J. Gamon 1984
Genre: Action
Rating: 2/6
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

Alright, this is definitely a weird one. You play a policeman 'driving' through town on a unicycle, with a blue rotating light attached to his helmet. Your only weapon is a truncheon which can be thrown either straight or up. Don't worry, it always comes back like a boomerang.

Mastertronic 1986
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Plus/4

P.O.D. - Proof Of Destruction. A game in which you're indestructable? Great idea, will take advantage of that immediately! Nah, nah, you can't hurt me, evil monsters! Oops? What was that 'boom' sound? Aw, crap - look for yourself what happened This is a fraud! It clearly said 'Proof Of Destruction' on the box. I demand my money back!

SSI 1994
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 6/6
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

A classic of turn-based strategy games which became the basis for a long series of similar games. But none of them could match the quality of the original.

You can surely question to take World War II as the background for a game but that´s not going to be discussed in this review. Instead let´s move on o the game itself: The player, a high-ranking general, takes control either of the Allied or Axis forces. There are single scenarios and whole campaigns which mostly are based on historical battles.

Elite 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

Paper delivery is a common way of increasing your pocket money. At least I guess it is in the USA. This game is the ultimate simulator of this thrilling job. You can use it to evaluate if this job suits your abilities and interests or for training purposes to improve your service.

Tengen / Mindscape 1992
Genre: Action
Rating: 3/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Paperboy... in the 1990s? Is it the long-awaited sequel taking the basic concept to new heights? In one word: no.

The player controls a paperboy (or, major new feature, a papergirl) on his/her round. Papers have to be thrown into subsribers' mailboxes (no stopping to stuff it in there) and new papers have to be picked up along the way, because why give the stupid paperboy enough papers for all subscribers if bundles of them are lying around on the street anyway? Which kind of defeats the whole premise, because why don't the subscribers just take their paper from those bundles?

Graftgold / Hewson 1985
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Commercial
System: C64

Deep in space, all the robots on a ship have gone mad, defying all human orders. The player has to 'clean up', destroying all the robots. Sounds like your average shooter? Then be prepared for a twist: You take control of a kind of 'meta robot' which will attach itself to any other robot to take control of its functions.

Graftgold / Hewson 1990
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: Amiga

Graftgold never really made the big leap away from 8 bit systems. Although they created many great games on the Atari ST and the Amiga, the revolutionary and original things they had done were a thing of the past. In fact, they even 'remade' their most popular classics. Uridium got that treatment later, but for Paradroid, they at least had the humility not to call it Paradroid 2.

Marc S. Seter 1993
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Licence: Freeware
System: Amiga

Although the C64 classic had been remade on the Amiga by Graftgold themselves as Paradroid 90, this version had its rough edges. Paradroid II, a freeware remake of the original, came out a few years later. Hard to believe in these days of lawsuits, trademark, patent and 'intellectual property' trolling: The programmer got through with not only using the original name, but also with producing pretty much a carbon copy of the graphics and much of the gameplay.

Peter Leahy 1998
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Parashooter - one of the two games I never managed to make a screenshot of! Highly promising slogan, eh? Well, it does show some technical sophistication on the programmer's side at least. Or it could be my inability to use Windows where this game runs in...

Mons & Simen 1984
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Licence: Commercial
System: PC

Paratrooper is quite an old game (published in the same year as the much better-known Alleycat, 1984) and, as many of those games, graphically none too advanced but quite addictive.

Storyline:

The story, if the lack of one can be named such, is very simple. You command an anti-air battery and the enemy is trying to destroy you. They're trying this in two different ways: