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The world has been polluted beyond the point where it and indeed mankind can survive so, as is usual in these scenarios, everyone has piled into a fleet of ships and legged it, looking for somewhere else to call home (up until the point the fossil fuels run out again and the chemical pesticides breed something particularly vicious that starts to absorb people). The problem is that between the desolation of Earth and the paradise that will probably be called New Earth are the Triton Ring Worlds, a series of heavily-defended artificial planetoids that, ironically, have one weakness; a fully-armed battle cruiser would be atomised for just looking at them the wrong way, but a small, single-person fighter could slip in under the radar and do some major damage. And guess who gets to fly that fighter...

Goldrunner for the GBA is an attempt to directly port the Steve Bak Atari ST and Amiga title of the same name; to this end the graphics are directly taken from the ST and the scrolling is, as to be expected from a port of a game that was at the time famed for it, absolutely smooth as silk regardless of the speed it's shifting at. Despite the seemingly cumbersome ship, the control system is responsive enough to do some hardcore seat-of-the pants flying which is for the best since it's pretty much a requirement most of the time. The screen is regularly peppered with nasties swirling around and their bullets (only the latter of which need to be avoided) but these aren't the player's primary concern; on the surface of each ring are structures, some of which need to be destroyed in order to reduce the ring's energy level whilst others cast longer shadows to indicate that they're taller and, therefore, you can smack into them. Rather hard.

One of the issues I've always had with Goldrunner as a gamer is that, in common with a lot of Steve Bak's work, even after a lot of time at the joystick it's hideously hard to play and unforgiving with it; the aliens that swarm around you at speed can't be collided with, but their far more deadly bullets don't obey some of the laws of motion (or perhaps the ship is magnetised in some way) so avoiding collisions with them isn't an easy job. Each of these collisions takes energy away from the ship, which is initially represented by five little lightning bolts at the bottom of the status bar, and running out results in death. Even more annoyingly, the best way to lose a cloud of bullets after it forms is to use your speed as an advantage - but again, hammering around the very large level like a thing possessed creates new challenges because you have to know the layout very well or spend a lot of time piling into buildings.

So although it's a very good conversion of what was a groundbreaking game on the 16-bit platforms, this GBA port (along with the original ST graphics and some of the Amiga sound) retains a truly cruel difficulty curve and, whilst I did consider that maybe it was me getting old, a couple of days of on/off blasting at both this and the Amiga version resulted in my arse being handed to me on a regular basis by both. On the plus side, at least the quirky and I suspect rather gimmicky mouse control of the original has gone and that's certainly a good thing.

To summarise, as a port of the original game Goldrunner GBA is a fine piece of work, but as a game it's something I can only really recommend to those who've either put a lot of flying time in with the ST and Amiga originals and want to relive those moments on the bus or to the more masochistic shoot 'em up players who like a truly hardcore challenge.

(Note that Goldrunner GBA is fully DS compatible).