The terse by informative documentation for this complex and rather challenging game remarks that all the console memory is required - hardly surprising when one line alone consists of 107 REMs.

All the ingredients for an absorbing game are here - perhaps too many for comfort. Use of either the keyboard or a joystick for control is given, and the graphics are colourful.

The aim is to protect three 'humanoids' from a fate worse than death, occasioned by contact with an alien ship's mutative secret weapon, and the dice seem loaded heavily against your success.

You begin with an armada of three ships, and you can lose them by colliding with something, being shot by an alien, allowing an alien ship to get through to clobber a humanoid, allowing your engine to overheat, and being got at by a 'killer mine'.

There are also 'invisible craft' whose presence is announced, naturally enough, by a sound described as 'Boing,boing'.

P.R.