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Bounce hungry arcade enthusiasts will have been drumming their keyboards restlessly at the complete lack of any decent Breakout style games on the Amiga. The clones which have appeared for it are all without exception pretty shabby copies of the original. Now you have your chance with this imported version of the Taito coin-op which revived it all in the first place. But at a price.

It strikes me as wholly unnecessary to describe the plot (the capsule warped in time somewhere bit) or the gameplay (knock bricks out) to anyone reading this. The game has appeared on just about every format and in every conceivable shape since it was released just over a year ago.

What might be of more use to perfectionists among you is to tell you just how close it is to the coin-op for your money.

To all intents and purposes, Discovery's version is arcade perfect. The graphics are as close as makes no difference and so is the sound. The most obvious difference is that you use the mouse. Now that's fine for some, but I always find the thing gets stuck at a crucial moment, and you end up watching the ball disappear past the bat. A bit like England's batsman facing Richard Hadlee. As a dedicated paddle user on the C64 version I would like to have seen the same concession.

Unlike the definitive Ocean version, you only get three lives on this one. You also have the option to control the speed of the ball by pressing keys 1-6. Quite why anyone would want any speed other than the natural one I'm not sure, since the game isn't as hard as the original, or the C64. The reason I say that is because you seem to get more bonus capsules than is usual. In particular there seem to be a plentiful supply of lasers, a bonus rarer than a good T'Pau record on Dave Collier's Commodore version. Cheats who don't like some of the first twenty screens can choose where they want to start as well.

What you have with Discovery's job on Ark is as good a version as you could ever expect to have on a home computer. Any criticisms are really only nit-picking. The one thing you don't have on it is an affordable price. You have to have money to burn to buy it. An obscene amount of money. It's also not easy to come by. Meanwhile C64 owners can revel in the fact that they possess a game that, bug'n all, is as good as the Amiga version, and nearly a quarter of the price.