Armed and Dangerous (PC)

I owned this once before, and sold it. I bought the copy I now own for one pound. I tried to sell that too, but nobody wanted it. It seems that Armed and Dangerous is the game that nobody loves, so with Valentine's Day approaching, I thought I'd better hit it up.

Armed and Dangerous, if you haven't heard of it, is a third-person shooter by Lucasarts. Just the name would normally be enough to have people buying it in droves, but then again, it's got nothing to do with Star Wars. It was also a new IP on release, which made it a doubly difficult sell.

It's got a rubbish attempt at a storyline, which doesn't matter of course... you're only in this for the carnage. And the controls are a bit woolly, with aiming in particular a bit vague, even with the whacking great crosshair slapped on the screen.

None of that matters. This game is about killing enemies in inspired fashion, using some of the most bizarre weaponry ever committed to code. Got a bunch of enemies you need to take out? Why not try the Vindaloo Rocket Launcher? Surrounded by angry foes? Simply activate the Topsy-Turvy bomb, an anti-gravity device that will pull the bad guys high into the air... until you deactivate it, at which point... well, what goes up, must come down. Usually with painful results.

You've also got the World's Smallest Black Hole, which comes neatly packaged in a cardboard box. Take it out of the box, and you'd better not hang around... not if you like your current size and shape. And then we have my favourite: the land shark gun. Yes, it's a gun that fires a shark into the ground, and that shark then homes in on victims and erupts underneath them, Tremors-worm-style, and fills its belly.

Of course, you've gathered by now that this is ridiculous. Sure it is. But it's pretty entertaining, and makes a nice change from the usual oh-so-serious blasters that saturate the market. I doubt I'm going to devote my life to it, but it'll be a nice diversion every now and then, and certainly counts as a quid well spent.