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Regular C&VG readers will need no introduction to the splendid arcade game, Gyruss.

The machine was launched in this country last year at the Computer & Video Games National Arcade Game Championships.

On that sweaty August afternoon, our reigning champion - Julian Rignall - strode up to the Gyruss and notched up an amazing 28,000 points on a machine which he had never seen before.

Now you can try your hand at Gyruss if you own a Commodore 64 and you also happen to have a spare £35 to purchase Parker's latest cartridge.

What? Thirty five big ones, I hear you say. Yes, I know, you could buy Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, The Hobbit and International Soccer for that kind of money.

So how do Parker justify this price? They claim that their game is of a quality that no other company has yet achieved.

Is this true? Well - yes and no. Gyruss has the best soundtrack of any computer game I have ever seen. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor plays beautifully throughout the various stages of the game, making full use of the C64's three sound channels.

The game itself is an excellent reproduction of the arcade game. Your ship spins left and right through 360 degrees, blasting the aliens that spiral out towards you from the centre of the screen.

The idea of the game is to get safely back to Earth - warping from planet to planet when you have cleared each space sector of the nasties.

Needless to say each warp is tougher than the previous one and the aliens start to sweep up from the bottom of the screen as well as the centre Galaga-fashion.

Gyruss is just a darned good shoot-'em-up - probably the best game of its type available for the C64. But let's face it, at that price, it has to be. And if I was given the choice of Gyruss or four other excellent games of different types, then I would have to go for the latter.