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If there's one thing I can say about Gemini Wing, it's that it is very difficult. Not difficult as in playability level, but difficult in actual distinguishing anything. A game where you die because you saw the bullet at the last moment isn't half as frustrating as a game where you dies because you can't see any bullets. Or enemy ships come to that.

You see, it all boils down to the graphics. The main sprites themselves are fine, small but finely detailed. It's the backdrops that cause all the trouble. You see, the backdrops are also very finely detailed, so much so that they camouflage all sprites on screen, which means you're going to have a bit of a hard time avoiding the enemy ships, let alone the bullets.

And that is really the only thing that marrs what isn't really a bad shoot-em-up. Set in the style of games like 1942 and Slapfight, you have to fly your little twin engine plane upwards through trillions of levels of continuous trigger firing action.

And it's action all the way, right from the word go. You are plunged into a blazing sky, enemy fighter and their bullets screaming through the air around you. What do you have to fight back with? Not a lot pal. The default weapon for the game is a titchy little twin barrelled automatic perched on the front of your plane. As you fly along blasting things, the things you blast drop little capsules, which you collect by flying over. Once collected, they fall into a tube and form a queue. Each of the capsules is a one-use special weapon that you activate by holding down the fire button. One of the weapons acts as a smart bomb, another gives you limited three way fire and so on.

But as a game, that's it. Basically a pretty uninspired shoot-'em' up. Nice scrolling and nice sound and all the rest of it, just stupidly difficult. The funny thing is, had the backdrops been better throughout, it could have been a good game.

Run of the mill scrolling SEU with severe graphical problems.