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Now I'm sure that you, like me, are sick to death of ninja games. Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Hari Kari, Chop Suey, araggghhh! Guess what, Virgin/Mastertronic has released yet another.

Shinobi is a game of martial arts mayhem where Jackie Chan meets the Water Margin in a sideways scrolling, multi-plane arcade beat 'em up. This was originally a Sega coin-op, and has been converted to your CPC quite faithfully in most respects.

You play the part of the slanty-eyed human killing machine (hmm, sounds familiar), who is out to rescue children from the clutches of the evil gangsters. What children, and where are their foster parents? Well, never mind, coin-ops usually have the depths of your average TV movie, so I don't suppose it really matters. What you pay for here is good old fashioned beating action.

Each level must be completed within the time limit, or it's victory to the forces of the programmer. To complete a level you must not only get to the end of the section, but also collect all the children along the way.

To aid you in this infant quest there is a counter detailing how many nappy rash victims there are to go. Quite where you store all these children is, of course, superfluous to the plot.

There are generally two levels of action, street level and rooftop. To help you get to the rooftops there are crates stacked on top of each other, behind which there is invariably a bad guy. You can jump up in the air, and thankfully throw shurikens while you're doing it, crouch down, stroll along and kick people in the noodles. The good part of crouching down is that you avoid bullets that gangsters shoot at you, and yet can still shuffle along, and kick at people.

You are armed with shurikens and can loose off quite a few at one go. Unfortunately, this is obviously a planet with very heavy gravity because they don't travel much faster than you do.

Jumping onto the rooftops is not too easy, but clearing the first level is certainly easier than the arcade game. What you really have to watch out for are the spidermen who perch on the walls of buildings and can drop on you if you are not paying attention. They do not move until you pass underneath, so give 'em some sharp steel before they get the chance!

At the end of each level there is a nightmarish encounter with a very large person indeed. He throws homing missiles at you and is very, very difficult to overcome.

Timing is the key to success here, since standing there and trading blows is invariably fatal. The graphics are quite good in a chunky kind of way and the scrolling in both directions is fast if not smooth. There's just the right feel to the character to enable accurate manoeuvres and yet still have parts that are quite hard to complete.

This isn't as good as Dragon Ninja but it's the best release since the Ocean game came out.