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The story goes like this: As Starmagon of the Empire Fleet, the player's task is to rid the space lanes of a group of pirates who are threatening the trading vessels. The pirates, who are based on the Black Planet, understandably feel contemptuous about attempts to deal with them - their planet has no sun, and is thus invisible (I'm not sure how well that ties in with currently established scientific thinking).

There is a way to detect their homeworld - all you have to do is to find the seven parts of the Key, which was broken up long ago, and hidden on seven different planets.

As with Quicksilva's Time Gate, the instructions for this game are so complex that they have to loaded as a separate program before the game proper is attempted - a printer is a great help here to save constant reloading of the instruction portion.

The instructions tell you about the special peculiarities of each planet, and the steps you will need to take to locate the key segment on each. Procedures for segment retrieval take the form of a mildly intellectual exercise - on one planet, for example, you have to outguess your opponent who is moving towards you on a sort of honeycomb grid.

You start the game with 30 crew members, and it's one of these - not you - that gets wiped out each time you make a mistake, which certainly mirrors real-life military behaviour.

At various stages your ship will be attacked in deep space by the pirates and you are equipped with weapons to deal with this eventuality - alternatively, of course, you can simply run away.

You have to make sure that your shield strength is sufficient to deal with the attackers, and you have navigational aids to enable you to land on the various planets.

This is the sort of game that's fascinating to play once or twice, but once you have managed to work out suitable methods of dealing with the obstacles on each planet, the enjoyment rapidly fades. I found this to be the case with Time Gate as well - it soon became extremely tedious.

This genre of games seems to equate quality with length - as long as the program takes an age to complete, it doesn't really matter if the constituent parts aren't up to much. This is a view to which I have never subscribed, but I may well be in a minority here - I know people who have been playing Time Gate for months and months!

If you fall into this category then The Black Planet is for you.