Ignore the pain!

For the third Rambo movie, Sly Stallone treks to Afghanistan on another perilous rescue mission. This time to emancipate his incarcerated former military commander/lifelong best friend, Colonel Trautman, drawing him into deadly conflict with his brutal captors, Soviet Colonel Zaysen and his henchman, Sergeant Kourov. Seeing as he's already deeply embroiled in fraught Afghan-Russian dissensions, Sly decides he may as well hang on a while longer to lead the Soviet armed forces in their daring uprising.

Ocean's inevitable gaming translation loosely follows suit, replicating the silver screen's explosive combat in a diluted fashion with a mixture of top-down action levels and tank-based first-person target-shooting. Whilst not quite bursting with effervescent high-octane thrills and blood spills, the cute, stunted spritework is exactly what you'd hope for from a tongue-in-cheek comic book interpretation, garnering an amiable charm beyond the sum of its parts.

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I'll be the judge of that

In 1995 Sylvestor Stallone stumbled into one of the worst calamities of his career; agreeing to take on the role of 2000AD comic book anti-hero, Judge Dredd. Set to the backdrop of a futuristic, dystopian, crime-ridden normality, Dredd is framed for murder by his own psychotic half-brother, Rico. Ironically, the police officer, judge, jury, and executioner spends much of the movie attempting to extricate himself from false imprisonment, fighting the injustice of the justice system that motivates and defines him to the core. It's a dour, humourless, charisma-free affair with little plot to speak of and no redeeming qualities.

Arriving 5 years earlier, the action-platformer Amiga game of the same name couldn't possibly have been based on the movie. Nevertheless, as it revolves around the same characters and source material, I assess them in tandem to discover if they are equally insipid and forgettable. In the game 'Sly' patrols six themed landscapes either on foot or riding/flying his trademark Lawmaster motorbike in an effort to keep a lid on Mega City One's escalating crime rate. On two wheels we travel much faster, yet are hobbled by the caveat of being unable to arrest or shoot the local criminal reprobates. Novelty mini-games and end of level boss battles add a dash of variety, or at least a diversion from the standard tedium on offer.

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Don't bother to buckle up - you may not want to survive this

Veteran mountain ranger partners Sylvester Stallone and Michael Rooker part company over who is responsible for the fatally failed rescue of Michael's girlfriend. Eight months later, returning to the Colorado Rockies to face his demons and reconcile with girlfriend, Janine Turner, Sly is manipulated into aiding and abetting the heist of a U.S. Treasury plane at the menacing behest of supervillain, John Lithgow. I've never trusted him since watching Santa Claus the movie so knew what to expect from Cliffhanger. In order to survive the precarious ordeal, Michael and Sly are forced to put their smouldering differences aside to tackle a common enemy. A few in fact, including that muscly bloke from London's Burning, Craig Fairbrass.

Released to coincide with the movie in 1993 were various console and computer video games. Here my focus is the latecomer to the party that left us dangling for a further year; an action-platformer developed by Spidersoft and published by Psygnosis for the Amiga. Is it as reprehensible as the YouTube ranters would have you believe? Does it bear any relation to the movie that's most notable for its accomplished cinematography and breathtaking scenery?

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Looks like there's a new shepherd in town!

Sylvester Stallone is the Demolition Man; a no-nonsense, hard-nosed cop of limited wordage who doesn't believe in treading lightly. Framed for the manslaughter of multiple hostages by a psychopathic career criminal who looks remarkably like Wesley Snipes, the cat and mouse share the same incarcerated fate for their involvement. In 1996 they are cryogenically frozen, subjected to 36 years of subliminal rehabilitation therapy before being revived for a parole hearing. Phoenix (probably played by Snipes in fact), escapes into a seemingly utopian Brave New World where crime has been eliminated. With no experience of real crimefighting, present-day cops are as much use as a chocolate teapot, obliging the powers that be to release Sly into the community to recapture him and restore law and order.

Two years following the theatrical unveiling of the 1993 movie, a licensed platformer of the same name was defrosted for the Genesis, SEGA CD, and SNES courtesy of game developers, Alexandria. A frenetic, 2D, scrolling shoot 'em up action tie-in that manages to improve upon the low bar set by its source material. I risk frostbite to connect the dots, assessing their respective merits side by side.

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