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Ah, imagination. It's a wonderful thing, able to conjure up the weirdest of ideas and throw them together into something so attention-grabbing that you wind up with a product that, many years later, everyone remembers. Deus Ex Machina (on the Spectrum) for example, and on the Electron, Drain Mania, one of the few games for that machine that it's almost impossible to fault.

In this game you play an athletic little chap called Theodore and the game is set in the sewers. Two pipes are situated at the top left and top right of the screen and, from these, emerge creatures. The creatures - Inky (a turtle), Pinky (a red angry face) and Dinky (a fish with legs) - are deadly to the touch and must be flipped over onto their backs to proceed. Theodore has to do this by positioning himself on the platform underneath them and headbutting it. A successful hit on the creature through the floor emits a bleep and flips it over. That's only half the story though, because to actually kill it/erase it from the screen, you need to run into it whilst it's in this paralysed state.

None of this is too easy. Firstly, the sewers are cramped places. A side-on platform game, Drain Mania typically has four levels of play and, when each screen starts, you begin suspended over the playing area. You can choose when and how to drop into it for about the first ten seconds but, once you're in it proper, you need to keep an eye on *all* the moving creatures, mentally assessing which directions they will move in. Whether any manoeuvre that suggests itself to take out a creature or two can be safely executed requires a fair degree of planning.

Secondly, the sewers are slippery. Early screens aren't too bad and Theodore responds well to keypresses, running left and right and coming to a rest when you release the control key. However, as the game progresses, the "lower" sewers' floors send Theodore skidding further and further in the direction he was headed even after the control key is released. This feature may sound unnecessary and frustrating but it's actually tremendously cool, because later screens can't be completed in the same way as early ones. You have to try and judge where Theodore needs to come to rest, and factor in how slippy the sewers are, before you move in any direction.

Thirdly, as screens progress, the opponents get tougher. Though it may not appear so at first, Pinky is tougher than Inky, and Dinky is the toughest of all three. Not in their manner... oh no no, all three of them glide around at the same speed. More in the amount of headbutts it takes to flip them. Inky only takes one and so is pretty easy. The others are less so, particularly if they have a fraction of a second after you headbutt them to glide out of the way of your second or third attempt.

Fourthly, everything bar the time you're given for completing the screen itself is time limited. Flip Inky, Pinky or Dinky over from below and you only have a finite amount of time to jump up to where they are and kick them into oblivion. If you don't get to them in time, they not only recover but they also turn into a tougher creature than they were previously. i.e. Inky becomes Pinky, Pinky becomes Dinky, and Dinky becomes Dinky. Bad timing can see you up against a screenful of Dinkys.

Fifthly, just as you come up with a winning strategy for dealing with these descending Dinkys, fireballs also enter the fray. These play by their own rules, bouncing and ricocheting around the screens pinball-style. They have the annoying habit of reaching you, or colliding with one of the creatures and affecting his progress; sometimes turning him around just when it's most inconvenient to you for them to do so!

To outwit all of these nemeses, you have three things - your skill with the controls, the ability to make yourself invisible for a very short period (useful if you become cornered, creatures will pass through you instead of kill you) and the Zap block in the bottom centre of the screen. The Zap block is a smart-bomb that will wipe out all creatures on the screen but can only be used three times (well, four times if you get a bonus Zap block!). A nice touch is that every two screens you also get a bonus game which involves running around the sewers headbutting money which hangs from the platforms above, collecting as much as you can before a timer expires. This is a welcome break from the abject concentration required to play the real game.

Drain Mania clearly is a clone of the very early game Mario Bros, produced at a time when companies could get away with slapping a different name on a non-original idea. Quite surprisingly in retrospect, it didn't garner the sort of praise it clearly deserved when first released. I mean, come on, how many games exhibit this level of imagination and fun? Instead its merits were glossed over by reviewers who considered it a fairly run of the mill arcade game with varying degrees of lastability. I, for one, would beg to differ! Not only do I still find a game of Drain Mania brilliant four decades after its release, but I have also, by now, played the original Mario Bros and I find Drain Mania superior to it in every respect. Handling, sprites, graphics and even sound and music... Ah yes, I haven't even mentioned the musical intro that starts this game. A true rarity on the Electron indeed.

Unfortunately for collectors, the original Drain Mania has become something of a prize and, whilst in the Noughties it would come up pretty regularly on Internet auction sites, there are few officiandoes now who want to let their copy go. That's probably not only due to the quality of the game itself, but also because the stylish Icon software boxes look pretty snazzy in their own right. Currently it's commanding prices north of the £20 mark, but it did later make an appearance on Audiogenic's Electron compilation Power Pack Volume 2, which is a little more ubiquitous and therefore can be picked up a little cheaper.