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Having played Hyderdrome extensively I'm still undecided as to whether I'm doing it properly or not. It's supposed to be a progressive scroller, with Double Fire, Missiles, Assault Shells, Homing Missiles and Droids up for grabs. But try as I might, I couldn't seem to collect anything except a slightly longer bullet and a fairly useless satellite.

The idea is to fly a basic ship along the left to right scrolling Hyperdrome, destroying obstacles and airborne attackers. Most destroyed obstacles reveal an icon, which, like Esso petrol tokens, award the ship with something useful - the more tokens the better the add-on.

The description of these add-ons is the only thing in the whole package which caused me to smile: each item is named and a brief explanation of its use follows in brackets - so after Shield comes "They can't hurt you" and my personal favourite, Homing Missiles comes complete with "Give them no chance".

To be fair, the ship is nicely animated, but the backgrounds are appalling - they're bland, jerky, ugly and incorporate a totally pointless and garish sport of token parallax. The graphics are so basic that you'd be forgiven for mistaking this for a C64 budget shoot-'em-up. In fact, it's all reminiscent of a C64 budget game.

Usually, even the poorest of games can be enhanced slightly by a few well-placed sonic effects, but not this one. The title music is an assault on the ear-drums, while the only spot effects were the sound of hailstones hitting a tin roof (representing explosions) and a sort of 'bloop' every time a token is collected.

So to sum up, what you've got here is an ugly, ear-scraping, slow and boring shoot-'em-up, without so much as one notable feature. And to round it all off, play stops continually (and unnecessarily) to allow disk access. This is probably the first game I've ever player where I complained that I was starting with too many lives. If software shops haven't already got a bargain bin for 16-bit software, this could be a good reason to start one.