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At the last count about twenty-seven people had explained to me, why it would never be possible to convert Uridium to the Spectrum.

I almost believed them. A mistake. Here is Uridium on the Spectrum and its a closer conversion than anyone could have ever dared hoped.

Uridium was No 1 game on the Commodore, and proved that, done correctly, there was photon power in the old zap 'em up yet.

More than life - freshness, excitement and exuberance.

The plot: destroy a giant space aircraft carrier (that's what it looks like), by first destroying all of its defensive forces - waves and waves of variously shaped ships that hurtle along its length. At the same time blast various gun emplacements, shields, blocks and other features built on the fuselage.

Now, aside from the problem of not being shot down by the increasingly vicious defensive ships there is another problem - it is very easy to hurtle straight into any one of a dozen or more obstacles on the ships surface. This causes you to explode into a ball of flames, generally a bad thing.

Actually, if you think about it, the above description would do for any one of a thousand arcade games. So what makes Uridium so special? Not easy to say but I think it's the slickness of the presentation and the speed and smoothness of the movement.

The only other program around at the moment to compete with it as far as making the Spectrum look like an arcade machine is Lightforce.

The sprites are elegant and sharply defined, the scrolling is very smooth (17 frames per second it says in the blurb) and virtually flickerless.

Maybe my favourite section to the whole game is the way your attack fighters turn in a tight corner - executing a perfect 90 degree roll combined with a half turn. And on later levels, you'll need to fly edge-on to swoop between narrow channels on the ship's surface.

What doesn't it have? Well it is mostly two-colour to prevent attribute problems and the sound is, well, limited.

Uridium is going to generate vast numbers of letters to our John Riglar pleading for infinite lives Pokes, tips and tricks. Things will get very het up and competitive - what does that all prove?

That Uridium is wonderful.

Label: Hewson Author: Dominic Robinson Price: £8.95 Joystick: various Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Graham Taylor

*****

Superb arcade game. Smoother faster, slicker and more challenging than almost everything else you can currently buy.