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I was really glad to get this CodeMasters game. A quick inspection of the inlay brought back memories of Trizons, a game we reviewed not too long ago. But when the Ed also gave me a packet of aspirins, I got a suspicious feeling.

The blurb tells you about the Galactic Patrol which is working on the XT/99, a new breed of fighter-reconnaisance ship. 112 years later, it's possible for you to check out their handiwork just by pressing the fire button. Only three pre-production models have been built and they all have shields and the ability to fire rapidly - so what's new?

The test has you out in space, shooting a load of wandering aliens, in the hope that it you blast enough you'll get on to the next testing zone. Your shield gets worm out every time you come into contact with one of the aliens or (later on in different zones) some lumps of what look like alien doo dahs.

These DD's ricochet all over the place and the whole thing gets a bit absurd when you face this massive doo dah attack on level four.

My problem is that I can't really tell you anything interesting about Danger zone - except that it sounds a bit like a game based on a recent song? The graphics are not too bad and the aliens were the only characters that didn't move smoothly. Still, they're quite nice to look at. The colours chosen were adequate but I would have liked to have seen more being used.

The jingles and sound effects were done by a certain David Whittaker I thought there could have been more - there was some empty space in memory.

Now for some boasting, this is the quickest game I've managed to hack - about 30 seconds. So to celebrate I'm doing a CU first. I'm going to give you a POKE that gets you to the last of the twenty zones.

First load the game and reset the computer. Then type POKE 6033,255 and hit Return. Then type SYS 4112 and press Return. And now get rid of those aliens.

Now the bad news, when you make it to the end, nothing special happens - you just go back to the start. The only thing that seemed fun to me was when I had the energy on full, holding down the Fire button sends a continuous stream of bullets.

A disappointing game.