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The time: the future. The place: Earth, weak and unprotected. The situation: the evil King Crimson, despicable despot and one-time ruler of our world, has returned, not to spread peace and love, but to conquer, crush and generally make a nuisance of himself. He uses telepathy to hold sway over a massive bio-mechanical army, with which he has levelled most of Earth's major cities, and a few not-so-major ones just for good measure.

However, a few brace souls have stood up to the menace, forming the Midnight Resistance, but one by one they have been cut down, shot and blown away by Crimson's relentless forces (everybody still with me?).

Two brothers have managed to survive this on-slaught, and have headed north to face and defeat the onrushing cyborg armies. What all this really means is one heck of an excuse for some serious shootin' fun, with one or two players running and leaping along nine levels of horizontal and vertical scrolling action, blasting the bad guys and collecting the keys that they drop.

At the end of each level, these can be traded in for more health, bigger and better weapons and more ammo, before moving on to confront the next band of death-dealing psychos, and eventually the chief scumbag, King Crimson himself.

I quite enjoyed the original Data East coin-op and was quite looking forward to the conversion, but wondered how the coin-op's gun rotation could would be transferred to joystick.

Unfortunately, my fears have been confirmed and the twist-stick control doesn't really work on a joystick, making control overly difficult, and so playability suffers. For example, when you want to fire up, you end up jumping into the path of an enemy bullet, and after several such "accidents", you feel like feeding the joystick to the goldfish.

The graphics are good, and capture the feel of the arcade machine, and the music and sound effects are good, but the pan-pipe tune doesn't quite fit the game somehow. But, in spite of its flaws, Midnight Resistance has that little bit of extra oomph to put it above many similar shoot-'em-ups.

Overall, a nice game that would definitely appeal to fans of the coin-op, but falls at the last hurdle due to the rather unforgiving controls.