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On many other 8-bit formats, US Gold was the force to be reckoned with. It bought the licences for all the top best-selling American games, hired some programmers to convert them to the British machines, and then counted the money each of its releases made. It virtually annihilated the competition and its name was synonymous (usually) with quality.

However, it only seemed to have a single programmer for the Electron: Peter Johnson. He converted Crystal Castles, Beach Head and Impossible Mission and he made a darned good job of all three of them. I get this feeling that Impossible Mission took him a long time too. It's a very complex game and, if you consider it began life on the Commodore 64 (which had double the memory of the Electron), you start to gain some appreciation of how hard he must have had to work to squeeze it all in.

Impossible Mission has a delightful scenario involving a mad scientist called Elvin Atombender. The myth goes that Elvin hates injustice and, as a child, he loved computer gaming, becoming particularly obsessed with a shooting range game on which he was determined to beat the high score of 100 billion points. After several weeks without sleep, he had reached 99,999,999,985 points and had lined up the last target he needed... when the power failed. This momentous act of "injustice" caused Elvin to decide the whole world must pay.

Now, before we go any further, I would caution you, dear reader, that if the above story did not quite ring true so far, that you haven't heard the half of it. Elvin now lives in an underground fortress with nuclear missiles at his fingertips. The whole world stands on the brink of annihilation unless one man, Agent 4125 - that's you - can search the entirety of Elvin's fortress for the codes that will the missile launch sequence to be aborted.

And how do you achieve this positively Herculean task? Well, by running, jumping and somersaulting through a sort of platform and elevator labyrinth, outwitting Elvin's motion and sound sensing robots. You also need to search every item of Elvin's furniture, because he has hidden the codes you need in them. Finding them is only one part of the solution though. You also need to unencrypt them, because these codes are *in* code.

To unscramble them, you'll need to rely on your wristwatch computer and your skills in pattern matching. If you don't have any skills in pattern matching, then you can use your phone to dial up "The Agency" and get help, at the expense of two game minutes.

Oh yes, the mission is timed. I forgot to mention that!

Impossible Mission is a groovy Electron game. The animation is superb, with Agent 4125 convincingly jogging about until you press the jump key, whereupon he performs the most impressive somersault the Electron is ever likely to see. It's fast and the rooms are solved by a certain dexterity of control, coupled with a sixth sense as to how each robot you encounter is likely to react to your presence.

The robots are also impressively animated, rotating on the spot, gliding around and shooting a laser beam that will strike you down with the slightest touch. Keeping the agent just out of range is an acquired skill and working out how you successfully navigate each room's litany of platforms and lifts is very satisfying. There are even bonus rooms where you can play a variant of the Simon game (remembering a music sequence and then playing the highest note from it) to gain the ability to freeze the robots or reset the lifts.

The one-elevator-shaft, one-action-reaction room sequences as you make your way in all four directions of Elvin's cavern complex are good too. The elevators can carry you up or down so if one room is proving too challenging you can retreat and try a different one. Don't forget that the computers that litter the complex are your key to utilising any robot freezes or lift resets that may fall into your sweaty palms.

In one word - awesome. Impossible Mission must rank as one of the most beautifully presented, and genuinely engaging, games ever written for the Electron. And yet, well, you just try finding it. Firstly, it only came out as one standalone release and US Gold, rather bafflingly wrote BBC in strong type on its cover and Electron in very narrow white type, such that the word on the cover is very hard to see. It was also US Gold's last game for the Electron and it seems to have had a very, very small print run.

Very surprisingly, despite its obvious quality, it never featured on a single compilation, nor was it released on budget. It may well be a very different beast to Exile, but its scope and complexity, not to mention the freedom you have to explore each of Elvin's rooms on your own terms, mean it comes a strong second-best to that epic. And yet, it seems to have been largely forgotten.

If you have the chance to get your mitts on a physical copy of this, don't pass it up. This is a brilliant game and worth every penny of the £25+ you'll probably end up having to pay for it.