Faster than light

For those who have never played arcade Defender - or the BBC Micro version Planetoid - the game goes like this: You pilot a spaceship which bears an uncanny resemblance to a Nike training shoe on a mission to protect Earth from swarms of invading landers which drop down trying to capture little men - neatly dressed in green shirts and blue trousers.

If they succeed and take one of the little men up to the top of the screen they turn into mutants and very aggressive little beasts they are too.

You have some defence though: You can shoot with a fonvard gun/laser, run away, jump into hyperspace or kill everything on screen using a smart bomb. Points are gained for destroying the enemy and for returning captured men to the ground. After 10,000 points you get an extra life and another smart bomb.

If you liked Defender, or any of its clones, this version will not disappoint you. It is fast - too fast for me! - and smooth. It has a pause facility and redefinable keys so that when the Return key is ruined by the hammering it gets from your trigger finger you can still play the game. There is a high score table and the sound is optional.

There are 99 different levels and at higher levels the number of monsters increases - I have counted 50 objects moving on the screen at one time with no perceptible slowing down of the action. The sprites - created using Minerva's own soon-to-be-released Atelier - are clear and move smoothly with both colour and shade used to very good effect, although some are a little small.

But what makes this game is the sound: Lucas Fowler, B.J. Stearne and Merlyn Kline have either a very good sense of humour or a very weird sense of relevant sounds. If you manage to shoot a lander which has captured a man you are greeted by the sound of a falling piano.

When the Nike trainer gets destroyed the resulting explosion has the same tonal quality of a banger going off inside an empty baked bean tin. While if you foolishly allow a lander to change into a mutant it rushes at your ship like a pair of fighting cats.

My 12-year-old daughter has fast reactions and nimble fingers, and her squeals of delight pay tribute to the enjoyment that this game's sound effects can give.

I only have one complaint, and that is not with any aspect of the software but with the time taken for it to load - it takes well over a minute before the spacebar can be pressed to start the action. When I first booted the disc I thought that there was something wrong.

The disc drive seemed to make several attempts to load before finally presenting the opening titles. Minerva says that this is due to the large amount of code which has to be loaded - more than 500k of sprite and sound data - and not to the copy protection system.

This high quality product is an excellent example of avery well-known game that you either love or hate. I think that lots

Peter Blenkinsop