The instructions invite you to "pilot a fighter across many types of alien terrain to laser anything that moves and bomb land installations" - an accurate description of the arcade game Scramble. Mission Alphatron resembles Scramble quite closely, although it has some interesting extra features.

Your spaceship flies horizontally along a tunnel which rolls from right to left. The joystick or cursor keys move the ship and the fire button projects a solid-looking laser beam from its nose. Considerable co-ordination is needed to operate the bomb control - the space-bar on the keyboard - as well as the joystick. Excellent sound effects accompany play.

A wide variety of mobile and stationary targets is provided. A continually dwindling fuel supply can be replenished by bombing alien fuel silos.

Graphics are not smooth, despite the claims on the cassette cover, but they are quite fast and consequently the slight flicker as they move is not particularly distracting.

There is one major bug: it is not possible to fire your laser through an explosion. Despite these minor flaws, Mission Alphatron is quite addictive - one of the better Memotech games released so far.

S.N.G.