It's been a long lay-off for Renegade, as they retreated to lick their wounds after the less-than-ecstatic critical reaction to Magic Pockets (in Amiga Power and one or two other of the less sheep-like magazines, at any rate), not that it's put them off - even as they prepare for a busy summer with The Chaos Engine, Sensible Soccer and Fire And Ice, they're planning to mop up a few more paying customers with a couple of compilations of back-catalogue Bitmap Brothers games.

First up, and covering almost the entire published lifespan of the ever-expanding programming team, The Bitmap Brothers Volume 1 features vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up Xenon, Knight Lore-style arcade adventure Cadaver, and totally violent future sport sim Speedball 2 in what's if nothing else a varied collection.

It's a varied collection in more ways than one, though. The quality of the games here swings wildly from the sublime (Speedball 2) to the ridiculous (Xenon), with the 'quite good' Cadaver somewhere in the middle. Speedball 2 has been Number Three in our All-Time Top 100 for two years running, and comes perilously close to justifying the price of this compilation by itself. (If you couldn't buy it from numerous discount outfits for about seven quid these days, it'd do just that.)

In our very first issue we called it 'a subtle blend of extreme violence and really extreme violence', but that's only half the secret of what makes this such a great game. The other half comes from the instinctive control and the potential depth (i.e. it's there if you want to explore it, but you can zap straight through just for quick thrills if you like), but mostly from the plain and simple enormous playability. And just as a bonus, the graphics and sound are excellent too.

Cadaver is an extremely pretty game, but an over-complicated control system and some heavy disk accessing drags it down a bit. Still, there's a lot of life in it, a fact indicated by the number of letters we still get for The Last Resort about it, and it's pretty rewarding stuff if you stick at it. Not bad at all, and if you look at it as an eight-and-a-bit-quid budget title, it's a fair enough deal.

Xenon, unfortunately for a compilation with only three games in it, is the traditional turkey. Inexplicably popular on first release (it was prettier than other shoot-'em-ups at the time, but not really any better to play), this now comes across as a dull, tediously difficult, unexciting-looking and unpleasant-to-control blaster that you'll stick with for about as long as it took you to read this review. I'm bored with Xenon now. Can we just pretend it didn't happen or something?

A mixed bag, fair value if you don't have Speedball 2 or Cadaver, but the price-to-number-of-games ratio is far too high considering the age of the contents. Think about it carefully.