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Escape From Moonbase Alpha is a game that could have only come from the early Eighties. Its author clearly took a few ideas from what was, at the time, mainstream British culture, and just threw it together without any real regard for whether it actually made sense. Weirdly enough, it's one of the most remembered Electron games. The early bird catches the worm. It was on the shelves nano-seconds after the Electron was released. People snapped it up for their new toy without much enquiry into whether it was any good or not.

The plot, such as it is, is that you are Joey, a weedly size zero space cadet with a blue head, and you are stranded on the mysterious "moonbase", which is actually a big, self-proclaimed, 3D maze. Your mission is to descend through the many levels of the maze and find the Doctor, then pay him ten bags of gold to escape. So far, so good.

Some of the rooms of the maze contain monsters who, rather like a traditional Role Playing Game, have a strength counter. There are "green grapplers" (who look a bit like miniatured godzillas), "metal maulers" (who look like veils), and "deadly dorises" (who look like Evil Edna from the children's TV show Willo The Wisp). When you encounter one of these monsters, you can fight them by running directly into them or you can retreat or try and find your way around them by jabbing at the ZX*? keys and hoping for the best.

Some of the rooms also contain the bags of gold you so desire to complete the first part of your mission but, annoyingly, you can't pick them up as long as there's a monster in the same room. And that restriction applies to any monster, because there are additional monsters who 'teleport' into rooms without warning such as "the demon" (who looks like the devil and comes to steal your gold) and "metal marvin" (who looks like a robot and saps your strength without even touching you). There's also a wizard who randomly pops up. He can be useful if Deadly Doris turns Joey into a frog, as he will reverse her spell in exchange for a bag of gold.

Phew, still with me so far?

If you hang around in the rooms, a telephone box may appear. If it does, and you move Joey into it, it will teleport you to a random room on the same level of the maze, i.e. 'horizontally' but not vertically. It even hangs around for a while allowing you to get into it for a second or third time if you're not happy with where it ends up.

Finally, there's the tenuous connection to The Incredible Hulk (!) whereby pressing T will turn you briefly into a green-skinned strongman, able to battle with monsters much more ferocious than Joey at the cost of a greatly reduced strength meter after reversion. The Hulk can also walk through walls, as if this inclusion wasn't odd enough in itself.

And that's Escape From Moonbase Alpha. It's a sort of madcap maze exploration game where it's pretty clear what you have to do, but where you need to keep shifting your plans to cope with what the game throws at you. Where the gold is and where the monsters are appears to change with every play and I'm convinced that some games are just impossible from the start. However, because of all the different options you have available to you, you can sometimes snatch victory from the jaws of defeat no matter how much the odds seem stacked against you. Entering a room with three bags of gold in it and no monster can turn the tables in a few taps of the 'P'ick up key.

I always think of this game as being something that evolved rather than being planned out beforehand. Yes, you could argue it's a bit of a mess of ideas and devoid of logic. Still, I think the reason it continues to be popular as that it's the type of game that children love... and most Electron owners were children when they played it. On release, the Acorn press found it good but a touch frustrating, which is pretty much how it feels to play it now. The good news is that Micro Power shifted literally tens of thousands of copies of this title so you won't have any trouble tracking down a physical tape. Expect to pay around £1.