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Well, who would have thought it? I never thought we'd see this official release - surely we all believed that a real Uridium, that classic C64 blaster would never appear on our machine, especially after Gary Partis produced that fast action clone Psycastria, which ought to have satisfied the Uridium fever out there.

So it was with some trepidation that I loaded the game and, although it is a good conversion, it isn't really "electric" enough. Perhaps there just isn't enough memory to copy games that work so well on other machines? It's certainly a fuller implementation than Psycastria was, with the addition of swirling fleets of enemy planes being an obvious extra. But as what cost? Well, it seems to have lost some of the graphic sparkle, certainly some speed and the pure base excitement that Partis' version had to excess.

The game, if you don't know it, involves horizontal scrolling landscape of giant spacecraft carriers. Your plan can flip left and right or up and down while the screen has to travel the length of each carrier, shooting stationary parts of the carrier, avoiding indestructable obstacles and trying hard to shoot down the enemy planes who have a nasty habit of taking you unawares.

Please don't get we wrong - this is still an excellent shoot-'em-up and there's lots of fun and excitement to be had. It just, somehow, isn't quite the Uridium that I dreamed of seeing on the Beeb. Still great to play though!

[Some very late news is that an Electron version is "in the pipeline, but we can't say when" so keep your fingers crossed, Elk users! - Ed]