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I expected Firebird's latest to be a flashy arcade game. After all, Thrust II was pretty fine. Instead, what I got was a lot of weird metaphysical objects bouncing up and down in front of me.

The anti-hero of this piece - called Tubaruba incidentally - is an itinerant schoolboy who has smashed a school window, collect £50 to cover the repairs and form the basis for his end of term report.

Sounds fabulous doesn't it? But when I started to play the game I was treated to a flickery stick-insect of a schoolboy sprite and a group of performing tomatoes which bounce up and down on the screen so that more by luck than judgement you get to make your first £10.

Our schoolboy finds himself in some very psychedelic otherworlds. Was he on drugs? Was there some message in the graphics which I'd missed? The answer to those questions is no. Tubaruba is just another excuse for Firebird to release any old tat on its Silver label.

Worse - I found it difficult to get past the first three screens because those alien fruit take up most of the screen. The game's play logic was all to pot, and the player character couldn't seem to move into the main part of the screen without tripping over something!

Hugely disappointing Firebird release. There's infinitely more invention in the title than the game itself.