You press a button, and wait for a couple of minutes for the view to change. You hear something shooting at you, but there are no instruments telling you from which direction. You flail around panning up, down, left and right, until you finally see some weird distorted polygon on one of your screens. If it’s in your front screen, you hit the lasers and fail to do anything since it’s already disappeared. If it’s in your back or side screens, you can see it merrily firing at you while you try (and fail) to turn around to face it. You then accidentally press the T button and see your ship rocketing off into space, with no idea where you’re going.

I’m sure I’m missing something. There must be a way of seeing where you are supposed to fly to, and then to see where things are when you get there. I was told I was near a planet, and near a fuel ship, but didn’t see either of them. I was told I was near a convoy – and saw a single ship each time.

I think I’ll stick to Elite.

Robocop on the CPC is a great game. Responsive, colourful, fast, full of action. It’s also pretty difficult, and relies on you memorising every enemy pattern throughout its levels.

The majority of the game is a side-scrolling platformer. Enemies include standard gun holders (walking along or appearing at windows above), chainsaw users, and flying kick specialists. The latter are pretty easy; as soon as they appear at the side of the screen, you can duck down and they will jump over you when they reach you anyway. Others need to be hit in a certain pattern at certain times to avoid taking damage; there are limited health recharge powerups, and only three lives for the whole game, so preserving health is important. On the second scrolling level (the third overall) there are bikes that you need to crouch down and shoot as soon as they appear, and even then it’s a toss up as to whether they’ll be destroyed before they hit you. I can get to the end of the third level now without losing a life, but only just.

The second mission is a shootout, where you need to hit a kidnapper without hitting the hostage he’s hiding behind. The fourth mission is a photofit game where you need to match up parts of a face. The fifth mission is another side-on platformer, but now you can walk up stairs and the screen scrolls vertically as well as horizontally. I don’t yet know about levels past this, because the enemies keep killing me as I walk up stairs.

Robots are very slow at walking up stairs.

I must admit it took me a while to even know I could walk up the stairs. In the first couple of scrolling sections, you can’t, even though the stairs look exactly the same as they do in the factory level. To walk up stairs you need to be in the correct spot and then press diagonally up, meaning that you are pretty vulnerable to enemies who aren’t standing obligingly at the top.

So it has some foibles, but it’s also a really fun game. I think I have found an exploit on the first and third level, though. The game can only cope with five sprites at a time, meaning that if you can shepherd four enemies along with you, no others will appear. Most enemies will come in from one side, shoot at you or hit you with a chainsaw, and then walk back to the side; they’ll then come back in to get you again. If instead you just walk along behind them, they’ll carry on walking away from you all the way to the end of the level. If four of the flying kick people are clustering you, you can just keep on ducking their attacks and walking along when they’re off screen.