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Breakout games are very old hat, aren't they? Ball, bat, bleepy-bleepy, bingy-boingy, desperately trying to manoeuvre to hit the last block with the pinball and... on to the next screen to do it all again! With hundreds of them to choose from, it's tough to get very excited by any particular one. But you still see the grand daddy of the Breakout clones, Arkanoid, proudly plastered on compilations of "classic" games and a good one still has that peculiar hook factor about it.

The Electron didn't get an official conversion of Arkanoid but, a few years later (1990), it did get Crack-Up, a wonderfully smooth and simplistic "bat and baller" that came out on the Atlantis budget label. Atlantis published a range of games, which ranged from the mediocre Cops 'N Robbers to the pretty-good-for-two-quid Hobgoblin. Crack-Up is one of the best things they ever did. Each playing area is progressively harder, and, to get further, you'll need ever more familiarity with the game. The screens are attractive to look at and deviously designed too.

With a concept as simple as bat and ball, there's only really a lot to say when the version under scrutiny somehow manages to get it wrong. In the case of Crack-Up, it's got most of the addictive elements it needs absolutely spot on. There are bonus pods that occasionally drop from blocks giving goodies like extra lives, two balls instead of one, an elogated bat, a quick jump to the next screen and a sticky bat... and it starts off slowly and the ball gradually builds up speed. All of this is a staple of every good Arkanoid clone, but whether or not its enjoyable to play really comes down to how easy it is to control the bat, and how accurately you can predict where the ball is likely to end up (especially when it's coming back towards your bat at the bottom of the screen).

Its tiny flaws are: sometimes the ball, at one particular angle passes through the bat when it should bounce off it (and it's always the same angle). Very irritating when it happens. The other is that the ball sometimes launches from the bat at an unexpected angle. If you're used to Arkanoid, where the side of the bat which hits the ball determines what angle it will bounce off at, this feels strange.

The feature I don't like pertains to the laser. It has slow bullets, and, if your bat is in certain positions on the screen, the bullets can travel between the blocks rather than take them out.

Otherwise though, Crack-Up handles like a dream. If you add all the time I've spent playing this together, it must be weeks rather than days, simply because of how addictive it is. It's brilliant in a way that defies any real description. And if it had been around in 1983, I'll bet it would have easily shifted a load of Electrons on its own! Quite simply, this is the best Breakout clone that the Electron has ever seen.

Given this sort of acclaim (by me, it came out far too late to be reviewed by any magazines!), naturally enough I recommend you track a copy of this one down. Unfortunately, it's actually getting harder and harder to find and, although it was originally a budget game, is standing to command three or four times the two quid it went for back in the day.