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Left, right, fire. It was music to my tone-deaf ears. "Where..." I had been musing only a few days before, "have all the shoot-'em-ups gone?"

Well, here is proof positive that the breed is not completely extinct, that there is still hope for those unregenerate blasters who will not, or cannot, cope with those new-fangled notions of mapping and thinking.

Battle Beyond The Stars, I'd be the first to admit, is not what you could describe as an original game. It will remind anyone who's been in an arcade in the past few years of a classic called Galaxians. You control a ship firing up the screen at a variety of aliens swooping down and unloading several mega-tons of lethal bombs. You clear one wave and go on to the next. You clear that and advance to take on yet more extra-terrestrials. And so on, for as many waves as the game contains.

Of course, a game as nostalgic as Battle Beyond The Stars has to have a suitably involved and silly scenario to give you some reason, however spurious, for risking your life. So here goes: on board the SSF1 Cutlass Captain King is preparing to warp from Alpha Centauri to planet Earth when what should he spot but a whole fleet of strange-looking alien ships, heavily armed with an assortment of lasers and nuclear weapons Well, just fancy that. Naturally, battle ensues.

The game has five levels, each with five waves of aliens. You begin by being killed, since the game is so fast that it takes a few goes to realise what on Alpha Centauri is happening. This first wave is the Terrahawks, flapping birds winging all over the screen. They drop bombs at an alarming rate and are very hard to hit. However, here's a little tip for free: don't move at all, but just blast away from the centre. You'll bag the lot and graduate to the second wave...

The Spinners. These are fiendishly whirling Maltese crosses. There's not many of them, so they're extremely difficult to hit.

Should you destroy them, you encounter the Death Star's colourful, but deadly, asterisks. Next on the gruesome menu are the Bouncers: yellow barrels with unpredictable behaviour. After them are the Saucers, whose name is self-explanatory, and then the Space Mines. These things hang around in space and emit a shower of deadly particles when hit. These fragments are very hard to avoid.

If you get through all that lot, you'll have to face them all again. But now there will be the Homers, seeking you out with a certain amount of intelligence. Don't ask me how you deal with them.

In between waves your ship scrolls up the screen over a pretty speckled background representing deepest space. Graphics throughout are colourful and sharply defined, while the sound, if not exactly sophisticated, is a suitably noisy assortment of blasts and explosions.

Although it's not quite as pretty or as smooth as Laserwarp, Mikro-Gen's classy shoot-'em-up, the action is faster and much more furious.

P. Fast and furious action. P. Requires little or no mental effort. P. Ascending levels of difficulty.

N. Requires little or no mental effort. N. More mature players could find it too fast N. Utterly unoriginal.

The one word that sums this game up is "fast". It may not have much originality or require any great powers of intelligence to play, but it's a very challenging shoot-'em-up. The odd game of mindless zapping makes a nice change and I'm sure it will sell quite well to those of us who aren't ashamed to like a good blast as well as complicated game.