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Ah, the satisfaction of swooping down onto your enemy's tail, sending him burning from the sky with a well placed missile, then watching him slam into some poor civilian's house in a storm of pixels. It's a golden moment in Jihad, a Commodore 64 remake of the 1980s C64 game Falcon Patrol, following the ancient and holy template of side scrollers laid down by the likes of Defender and Chopper Command.

More than 20 years since the little jump jet of Falcon Patrol took to the skies, Jihad puts you behind the controls of an Iraqi fighter plane battling the American invaders. And no, before any assumptions are made, this isn't the retro equivalent of the hilarious Night of Bush Capturing which failed to strike fear into the hearts of the first-person-shooter-playing world some years back! With its difficulty levels of either George W. Bush or Saddam Hussein and light hearted instruction text the tongue is jammed very firmly in cheek, and politics don't interfere at all with the gameplay.

Falcon Patrol's sand-blasted, washed out colours (which added to the desert ambience of the game, don't get me wrong) are replaced with much richer shades, a brighter blue sky, and brighter houses for you to crash into as you learn the controls.

Vertical take off planes aren't quite as vogue as in the 80s, and in Jihad you're back to taking off the traditional way, from a runway which invariably gets bombed about 15 seconds into the first level, which works out as about 2 seconds after you've filled up on fuel. It's not the best start to a game - load up with fuel, roll down the runway, die in flames, but it's easy enough to get around with a little creative thinking.

Finally airborne, and battle commences. Jihad plays a little faster than Falcon Patrol, although not as cruelly fast as visual assaults like Datastorm! Still, head on attacks often end up with mid-air collisions and both your plane and your opponent's falling from the sky into the dust, or sometimes the side of one of those Iraqi pyramids you hear so much about.

An infinite supply of missiles lowers the difficulty level a little, allowing you to fill the air ahead of you with them in exactly the way that Falcon Patrol did not. The speed and wide-sweeping attack patterns of the enemy fighters on later levels make sure that the game stays challenging and impossible to beat by cheesy moves like flying in a straight line spamming missiles ahead of you.

Bonus stages where you take the fight to the enemy's fleet break up the desert dog-fighting. Chances are good that by the time you've reached the first bonus stage you'll be on your last life, and thankfully if you die in the bonus level it doesn't count, so you can live to die on the next stage of the game.

Now, I'm a sucker for side scrollers with radar displays in the bottom centre of the screen, but I can't let this particular one off without airing a couple of grievances. I might have made light of it but getting killed a handful of seconds into the first stage gets old pretty fast. It's a bit of a sneaky move to have your base bombed as you're trying to get off the ground and especially on the harder Saddam Hussein setting it goes a long way to ensuring that you won't get very far. Then again, there's nothing like a game with a steep learning curve to challenge a player. Sadly, there's also nothing like a game with a steep learning curve to put a player off.

My second and only other problem with the game is a distinctly minor one. When the enemy fighters fire missiles at you they make the same sound as the bombs they drop. It bugs me.

So get up there, but keep an eye out for those early-in-the-game bombs!