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Typhoon is one of those little-known arcade conversions Ocean tends to spring on the unsuspecting public, not in a blaze of publicity but rather overshadowed by the major licences.

Frankly, before now, I had never even heard of Typhooon the conversion, let alone the arcade machine. I like Afterburner and Flying Shark, and Typhoon is a mixture of both of them. Before you start getting hot flushes over the thought of an early version of Afterburner, it seems only fair to warn you that in the first stage you move left and the plane banks right and you're also driving straight for a battleship launching a flurry of air to battleship torpedoes from your seemingly limitless supply.

A few direct hits put paid to the incredibly bad marksmanship of the battleship's gunners. On the tape version that I was using, the time involved between the end of the first level and the second level proved sufficiently long for me to hammer my mate Tony Dillon five nil on Sega soccer, have a breather and wipe the sweat from the C64's joystick. The computer took me completely by surprise by giving me a mere three seconds to gather my wits before starting the second stage.

For some completely inane reason, which escapes me super-enlarged intelligence, your super sleek, mega-death, F-14 paddywacker had metamorphosed itself into a humble green helicopter, churning out torpedoes like they were going out of fashion. I did the decent thing, and was hammered by the first wave of jets to enter the screen. I proceeded to blast and maim (well fluke and jam) my way up the level until a very large and unpleasant battleship realised what I was doing and launched a salvo of eight homing missiles, globules of whatever battleships glob, and a number of jet fighters. Thirty seconds and five men later it finally sunk into me that trying to pick off every gun turret, missile and plane was pointless, but by then I had to use the very handy restart feature I used all my reserves of raw skill and bypassed the battleship straight into a squadron of hunter-killer submarines.

The music is fantastically catchy, leaving half the office running round humming it. Graphically the first stage is the best, the perspective used on the attacking enemy fighters is good and fast with it.

Typhoon is a respectable game though not really anything special.