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Like our cover story, Bionic Commandos, Data East's Karnov, the story of a Russian firebreather, didn't fare too well. In fact, you'd be hard put to find one in many top arcades less than a year after it was launched.

For all that it would have made a nice C64 conversion, what a pity nobody could be bothered to do the job properly! Instead Activision have simply ported over the Spectrum version without any regard for the difference in capabilities of the two machines!

What you have with Karnov is the fairly standard gameplay - a left-to-right scrolling shoot-'em-up with platforms. It's a simple revamp of the Ghosts 'N Goblins idea, but despite that had it been quick, testing and colourful, it would have been enough to please most arcade players. There's nine levels of play, with a possible eleven extra items worth collecting like wings, boats and apples.

So what's missing? Everything. The backdrops are limited to four colour jobs and consequently look like a blocky unfinished demo in places. Worse still, although ol' bunsen breath is well defined, he has a sort of black aura round him caused by attribute clash round the character boundaries. The last time I saw anything like that it was on a C16 game!

I could put up with much of this if the gameplay was in there, but someone mislaid that as well. This type of stuff relies on plenty of dodging and diving around, but Karnov is about as manoeuvrable as a JCV in quicksand. The reason being, that the game is so agonisingly slow, that's s-l-o-w slow. The game's "nine levels of absorbing gameplay" promised in the booklet turn into hours of turgid ploughing against the odds taking ages to jump and turn. That's if you want to persevere that long.

After all this, the sound is pretty peripheral but I may as well whinge about the Spectrumesque burps and bleeps. All of which means that this conversion doesn't have anything to recommend it at all, which for a game based on a circus is pretty ironic. Send in the clowns.