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When a computer comes to the end of its shelf life, a few things tend to happen. Firstly, many people just upgrade. No games for the Electron? Try a Spectrum or that new Commdore Amiga instead, oceans of games for those. Secondly, of those that stick with their computer, expectations of existing publishers rise exponentially. If games are few and far between, we don't mind shelling out the dough for them, but we want them to be good. This is why you often find the very best games for any machine get produced just as it starts to slip away from the public consciousness.

Helter Skelter by Audiogenic was reviewed in the very last issue of Electron User. It was proclaimed "one of the better platform games to have hit the market in recent years" with "flicker-free and fluid movement". And, on the strength of Jon Revis' review, and for a long(ish) period of time, the game was considered something of a missing gem. That's because Helter Skelter was to be Audiogenic's last-but-one Electron game but, whilst versions for other computers were readily available via mail order, no-one could find the Electron version of it. According to Jon Revis, it was an Arkanoid (bat and ball) clone but with the twist that the ball itself was under your control rather than needing to be batted around the playing area. He stated in closing that the game was simply fun with "the realistic response of the ball to the apparent gravitational effects" particularly worthy of note.

What a shame, we all thought, that the Electron release of Helter Skelter had not made it. Loopz, which was Audiogenic's very final release, was pretty good, and there's nothing really dreadful in Audiogenic's entire catalogue of Electron games... And that's not to mention how respected the authors behind the conversion were - Kevin Blake wrote, amongst others, Bug Eyes II and Superman: The Man Of Steel fame whilst Adrian Stephens created Spellbinder and Killer Gorilla. And then, almost two decades after people had given up all hope of ever finding it, some copies of Helter Skelter turned up. A few mail order suppliers had indeed taken delivery of Audiogenic's supposedly flicker-free, fluid, realistically-responding bouncy ball game, and someone quickly bought one of these and converted it to emulator format. Now every other Electron fanboy could finally see and play it.

And, well, to say euphoria at its discovery quickly turned to downright indignation at the quality of the game itself wouldn't be to understate it. Helter Skelter is diabolical. Essentially, what you have to do is manoeuvre a bouncy ball around a (cramped) platform area, hitting some monsters and avoiding others, until you take out the last nasty and clear the screen. Sounds like a simple enough concept and games like Crack-Up and Arkanoid managed very reasonable and addictive variants of such a concept. But, and I kid you not, Helter Skelter runs at about a tenth of their speed. It also introduces unnecessarily huge sprites which don't so much roam around as inexplicably jerk from one place to another. In fact, the game looks as if it's constantly dropping at least ten frames of animation every second.

As you might imagine, this makes controlling your ball something of a pain in the posterior - move left and it reacts, move right and it keeps right on moving left for a second or two before it corrects itself. Move left again and it'll happily skid right for even longer. Try rhythmically tapping left and right controls and it'll behave entirely unpredictably.

Helter Skelter's screens are not simply cluttered but actually messy. They are rendered in high resolution but only use about 80% of the screen's playing area, giving a mere 120 x 140 pixel playing area. Worse, splattered across the base of the Electron version is a huge chunk of 'splunge' which is presumably code required to run the game that has had to be put in screen memory. Small playing areas and splunge on the screen can be forgiven if you get a fantastic game like Exile as a result, but for a veritable, plodding snoozefest like Helter Skelter they just add insult to injury.

The central problem with Helter Skelter however isn't the raised expectations (i.e. late release coupled with a glowing but totally bullshit review); it's that the game is completely unplayable. Despite copious instructions, the very objective of the game is to bounce the ball around the playing area - and bouncing simply doesn't work. Use key C, they instructions say, to "vary the speed of the bounce". But what the heck does that mean? Do you hold down key C to build up "power" (Ricochet-style) then release it to bounce higher? Do you tap key C to increase your height whilst moving in one or the other direction? Do you hold down key C as you move, like a jump key? Well, if so, none of these methods work. All key C seems to do is, at random, send the ball upwards like a helium balloon! The "lag" which besets the entire game means you're never entirely sure which keypress or tap caused it to react in the way it did, and the struggle to move it once it's actually in flight is akin to trying to grab hold of beachball floating on a pond with one hand tied behind your back and the other covered in treacle.

Look, I personally don't know what happened here. Everything about this game is lazy and inefficient. For example, there's a Screen Editor. But there's no save option on it, and even no edit option, meaning that, if you do construct a screen to "challenge" your friend, your friend would have to be sitting right there in the same room and be willing to play it immediately. I'd venture to suggest that, in thirty years, no-one has designed a single screen on the Electron version of Helter Skelter, and certainly no-one has ever played a two player game on it, nor got any further than screen five. You start it, the ball drops into an area, you look for the nasty with an arrow over its head, you frantically try to get the ball over to it and somehow bounce onto it to wipe it from the board. You look for the next arrow, you repeat. But - get this! - even when you successfully remove all the nasties from the area, do you get a 'congratulations' message, a ping noise and a move to the next area? No, no, no, rather incredibly, the timer just continues to count down to zero in the usual way, only propelling you to the next area when it eventually reaches zero. You're just left to twiddle your thumbs until then.

And, whilst I'm tearing into this unmitigated trash, what's with the name Helter Skelter in the first place? Does this game feature any sort of slide? No, the name just sorta sounded cool, Beavis, huh huh, so we just slapped it on there, Butthead.

It's somewhat depressing how bad this game actually is, and why Electron User chose to cover this up is a question now lost to the hands of time. If I was giving Jon Revis the benefit of the doubt, I'd say perhaps he only played the BBC version of the game which is marginally better (in that it's a lot faster and it doesn't have that mess at the bottom of the playing area) and comes on the other side of the cassette. But, frankly, I think the more likely explanation is that there were so few new games by Electron User's last issue that it would've given 100% to a reaction test. Which is very sad.

So, is Helter Skelter of any interest now? Well, if you're one of those collectors of totally crap games (I know there are some of you out there!) then yes, this ticks all the boxes. Likewise, if you collect very rare games, it's quite a prize as it's extremely difficult to find. It came in a decorative cardboard box roughly the size of a videotape with a free poster (!) and originally retailed for £9.95. However, this isn't the type of game you'll find bundled with an Acorn Electron for sale on eBay because it appears, from all the evidence, that it was never actually released back in the Eighties/Nineties. If you are to track it down, therefore, you'll be looking at making an approach to a fellow collector with a spare copy, or trying one of the eBay sellers that clear old warehouse stocks. Given how bad the game is, you may decide that, in its case, the chase simply isn't worth the effort.