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Frenzy is one of those games that you can just pick up, play for a while and then put down again. It hasn't got eye-watering graphics or any sort of plot. It's a variant of the 'area-fill' style of game where you get a blank page, and attempt to "fill" areas of it for some pre-defined purpose. In Frenzy, this is to capture a diagonally bouncing "Lepton" (or "line" to anyone else) of a few pixels in length.

At first you can only move your cursor around the very outside edges of the screen and you're invulnerable until you start 'drawing' by tapping the Return key. To draw an area you must venture out into the page, leaving a solid trail behind you, and then return to the outside edge. However, if the Lepton collides with you during this, you're toast.

If you make it, the square or rectangle that you have created on the page is filled in, and if you can somehow encase the Lepton itself, it will explode and you'll win the level. Which usually means creating a succession of smaller rectangles down the centre of the page, trying to 'box' in the Lepton in a smaller area, and then creating a 'final' rectangle that divides the page in half. You have to be careful though, because whenever you split the page, it is only the smaller area that is filled in, and it's sometimes difficult to assess whether it will be the left or right area that is filled. If the Lepton isn't in the smaller area, then you'll merely have filled in 50% of the page for fun, and now trapping it in the remaining 50% will be even harder.

As levels progress, the game gets harder with faster Leptons, more Leptons and other foes called Chasers, which run around the edges of the page and up and down the areas you create. If these collide with your cursor, it will explode into pieces.

The situation is further complicated by a 'speed toggle'. You can choose to move your cursor slowly or fast, filling the area red or purple as a result. If you fill an area in red, you get a much higher score for that area, but you take the risk of not making it because a stray Lepton or Chaser picks you off mid-trail.

I have to confess that, even though it's not much to look at, I rather like Frenzy. It has a lot going for it in the fact that it relies to a great deal on the player's creative skill. This is the ultimate test of "thinking *inside* the box", and it can be fun in itself just trying to entice the Lepton into an area to see if you can somehow trap it for a while without actually killing it off, and then go on a bonus-creating binge by filling in the rest of the page...!

It's also a game that rewards you when you do well with extra lives, meaning that you can progress quite far if you really take it seriously. Sometimes you do get picked off through pure bad luck but it never really feels like an "unfair" game. Rather, it's like a cat and mouse game, where you're the cat and the Lepton is the mouse.

The freedom Frenzy gives you makes it quite addictive. You can experiment with all manner of different tactics during each bout, and, if you really wanted to, you could try and paint a mosaic-style image of purple and red blocks in the playing area too!

Frenzy was one of the very first third party Electron games and was universally given a thumbs up by all the Acorn magazines. It also appeared on two compilations: 10 Computer Hits 2 and Micro Power Magic 2. A physical copy is therefore very easy to source. Expect to pay around £3-£4 whether you opt for the individual release or one of the compilations.