Bargain Bin

From the bargain bins in your high street game shop, to car boot sales and pawn shops, you can find second-hand games cheap as chips all over the place. Our Boys, Brian and Phil, have been out trying to find the best, and worst, of them.
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The only rule of Bargain/Bin; if it's under a fiver then it's fair game.

Television. Drug of the nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. So sang the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in the 90's. However television also provided us with games. Lovely games and two bargains to a bin no less. But what a bin. Welcome to TV!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Occasionally one of the games subjected to Bargain/Bin approval turns out to be good enough that we forget to move on to the next ‘discovery.' This is one of those games; we genuinely didn't want to stop playing, which was a surprise since Phil usually hates anything vaguely cartoony, the old grump.

Still image cut scenes styled after the better TMNT cartoons introduce each level and from here you take control of one of the turtles in your quest. Each of the early levels acts as a tutorial teaching you moves for each new turtle, but hey there kids - they're not boring. They bounce around with the energy of a well-fed kitten and banter between the characters will please fans and newcomers alike.

Most impressive are the context sensitive controls. Many games leave you swearing at the screen as the character fails to make the ledge jump and instead swan dives into the spiky pit. TMNT knows what you are trying to do. Moves that you would struggle to pull off in other games simply flow from the controller. Clambering up walls, double jumping, pole vaulting, all come as second nature and that is merely a fraction of moves available.

Combat is as smooth as the platforming letting you take on four opponents without any trouble. The four turtles use the same controls but fight differently enough to add further variety without added complexity. We found its changes in pace between the frantic action and the slow platforming could be disorientating but it kept us on our toes.

TMNT is a forgiving title, fall off a rooftop or loose a fight and you will never be sent back far and while it is challenging enough to make you proud of your achievements it never gets annoying.

Bargain

Starsky and Hutch

Onto your screens splurges a taste of the 70's as some funky music introduces Starsky and Hutch. To tie in to the original series, there are comic book style cut scenes and Huggy Bear's laconic tones telling the story.

A slightly different spin on TV show games, to complete levels you have to bring down the bad guys in high speed driving escapades while also maintaining the show's ratings. This involves shooting or driving through viewer rating icons, usually positioned just after a trick jump or down an alley of cardboard boxes. It's a stroke of genius that forces you to take chances, look cool and reminds you of the series.

There are other icons to grab as you speed around Bay City. Speed ups, ammo, health are rarely essential but they are fun and useful. The driving is solid and easy, meaning that even the worst videogame driver (Brian) can throw the gran tourino round the corner and catch the bad guys. It's all pretty simple really but yay for simplicity as the game's colourful graphics, sound and gameplay do a lot to endear it to us.

Single player is fun but two player co-op mode is ace. Yeah, one drives while the other hangs out the window shooting crooks and icons. A little teamwork is required; if the driver throws the car around too much the shooter will never be able to line up a shot. Then again, sometimes the driver will need particular power ups shot out of the air and this delivers the fun bickering you want out of two player games. There are even times when driving and shooting need careful timing to pull off some crazy stunt and get the viewer ratings up.

On your own, or with a friend, Starsky and Hutch is fast, charismatic, daft and a whole lot of fun.

Bargain

Captain Scarlet

Once in your lifetime a game comes along that make you reconsider your definition of the term bargain. In the few months we have been writing these articles we have encountered some awful games, but this... Wow!

Ostensibly a vehicular combat game you, as the good captain, are tasked with driving around in the daft and mainly undrivable Spectrum cars while shooting Mysteron cars until they blow up. A reasonable premise, however, there are certain things that a game like this needs, fun handling for example or enemies that provide a bit of interesting combat. Captain Scarlet does not have these things.

Most levels take place on a road where every junction, if there even are any, is blocked. Mysteron vehicles are scattered along these tracks for you to blow up, one at a time. The roads are helpfully walled to prevent you from ever going off road and getting lost in the vast featureless wilderness that surrounds the route. It's almost as if they re-skinned a PSone rally game that hadn't worked in the first place rather than start from scratch.

Other highlights include a level where we forgot what we were supposed to be doing but when we got to the other end, having failed to find any enemies, it finished as with a success! Or the level where the car wouldn't start. Or how about the level where walls are only an optional obstacle for the Mysterons allowing them to occasionally shoot through them or just drive into them then instantly reappear further up the road.

There is something criminal about this level of ineptitude and we pity any Captain Scarlet fan who bought it because they thought it looked fun. To paraphrase one of Phil's earlier remarks, "This is unacceptably shit!"

Bin Bin Bin!!