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Despite being a conversion of quite an old arcade game, Bomb Jack is one of the most enjoyably addictive games that I've played on the Spectrum for ages. It's one of those simple games that manages to be hugely addictive and leads you on to constantly try for the next screen or the highest score.

The plot of the game is virtually non-existent: Bomb Jack is a small figure who, in his cape and mask, looks like Mighty Mouse from the old cartoon series. Dozens of bombs have been placed in various locations around the world (the Pyramids, an old castle and so on) and it's up to Jack to defuse them all. The Bombs have been placed on groups of platforms and Jack gets to them by leaping around and landing on them to defuse them.

In addition to the bombs, there are a number of nasties that get in the way and which are deadly if Jack collides with them. There's a bird that flaps its way around the screen and a number of men in which look like space suits. These start at the top of the screen and gradually make their way to the bottom, where they turn into vicious looking insects and are also joined by little flying saucers. The longer you stay on each screen, the more of these you have to deal with, and after a while they all start to home-in on you, which is when things start to get really frantic.

The controls are very simple, just left/right and jump, but mastering these controls so that you can have Jack zig-zagging around the screen, avoiding deadly objects and getting to all the bombs isn't at all easy. Pressing the jump button once will let you jump, but repeated presses allow you to control the speed and height of the jump. Jack responds well to the keyboard controls, bouncing around quickly and smoothly and this allows you to make some very nippy moves but the technique, though simple in theory, isn't easy to master. I started off by jerkily bouncing around the screen and bashing into platforms all over the place, but after a while I managed to get Jack smoothly nipping between deadly sprites and just dipping here and there to touch a bomb before moving off again.

The graphics are fairly simple but reasonably well done. The background pictures are all quite finely detailed, but you do get the odd vanishing sprite when two sprites overlap from time to time, though this doesn't really detract from the enjoyment of the game. There are five basic locations, and as you get further into the game these reoccur with different and more complex arrangements of all the bombs. When youre trying to reach the bombs, you can either go to the nearest ones and try to clear each screen as quickly as possible, or you can attempt to defuse them in order as their fuses are lit. This gives you a bonus for each bomb, but is risky as it takes longer and means that the insects and spacemen get deadlier all the time. This is a nice touch, since it means that even after you've learnt how to clear a particular screen there's still the challenge of trying to get the highest possible score.

Every now and then, there are capsules which bounce around the screen, and collecting these will give you bonuses, extra lives or, like the power pills in Pac-Man, wil paralyse all the creatures on screen for a few seconds, allowing you to rush around, stacking up points by killing them.

After producing some particularly naff games based on heavily hyped TV licensing deals, Elite finally seem to have struck an untapped vein of enjoyable arcade conversions. Bomb Jack, like their recent Roller Coaster does away with some of the hype, yet still manages to be simple, good old fashioned fun.

A Monster Hit.