A few years ago, when I was very young, I went round to my mate's house to see a couple of new games he had acquired for his Vic-20. One of them was Laser Zone. We played it all evening and I went home in incredible envy of this game.

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I can't remember why I loved this game so passionately, but it's still a good game, only let down by the graphics on the Dragon. It puts you on two axis of a grid with objects coming at the two axis. On each axis you have a gun and the idea is to blast anything that moves out of the sky (or gnd). Up and down on the joystick controls the gun on the vertical axis, and left and right correspondingly move the gun on the horizontal axis. And that's about it, save a couple of rather nifty touches that raise this game from the mediocracy.

The first is that by using diagonal movement it is possible to pick an alien that has landed on a certain axis off with the other gun (does that make sense?). This is a very difficult manoeuvre to execute involving a lot of practice to prevent suicide!

The second is that it is possible to play with two people in co-operation; one on each axis, and it's here that the game comes into its own.

The sound's great, the graphics are all right (although I prefer black and white) and it plays fine. I have given it a rating of three but I don't know whether I found the game a let down because it has not translated well to the Dragon, or because after a very long wait I had built up my expectations too highly, so it may be worth four. The game is well worth a look if you can pick it up cheap somewhere (It's often going cheap at the shows) and you may find the initial passion for it that I shared. But, be warned, this is not an easy game!!