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C64 owners who like to exercise their trigger fingers now and again will find plenty to keep them happy this month and at a low price too! Raskel and Vortron are two space shoot-'em-ups on the budget Budgie label. Whilst neither is particularly original, both are fun to play.

Raskel is a defender-type game without having to rescue any humanoids. You have to fly your craft over the surface of your planet trying to protect your power rail from hordes of invading aliens. The game is very fast and the strategy required is no deeper than the "if it moves, blast it" type. You do not get destroyed as such, but rather keep losing energy until it reaches zero and you lose a life.

This means that you can quite happily ram enemy craft if all else fails, but be warned, this does knock large amounts off your remaining energy. As a last resort, you have access to a smart bomb which will destroy everything on the screen. There are twenty waves of aliens to overcome.

Much slower, but requiring more skillful manoeuvring is Vortron. Here, you have to protect your planet from nine waves of invaders. The main difference between this and other shoot-'em-ups is that every time you fire, your blast is directed, not at the enemy, but straight towards your planet's central energy core. This means that you have to arrange things so that the invader is between you and the core. You can move around the screen at will but you bounce off the edges and fine joystick control is called for.

Points are scored according to how quickly you destroy the enemy wave and bonus points are available by colliding with certain mystery objects. On completion of a level, a "secret door" appears to take you to the next.

Neither of these games offer anything startlingly new, but they are cheap and cheerful and you will find yourself going back to them in order to while away the odd half hour. And that surely is all that you want and expect from a budget game.