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Earlier this year the CPC world went wild over a game called Zap 'T' Balls, which was odd, because basically it was just a pale imitation of Pang with most of the more interesting ideas left out. Sure, Zap looked gorgeous, but it didn't have a fraction of the playability.

Pang is based on a simple concept which has been cleverly adapted, intriguingly built on, entertainingly expanded and generally metamorphosed into a game that's more addictive than chocolate hob-nobs. It's also one of those games that sounds completely naff when you try to explain it on paper, so don't let the next bit put you off.

There are these bubbles, you see... yeah, okay, not a promising start, but bear with me. You've got to burst all the bubbles on each screen to progress to the next one. You do this by ordering about some bloke who looks like a reject from a Manga comic and is armed with a weapon that, get this, creates walls. And if a bubble bounces into these walls it blows up, right? Wrong - it disintegrates into loads of smaller bubbles. The only bubbles you can actually obliterate completely are the smallest ones. And if that wasn't bad enough, you can only build one wall at a time and they vanish either after a few seconds, or if a bubble hits them. And if any of the bubbles hit you, say bye bye to a precious life.

To complicate matters further there are platforms which make the bubbles ricochet around the screen like it's party time on the Dodgems and birds which temporarily disable your gun if they fly into you. But it's not all bad news. There are loads of power-ups which which do things like freeze all the bubbles for a few seconds, turn your weapon into a machine gun or allow you to create two walls at once.

Each screen has its own unique layout and background graphics to keep the game fresh. Admittedly the graphics aren't gob-smacking, but they're still better than average, even if the bubbles do look a bit solid.

Pang is in the "one more go" category of computer games. It's packed with details, power-ups and dangers that keep the gameplay fresh. And on cartridge, when you can get it up and running in mere seconds, it's almost impossible *not* to load up when you've got a spare few minutes.