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You know, once you've got your Maglux reinforced pressure suit on, screwed down the armoured visor on your Captain Nimmo reproduction space helmet, and hooked up the capillary hoses to your life support system, Saturn's quite a nice place. Of course, the weather is pretty awful, but the people are friendly enough, and terribly keen on sport. On one day of every Saturnian year, they invite every ethereal athlete this side of the Event Horizon to compete in a tournament starting on the first Purple Saturn Day and lasting until the 45th.

You begin the tournament with seven competitors of various species (Some of which will be familiar to Captain Blood fans). You can size up the competition by checking out a set of statistics relating to each competitor's agility, mental ability, aggression, size, eyesight and ability to travel through time. All the competitors are in a constant state of evolution, which means that, after every tournament, their statistics might change slightly. The results of the changes are stored to disk so no game will ever be quite the same as the last. Well, that's what the instructions say, but I reckon you'd have to be doing a hell of a lot of extensive playing to notice the difference. Nice thought though.

If you don't want to take on the rest of the universe straight away, you can start off by pitting your wits against the training droid, which puts up slightly less of a fight than the other competitors. Just click on an event planel, and after the machine pulls a pretty introductory screen off the disk, you're on your chosen playfield.

Ring Pursuit is a fast and furious 3D race through the rocky rings of Saturn. Basically, you score points by staying in front of the other guy, and slaloming around coloured markers. The longer you stay in front, the more points you get, but it's essential to pass around the markers on the correct side according to their colour. Also, the route through the rings is cluttered with asteroid fields of varying densities, and negotiating these at top speed is something even Han Solo would baulk at. Mouse control is fine, though, and the very fast 3D effect makes this the most exhilarating of the four events.

The format in which Tronic Slider is presented will be very familiar to anyone who's ever played Lucasfilm's Ball Blazer. You get a 3D view of a floating platform bearing solids pillars. Between the pillars float you and your opponent, both in laser-armed scooters, and an energy ball. Shoot the ball and it explodes into energy fragments which you collect to build up a score. This game has a time limit, and at the end of the match, whoever has been able to collect the most fragments is declared the winner. The gameplay is spiced up by the ability to bump into your opponent and knock the fragments he's collected back onto the playfield for you to pick up. This event is played at quite a pace, and again, the effect of moving in a 3D environment is very well done, but I would gripe that when the game really gets going, the rapid turning and bumping into pillars does get a little disorientating.

My favourite event was Brain Bowler, an ingenious combination of logic puzzle and (don't believe this if you don't want to) Breakout. You're presented with what looks like an electronic brain, split in half, with energy pulses cruising the network of wires, resistors, switches and chips. With your mouse, you control a ball which is fired at the various components to activate or deactivate them, allowing the pulses to reach your half of a central cortex before your opponent does the same on his side. At first, it looks incredibly complicated, but once you sit down and suss it out it becomes very compulsive and is one of the best blends of arcade action and head scratching that I've seen.

The last event, Time Jump, is far simpler. To propel your vessel through time, you must collect energy sparks to power a gravity catapult. These sparks whizz past you and by positioning your cursor over them and firing you can capture them, filling up a tension meter to show how far into the future you will be shot. After blasting three waves of sparks, you're fired into the void at tremendous speed, then through a dimensional gate, where you are shown a "mind-altering vision", which changes shape depending on how many sparks you caught. This is the least taxing of the games, but it's reasonable fun nonetheless. It's great strength lies in the marvellous, fast graphics which accompany the final journey, and it's nice to get a visual reward as well as mere numbers for once.

Purple Saturn Day is an excellent package, accomplished with all the graphical style and audio effectiveness of Exxos' other game Captain Blood. Not only is each game beautifully presented, they are all very playable, and there is such a variety that once you're hooked you'll be playing for weeks to come.