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Get your strait jacket out of the wardrobe and start doing up the straps, matey. This psycho-blast from Tony Crowther turns your subconscious fears into laser fodder, and uses them to drive you completely crazy!

Phobia is a one- or two-player horizontally scrolling rescue mission set in the sort of solar system your mother always warned you about. Fifteen planets lie between your spaceship and your ultimate goal, the sun. That's where the Galactic Emperor is being held by Phobos, a chap who apparently doesn't like politicians.

To reach the sun and rescue the Emperor, you have to collect the nine pieces of a heat shield which are scattered throughout the system. Of course, you don't know exactly where.

Anticipating a rescue bid, Phobos has populated each planet with monsters taken from man's worst nightmares. The first planet you have to fly through is full of giant spiders which cast deadly webs across your path and spit venom bombs at your spaceship. Fortunately, dead spiders leave behind little gun icons which provide increasingly rapid firepower, air-to-ground missiles and speed-ups.

After you've plugged the mega-beastie at the end of this section, you're still only halfway through the first planet. The second half has you zipping through a tortuous maze of passages with an egg at the end. Shoot through the eggshell and a question mark appears, which, if you're lucky, is part of the heat shield.

Now this may sound like yer standard shoot-'em-up to you, but Phobia has one or two neat innovations. If you opt for one player mode, a press of the space bar gives your ship a double, which doubles your field of fire, but makes you a bigger target. If you do play with someone else, shooting the rear of his ship charges up his super-weapon, which launches up to three unstoppable missiles across the screen.

Phobia's most vaunted technical innovation is the use of colour switching techniques to display 32 colours on the C64 (which is only designed to provide 16). However, Tony does it, it's an effective trick which has been used to make the sprites and backdrops very pretty to look at as they scroll past.

Not that there's much chance to admire the scenery, though. Swarms of monsters appear from all angles, and even gamers with the most turbo-charged reactions will have their hands full dodging bullets and the scenery. The collision detection is often in your favour, but still the game is no picnic. After many a game spent trying to get through the first level my sanity was in serious jeopardy, but unfortunately I just couldn't drag myself away and now listen to me. Burble burble burble.

Apart from the lack of music, Phobia is superb - pretty graphics, extremely addictive blasting gameplay, even the multi-load isn't too intrusive. The best C64 blast since Armalyte.