baked beans desperately trying to get out of the can. Every so often, a civilian is to be found strolling admidst the chaos. You must reach these, whereupon you will be given a point bonus and a more powerful weapon. Despite this, the second gun you are given is no better than the first. The third is, but doesn't look any better from the first or second.

I don't know or care how many levels there are, but for safety's sake I persevered as far as level two, but that neither looked nor played better than the first. The biggest problem with this conversion is the boring gameplay. When you play a shoot-'em-up, you like it to flow, you want to bother having to press the Fire button. That's the problem, you don't even have to or need to shoot anything here, you just walk slowly along the street waiting until a convict stops firing, and then... hey presto! Next level.

Jailbreak is also graphically awful. Boring flat backdrops. Awful, jerky, slow scrolling and deformed sprites that look almost mongoloid. The sound is boring with an ear-aching synthesised tune and boring effects. Jailbreak is a disaster. I'm currently in the first month of the year and I already have a contender (if not outright winner) for my worst game of 1987. If I sound harsh it's because I was expecting such great things from Jailbreak. Had someone not written the name on the box I wouldn't have recognised it at all!