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"Oblivion gets our vote for the title of 'Most Addictive Arcade Game for the BBC Micro'" is the ambitious claim made by Bug-Byte for their latest offering. Whether it gets your vote depends on whether you like the 'shoot them as they come at you' style of arcade game.

Oblivion is a typical 'Galaxian' type of game. Spaceships drop out of the sky to home in on your position, dropping bombs as they come. You have no bases to hide behind, your only options are to shoot the ships with your laser, or 10 avoid them and their bombs. As the game progresses, different spaceships appear with different modes of attack, and the bombs instead of dropping, three different styles of ship were attacking along with some large homing bombs, whilst the speed of the game had increased noticeably.

The game is designed to operate from the keyboard without the option of using joysticks. The keys used, TAB and Q for left and right, COPY and DELETE for fire and up, are comfortable for a reasonable length of game. On-screen scoring for one or two players and a high score facility are included, though the omission of an explanation of the scoring structure is a pity. Left to itself though, the computer will play a game, from which the points scoring can be determined.

The supplied tape loaded faultlessly every time. Its packaging. though only a card insert in a plastic cassette case, is typical of this type of product. The program has good. high speed, high resolution graphics, with good accompanying sound effects. It appears to be bug free, the only way of stopping it being with the break key, suitably well away from the game keys. Though not particularly original, Oblivion is a good example of its type of arcade game implemented on a home computer.

Dave Reeder