Page 2 Cartoon Collection (£9.99 cass) Building on the success of last year’s budget releases ever seen on the Christmas smash The Dizzy Collection. Codies’ Cartoon Collection features five of their highly successful budget titles one of which was previously unavailable on the C64. So what are they like? Read on... Dizzy Is there anyone out there who hasn’t got a copy of Dizzy? This game’s been recycled more times than one of Phil King’s jokes and I can’t imagine anyone who wants one not already owning it. Not that it was any good - scoring a miserly 48% in Issue 41, it doesn’t really make good use of the Commodore’s capabilities. Anyone who has played Chased HQ will know what porting Speccy code to the C64 does to a game, and I’m afriad that's what's been done here. Not a disaster (48% is a little harsh), but a pale imitation of its Spectrum counterpart. Could and should have been better. Spike In Transylvania Now this is more like it! Spike In Transylvania’s humourous approach and simple-but-endearing puzzles earned it a Silver Medal in issue 74. Spike differs from the Codies’ other arcade adventures in that it features three dimensional movement, rather like the old Ultimate games. Difficult to get to grips with at first but fiendishly addictive when mastered. Spike In Transylvania remains one of Code Masters better releases. CJ's Elephant Antics Another Silver Medal Winner!!! Scoring a massive 94%. CJ is one of the best original budget releases ever seen on the Commodore. A cutesy platform shoot ‘em un in the New Zealand Story/Bubble Bobble mould. CJ features smooth scrolling, excellent graphics and one of the silliest plots ever seen on a computer game. The collision detection is sometimes a little dodgy making it unclear how close you can get to the platform’s edge before falling off but this doesn’t stop it form being one oF the most challenging budget games ever. Seymour Goes To Hollywood Aaarraggh! They've done it again - Seymour is ported across from the Speccy in the same way as Dizzy. No attempt has been made to utilise the Commodore’s superior graphic ability and the game runs extremely slowly, talking ages to display the next screen or to update the oblects list. It’s a real shame, as all the great Speccy gameplay’s here with logical, well-thought out problems that push back the frontiers of arcade adventures. The cutesy Speccy graphics are also very characterful, although obviously lacking in colour, Slightly Magic Slightly Magic also suffers from Speccy port-over syndrome. The main sprite is well drawn but hideously animated shuffling across the screen like a crab with diarrhoea. The screen flickers badly when you pick up an object or talk to another character, making this run-of-the mill arcade adventure look very amateurish.

Recommendation All in all Cartoon Collection is a a disappointing compilation featuring too many games written on other formats and badly converted to the C64. Could have been a goodie, but as it stands you’d be better off buying CJ’s and (n.b. the end of this sentence was missing in the original article I.B.)

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