Platium looks an excellent compilation on paper, with four major - and recent - successful arcade licences crammed into one package.

Black Tiger is the weakest. It's a platform shoot-'em-up with the usual assortment of power-ups along the way but with no scope for exploration, since your route is indicated with arrows. Backgrounds are good, but your main sprite isn't. Don't expect anything new.

Strider is a four-level kicking/shooting match, where your lone hero has to do battle with the entire Russian army. As usual, there are various extra weapons to pick up. Nothing remotely original so far, except that the graphical are great and the animation of the main sprite, the acrobatic Strider, is startlingly good. The game has nothing new, but plays very well and looks terrific.

If you've ever played Side Arms you be immediately at home with Forgotten Worlds. You fly through the air with the greatest of ease, blasting hell out of the baddies with a gun you can direct with the joystick. Collect the coins left behind and you can drop into the shops and buy some better and even more destructive hardware. Good, blasting fun with more than the average level of gameplay.

It's a funny old game - Ghouls 'N Ghosts, that is. The arcade original is none too original, consisting of a knight in shining armour (or underwear, if you take a hit) running along battling all manner of ghastly ghouls and picking up weapons as he goes. What makes the arcade game so great is the main character: with a physique more like Arnold the milkman than Arnold Schwarzenegger and the acrobatic style of a panicked hurdler, he's enough to transform the game into a classic. The ST version loses a lot of that - but it's still a good and jolly game, nonetheless.

Platinum is a very good compilation. It has a strong central theme - that of traditional arcade action - and the four games represent subtly different styles within the genre. More than that: there isn't a bad one among them.