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If you were around in the early Eighties, you might well recall Astro Blaster being one of the very early shoot-'em-up arcade machines. One of Sega's early games, it's a vertical shoot-'em-up. It equips you with a laser and invites you to clear waves of aliens, but requires you to "pace yourself" to actually do so.

The problem is that, each time you unleash a bullet, there is a small increase in the temperature of (presumably) the "blasters" of your ship. If you act like a kamikaze Rambo, it won't be too long until the blasters overheat and refuse to work until they've cooled. Instead, you must duck under the alien wave and try to only fire when a bullet is certain to make its mark.

Astro Blaster has now, some 35 years after its arcade debut, appeared on the BBC Micro. Once again it's under the Retro Software label, it's free and it's coded by Richard 'Tricky' Broadhurst who also gave us the arcade conversion of Frogger raved about in MM #1410.

As with Frogger, Astro Blaster is a flawless conversion of the Sega arcade game. It uses the BBC's high definition, four colour mode (Mode 1), retaining the arcade's detail, colours and resolution. Indeed, it even includes the famous "Fighter pilots needed in sector wars" sampled speech (Not often that Beeb games talk!). Sound otherwise is restricted to blasting and blipping noises, but, all told, it's a nice enough game.

A nice enough game, that is, for those who are fans of the arcade. I'm not one of them. Firstly, I don't like being forced to "pace myself" in the way this game demands. Enduring ten second stretches without being able to fire irritates me. Secondly, that strategy of pacing I described earlier does not actually work. The sheets of aliens here very rarely bob about in a formation that allows you to pick them off with strategy. No, the aliens bob around. More often than not, if you hit one it's a matter of luck rather than judgement. Which means, to stand any chance of taking them out, you have to unleash the very vollies of firepower that overheat the blasters in the first place!

Thirdly, some formations immediately come streaming down the screen and sit literally millimetres from the tip of your spacecraft. You are expected to get underneath these and take them out. An exercise in impossibility.

So, whilst this is undoubtedly yet another amazing feat of programming, I am somewhat lukewarm to it. Personally, I'd much rather load up BBC shooters Galaforce or Firetrack.