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A fairly simple, but quite addictive, arcade game, this one! As the "space guard" of the game's title, you control a spaceship under attack from various alien vessels determined to turn the screen into a mine field.

Points are scored by firing a laser at the alien vessels (150 points) or the mines they have deposited (50 points) with a bonus 1,000 points being awarded for each screen cleared.

Initially, the emphasis is on "space" rather than "guard", screen presentation being a little unimaginative and consisting of a large black space occupied by your ship and a few alien vessels. But with successive screens, more and more alien spacecraft appear, making the game increasingly difficult.

There are three different types of alien vessel resembling a traditional green space invader, a blue dumb-bell (this splits into two flashing "liquorice allsorts" when hit) and a pair of red lips!

Movement of the player's space ship is by keyboard or joystick. I didn't like using the keyboard because of the close grouping of the keys used to move the ship, but control by joystick was superb and the best I've encountered in any joystick game for the BBC machine.

The graphics are perhaps a little crude (Mode 2 is used for the screen display) but this is more than compensated by the speed of the machine code program and the good use of sound effects.