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Great explosions! I thought to myself, when I first sat down to play Star Jammer on the Dragon. I ended up horribly disappointed with the game.

You are presented with a starship's viewscreen and various stars and objects float in front of you. Your gunsights are situated in the middle of the screen, and the object is to manoeuvre an alien ship into range of your lasers and zap it. But you must reach the next stargate in the galaxy before your energy levels run down.

Unfortunately I couldn't identify any stargates and don't think I ever managed to reach one!

The game is a version of Atari's Star Raiders game for the Atari 2600.

There were no instructions included with the cassette and play was largely by trial and error.

When I started the game, I found it almost impossible to identify the alien as they start off as small blobs identical to all the other blobs around them.

They rapidly get larger and larger until they exploded in a spectacular and colourful fashion. I was immediately awarded 50 points for doing absolutely nothing.

With my next life I manoeuvred the alien into range of my gunsights and blasted away. I was awarded another 50 points! As the game progressed, the greater number of aliens killed meant more points were awarded for each one reduced to cosmic dust.

If the alien isn't killed before it reaches a certain size, it grows until it fills nearly half the screen and explodes. These explosions are fantastic and although the program is written in Basic I feel it's a shame that the game doesn't match up the quality of the explosions.

The game is not helped by the impractical Dragon joystick. This doesn't have the usual self-centering feature and makes for very erractic manoeuvrability. It is available from Sussex-based Salamander software for the Dragon 32 at £7.95.