Remember Dinamic? They're the Spanish software house who brought you Game Over, the left-to-right scroller with the subtle advertising? Well, they're back with Navy Moves, and take it from me, it's more than a marked improvement on its forerunners.
It follows roughly that a group of fanatics have gotten hold of a nuclear submarine, and are planning to do rather unpleasant things with the missiles on board. Seeing as you're a commando of the highest order, it falls to you to use more than a reasonable amount of fore to stop them.
Taking it from the top, you start in your Run The Gauntlet reject rubber dinghy somewhere in the choppy mid Atlantic facing flotilla of Ussex-12 mines. If the little rubber boat says hello, the mines say boom. But, as luck may have it, you have an ace up your sleeve and a jump feature on the boat.
Try not to prang yourself on Tiger Sharks. Bypass these and it's into a bathyscaphe from which you can blow mercy hell out of innocent octopi, until a giant Moray eel turns up.
Once you've made it past all the things that Jules Verne considered too nasty to include in his books, you arrive inside the sub. Armed with a rib-tickling machine gun/flame thrower combi unit, you can administer death to anyone you meet - the only problem being that they can do the same to you.
The objective is to plant a bomb at the base of the main reactor, and then send a signal to your mates to come and pull you out before the thing blows.
Initially I was slightly disappointed, particularly with the first stage. The graphics aren't too good and the sound is very patchy. It's also very hard. But persevere, and you're rewarded by the submarined stage which is a combination of Green Beret and Impossible Mission. Shooting one of the enemy produces a very satisfactory Dirty Harry-style death - enough to make you want to waste all your ammo.
A fun arcade game which produces a good combination of arcade, and, later on, arcade strategy. But Navy Moves is all too easy to get into. A fun, though only moderately original game.
There is no difference in gameplay between the 8- and 16-bit versions. The graphics are obviously better than those of the C64, but only on the same scale with the 8-bit version. They improve as you progress into the game, but never become more than neat and well drawn.
The one improvement I did notice is the extra degree of power added to the flamethrower. The sea of flame is particularly wicked. A commendable game, but don't expect it to be top of the 16-bit innovation stakes.