Edition One

Your Sinclair

Life Expectancy 88%

Instant Appeal 95%

Graphics 85%

Addictiveness 90%

Overall 88%

Rich Pelley 88%

Virgin Games £12.99 cass Reviewer: Rich Pelley Edition One is a big box with a pretty picture on the front with a folded-up piece of paper and a couple of boring tapes inside. Crap, eh? (Or is it?) GEMINI WING Jackie gave this a measly 43 last year - a trifle unfair, methinks (perhaps she was having problems seeing over the desk or something). It's another vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up, with you blowing up spooky alien insects and things. Weird. It's quite good fun, if a trifle hard (suffering heavily from the disappearing bullet syndrome, which is a bummer). But stuck onto a compilation I'd say it deserves slightly more than the pitiful rating it got last time. So it can have, dum dee dum, 55 instead. '90 Rating - 55° DOUBLE DRAGON Next up it's Dub Drag - a beat-'em-up full of huge strapping blokes, scantily-clad women and threatening geezers wielding baseball bats (hardly the sort of people you'd invite home for tea). Not that they'd come anyway - they'd much prefer to beat the crap out of you (and a chum) instead. It's a horizontally-scrolling affair, with plenty of opportunities to interact with the scenery (climb ladders etc) and pick up weapons. It's a lot of fun for a while as well, but the graphics are a bit shoddy and it gets rather tedious rather too quickly. '90 Rating: 70° XENON Xenon, on the other hand, would would come home for tea and even stay the night for a jim-jam party (if you asked nicely). It's a monochrome vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up, and an utterly brilliant one at that. Graphics 'n' sound are excellent, but the best bit's got to be the variety - all four levels are completely different from each other so you'll never get bored (well, not for ages at least). The height of the compilation (so far anyway). '90 Rating: 92° SILKWORM Blimey - not only've we got Xenon bunged in, but Silkworm too, which is brilliant. Utterly. This shoot-'em-up scrolls sideways and features lots of choppers (ahem), but the best bit is when player two plugs himself in and takes control of this little jeep underneath - jumping over mines and things. The variety of the baddies is absolutely immense, including these super little ones which join up into bigger ones in mid-air. Graphics are superb, as is the whole game really. Completely addictive. A 'must' (whatever that means). '90 Rating: 93° And there you have it. At a mere 324.75p per game (I did it in my head. Honest), we really are talking barg city here. I'd say the pack is worth it just for Xenon and Silkworm alone, although Gemini Wing and Double Dragon aren't too bad to have as well.

All this Silkworm jeep-bouncing-around malarky's making me feel, er, a bit car sick. Oh no... Bleeeeuurrgh!!

Flying through the laundromat of the future in Xenon.

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