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A touch of the ™'s here, this has to be an American game. Quote (and in alphabetical order too!) from the packaging "Ancients, Autotronic, Blatarian, Dromodite, Koronis Rift, New Federation, Psytek 7500 series Science Droid System Analyzer, Repo-Tech Robot, Scavanger Mk IV Modular Planetary Surface Rover, Tseweueme, Xendrons and all other elements of the Koronis Rift game fantasy are trademarks of Lucasfilms Ltd. All rights reserved". It leaves you wondering whether George Lucas and his pals will go one further and eventually conquer space with all these objects. trailing ™ symbols after them!

Still, on with the review. You are a techno-scavenger searching for the valuable technologies left by the men that have gone before. (Kirk out) Eventually you stumble across the legendary Koronis Rift (aaaaahhh...), which is the hiding place of technologies beyond your wildest dreams - though who dreams of technologies, that's what I'd like to know. The rift, however, is guarded by 'guardian saucers', which has a nasty tendency to blow you away a bit if you're caught looting the other spaceships.

This is a pretty mega game. After loading side one of the tape you're shown the interior of your spaceship. And quite comfy it is too! Suddenly a rolling test card appears in each of the five monitors in turn, and gradually the horizontal hold is adjusted so that the displays are still. A nice touch - I wonder how much programming went into that! Then it's time to load side two.

One of the monitors now displays the location of the nearest spaceship, so you can use the ship's motors to move towards it. As soon as you're in range you can send out your RT robot to do your dirty work for you. Once it returns you can add the module it brings back to your ship's own circuits, then return to your scoutship to analyse your finds. The circuits are analysed by a robot. though you have to unload them from your scoutship and put them on a conveyer belt. The robot does the rest, acting on instructions from you.

Now two things can be done with the gathered circuits. The first is to scrap them, 'cos if you do this you get a score. The second is to add them into one of the six circuit locations of your ship and thereby improve the abilities of your weapons and scanning equipment. By the way, avoid doing what I did in a rush to escape from a guardian saucer, which was to quickly fit a new heavy duty battery circuit into the slot that held the weapons and shielding circuit, thus leaving me without guns and protection. A sitting duck. (Quack!)

From the scout ship you can return to the current rift level, load the next rift or even skip a rift and start loading the next but one. So you should be able to make it up to rift 20 to destroy the source of the guardian saucers pretty quickly. (Me, I didn't get past rift three, but that's my problem!) Once destroyed, you can raid the entire rift without disturbances.

This is an excellent game. Obviously a huge amount of work has gone into the plot and graphics. The rifts are made with fractals and are fast and detailed, giving the game a fair sized shot of realism. The documentation isn't too complex, but there's a lot you have to plough through to get enough information to play the game. It is joystick compatible, but the joystick only controls the shoot 'em up part of the game, the rest being controlled from the keyboard.

So, only one thing remains to say - you'd better buy this game or else Lucasfilm may well trademark the Earth™ and its Entire Contents™ including you™!