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Games based on films were often bad, but the BBC version of The Living Daylights really is in a league of its own. It's a run-and-gun game in which you play James Bond (obviously) and it has eight stages, all of which are variations on that theme.

I think that this is one of those games where there's very little disguising just how awful it actually is. I've seen Intellivision games with better graphics than this, and it's maddening to actually attempt to play the thing. Common to all eight stages is that Bond can only jump and duck when he is actually running forwards. And to run forwards, you actually have to aim your gun off the right hand side of the screen, which you can only do when Bond is standing still. This is certainly a unique way of controlling a game character, and practically guarantees he will not be able to avoid a load of incoming fire and/or projectiles!

Not that that really matters, you see, because by simply running forward at, um, full speed and constantly jumping, you'll make a lot more progress than by attempting to duck, dodge and shoot anyway. The first stage is very confusing indeed in that it's almost 100% a "training mission", with all those shooting at you just using paintguns. This means that your energy never decreases. However, when you get to the very end of the level, there is a single 'hard man' to defeat. So when you reach him, you need to (a) change from paint gun to Walther PPK, (b) aim your errant cursor at his head, and (c) shoot him dead. You have about three seconds to achieve this so it really shouldn't be hard.

But it is. Because, incredibly, when you run, and jump, and duck, the movements affect where your (now hidden) crosshair is. When the bad guy appears, and walks towards you, you'll also be mid-run, and Bond takes a good second to actually stop running when you pull back from making the screen scroll. The instructions don't reveal to you that you have to use the key for Duck to also switch weapon (but only when standing still), so it's actually quite a challenge to find the cursor, move it into position, change the gun and take the shot. The programmers were too lazy to actually design a sprite for the 'hard man' as well, so you get a mirror image of Bond himself to defeat, which is as pathetic as it sounds.

When this first mission ends, you get a very strange feature. "Q's Workshop" is displayed in large text, and four things are depicted in very blocky graphics. You have fifteen seconds to choose one of the things before you enter the next mission and all but one of them are completely useless. Whether you'll choose something useful or useless feels not only random but more or less academic, because, as I've said, you're much more likely to clear a level by just running as fast as you can across it, continually jumping, rather than attempting to use a weapon, even if you're lucky enough to choose the right one.

An absolutely bewildering inclusion from mission two onwards is the inclusion of a companion for Bond. This figure, dressed entirely in black, and positioned a few pixels back from him, is presumably the film's leading lady. If you haven't seen the film however, this black spectre seems, well, ghoulish; a zombiefied monster who tails Bond rather like Sakado from The Ring movies. There's no reason for her to be there - she can't be shot or killed, and you can't switch to her, play as her or interact with her in any way. She is just another stupid inclusion in this remarkably stupid game.

And, if you thought it couldn't get even stupider then you should've known better. After running across four missions, and choosing another pile of crap from the random selection of Q's inventions, you'll be confronted with the same 'hard man' *that you shot in the head in stage one attacking you over and over again with exploding milk bottles*. Every time you run forward a few steps, he appears, and throws a milk bottle in your direction which you can't avoid. The milk bottle will mysteriously disappear however when you shoot the man himself, who'll disappear along with it and... Oh, I give up, this is all just so silly that I can't be bothered playing any more.

Until Goldeneye on the N64 came along, James Bond games were almost universally dreadful. Even though The Living Daylights is an affront to your software collection, a diabolical dump direct from Satan's own arsehole, it is, incredibly, by no means the worst (A View To A Kill, on the Spectrum 48K is probably the worst Bond game of all time). The thing I really hate about it though is that it fails not because the programmers were trying to do something too ambitious, but rather because the programmers were too lazy even to do their best with a very, very simple concept. There's simply no reason why The Living Daylights couldn't have been a Bond-themed Impossible Mission style game, or even a flick-screen Stryker's Run, rather than the travesty we have here. Eight stages of run and gun is just very, very poor and, if you don't read the instructions, that first training mission is very confusing indeed.

Despite the very lavish packaging and the incredibly high price tag (of £12.95 on tape/£17.95 on disc, a small fortune in 1987!) I wasn't expecting great things from The Living Daylights, and it didn't disappoint. A-ha probably sung it best: "No-oh-oh-oh, The Living Day-lights." Quite.