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It's quite bizarre, this one. The first shoot-'em-up to take place in the air over Coronation Street! You control a little space man who flies along dodging telegraph poles and TV aerials, as well as the prerequisite formations of alien blobs, over a landscape of terraced houses. When I lived in a northern town, life was never like this!

This slight 'innovation', if you could call it that, is the nearest thing Firebird's newby gets to original thought, and even that is soon lost as you enter a more standard system of tunnels and stuff for the later stages. Still, even though this is nothing more than a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, throw-a-stick-in-the-Virgin-game-shop-and-you'll-hit-fifty-of-them-shoot-'em-up, it's still a pretty good game. Despite all the advances we've made in computer games, for sheer playability all out destruction is still hard to beat.

"Destroy the alien waves" is about the nearest the packaging gets to a plotline apart from the info on the back informing us that it is the sequel to Sidewize, which we would hardly have forgotten since that was only out towards the end of last year! - and that is no bad thing. We all know what to do, just throw me straight into the action say I. Which is precisely what the game does. There you are on a screen that scrolls quite fast to the right, indulging in pretty fast joystick-waggling to avoid the waves of aliens. You start off equipped with a basic high-powered laser gun which is what your weapon always reverts to when any picked-up extras run out of juice.

Lucky you, there are a couple of E-marked energy pods and a weaponry icon floating there right in front of you, which enables you to select one of the higher-powered guns from the display at the bottom. You'll need it too, because the bad guys come at you thick and fast, and the proximity of the roof tops means there really isn't so much room to move. Besides being hit by an alien, you die if you touch the roof, or if the chimneys of the otherwise ordinary-looking houses belch out an indestructible bullet at you. Hey! Not fair! I thought the native aliens on this poxy backwater planet I'm trying to rescue were on our side!

As with all games of this type, of course, practice makes perfect, and as you learn the various attack formations and how to deal with them, you progress a lot further into the game. One thing to bear in mind is that not only does the screen keep scrolling after you lose a life, but you are invulnerably for the first few seconds after you reappear. What this amounts to is that if there is a particularly tricky obstacle that you find impossible to get past, you can beat it by strategically dying just before it appears, and then using the scrolling of the screen and your brief invulnerability to get past it. Of course, this means sacrificing a life, so it is up to you to decide if it is worth it. In your choice of weaponry you do have a shield which comes into play when you hold down fire to provide the same service, but it soon runs out if you use it at all.

Other weapons include Surround fire, bullet fire and a smart bomb, though you need to travel over an icon to get to use any of them. For certain parts of the game though, having a weapon that throws out a wall of five bullets in front of you is almost essential.

You can tell of course, that this is almost your generic shoot-'em-up. Lots of weapons and energy pods to collect, waves of aliens to beat, and, of course, the big mummy alien at the end of each level. Despite the wide range of shoot-'em-ups that exist for all you Speccy fans out there, this one does leave a pleasant taste in the mouth. If you're not the jaded old gamer with a hundred games similar in your cupboard, then pick this one up. It won't blow your socks off, but you could do oh so much worse.