Players Premier
£2.99

It was a secret CIA intelligence report that started it all off (well isn't it always?), and it's you who must finish it. Under orders from the special United Nations narcotics taskforce you and your team smuggled four bombs into the underground cocaine refinery of the Evil Drugs Duke of Colombia, hidden in the South American jungle. Your team didn't stand a chance: all but you were immediately wiped out by the Duke's gun happy henchmen, and the bombs were never connected to their electrical generators. You must complete the mission!

And it's action all the way: jumping and moving around obstacles like dogs, barbed wire and land mines the slightest touch of which decreases your energy and loses your life. Shooting comes into it, of course, with a bonus system built in. Shoot 50 henchmen and you're given a choice of points, food or ammo to build yourself up again.

Moving Target bears a striking resemblance to the second part of Navy Moves from Dinamic. The sprites move, jump and in some can look like the ones in Navy Moves, but we can let the programmers get away with it, as it's the best budget gams I've played today! Music, effects and colour are all excellent, but the graphics do seem awkward and there is a lack of animation when your player jumps. All in all, Moving Target is a great blast at the price and should give you hours of play.

Players Premier
£3.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Nash

It must be awfully hard finding politically correct villains for Speccy games. The plot to Moving Target runs as follows. 'The evil drugs duke of Colombia must die.'' There you are. A healthily dastardly villain everybody can hiss without fear of offending anyone but Colombian drugs barons who aren't the sort of readers were aiming for anyway, thankyouverymuch.

Moving Target is surprisingly good. It's a zap game in the grand old tradition of running around a flip-screen maze, finding keys to open doors, shooting guards and planting bombs. (Very Dan Dare-ish, actually.) it overcomes some pretty tough handicaps to emerge smiling and worthy of a good couple of hours play now and then.

The first of these handicaps are the graphics. They are, to use that splendid YS-ism, crap, with some very odd animation of some very odd sprites. The deadly guard dogs are the worst offenders - they sort of sit there looking like carved lard, then suddenly breakdance over to bite your legs off. (Vicious tykes too - takes most of a clip of ammo to finish them off.) At least there are some nice 'n' chunky 128K sound effects.

So, apart from looking awful and trickily playing about with difficulty levels (you can't fire on the run, which gives the enemy ample time to surround you), Moving Target is a barrel of laughs. From the snazzy effect of just seeing the muzzle flash of your gun rather than having the bullets fly across the screen to the ratings table that starts at 'Rookie' and improves as you go along (er, to 'Second Rate' in my case), the game just, well, gels. There are thousands of baddies to zap, many obstacles to avoid (that barbed wire is really rotten), a massive map to memorise and those blimmin' guard dogs to curse. I enjoyed every cordite-permeated moment of it.

Label: Players Premiere
Author: Gareth Baker
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Bit of topical humour, as Ben Elton would say. Moving Target is about those naughty naughty drug barons who have been causing such a commotion in South America by blowing up judges, bribing politicians and indulging in tasteless interior decoration. So this is your chance to redecorate their haciendas WIV THERE BRANES!!!

Yes, Moving Target is another horizontally-scrolling search-and-destroy mission where the aim is to bump off as many thugs as possible. And why not, as Bazza Norman would say. Problem is that while all the required elements are there, machine guns, landmines, gun emplacements, sections of bombs to be assembled, vicious guard dogs, the whole doesn't add up to much.

The main problem is that the monochromatic hero isn't very well animated - he leaps into the air like a constipated haddock, and his gun blazes dramatically, but doesn't seem to actually shoot any bullets. But he's nowhere near as funny as the guard dogs, which are supposed to be savage Dobermanns and in fact look like the HMV doggie, Nipper. Not too frightening, although for some reason you don't seem to be able to shoot them, even if you crouch down and blast them in the teeth.

The landscapes of bushes, caverns and steel doors are nondescript, and it's all too easy to find your hero getting wedged between one bush and another while you're trying to grab the necessary key, ammunition pack or food supply. Nothing's more annoying than wrestling with the joystick while you're being gunned down by the thugs.

As you climb down ladders into the deeper realms of the drug baron's fortress, a depth indicator shows your position. The lower half of the screen also features indicators for time remaining, strength, ammo, numbers of guards you have to kill before you get a bonus, and so on; it might have been a better game if the playing area was larger instead, but I suppose that would have made the speed and smoothness of animation even more mediocre.

On the whole, pretty unremarkable. As far as Moving Target is concerned, kids, just Say No!