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Unless I'm very much mistaken, I've been playing an Amiga game. I mean, I took a blue disk from a box and popped it into my machine's fun slot, just like any other 16-bit offering. Then I was confronted by something horribly familiar and deeply unimpressive. If you thought you'd never have to play out those tired scenarios when you bought the wonder machine, think again.

The simple fact is that Raider is that old C64 budget classic Thrust with a bit more colour and a few more levels. Ignoring, as is customary, the Philip K. Dickhead storyline and plunging into the game, it's made clear that you have to shoot out all the fortifications and pick up a cog-like pod on each of the four star systems and then fly through a power plant to deposit them. This boils down to a great deal of fiddly frustration as you try to negotiate flak and rock outcrops whilst battling with gravitational pull from the planet.

Thrust Raider is controlled from the keyboard, something of an anachronism in this day and age for a game methinks, especially when the mouse could have done the job equally well.

The sound effects do not help, whilst the graphics look, as someone put it "as if they were knocked up on Deluxe Paint in ten minutes".

It's not that Raider has no appeal, the original gameplay can still hold your attention for a while, and it's fiendishly difficult too. But there again I didn't have to spend £20 to find that out. It might be a different prospect at budget price. Otherwise, forget it.