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It must be quite difficult to write a home version of an arcade game; so many of the games players will have seen the arcade original, that the task of copying has to be performed with care.

Defend Or Die is quite clearly a Defender clone with the name changed to protect the guilty. However, Alligata should be safe from an Atari lawsuit, if Acornsoft can get away with Planetoids and Alligata with Guardian then Defend Or Die should be OK.

When Defender was first launched as a coin-operated machine it was slated by the industry for being too complex and the author, Eugene Jarvis, was accused of having too many controls. However it sold well and must rival such video greats as Pac-man and Space Invaders in terms of takings. The reason for this is that Defender is the kind of game which you play by instinct. Your eyes have to be everywhere to control the up, down, thrust, fire, hyperspace, reverse and smart bomb, making split second decisions over which alien to shoot or if a situation is survivable. Watching the score to see if you can afford to waste a smart bomb or if you should commit suicide to save the planet. Defender is complicated but it is fun to play. When you have tired of ladders and platforms games or eating dots you will probably return to this kind of game.

With such a pedigree it is hard for Defend Or Die to be a perfect clone: for starters, the original has 256 colours. However the spirit of the game is more important. The tactics are what count.

Perhaps the greatest discrepancy is the behaviour of the pods. These are harmless little aliens which once shot release a mass of very nasty red baddies called swarmers. The Defend Or Die pods are opened by a smart bomb but the swarmers are not destroyed as they should be. This reduces the need to save smart bombs until the beginning of the next sheet. If you open pods one at a time the swarmers make a bee-line for you. This makes them too easy to pick off. These may be signs that the programmer has not spent long enough playing Defender.

There are several oddities in the program, some might call them bugs. If you hyperspace whilst firing, the program seems to lose track of the ships position and the shots wrap around the screen. It is also possible to fly off one end of the screen and reappear on the other side. A feat certainly not possible in Defender. Your shots stop as soon as they hit something, be it an alien, a bullet or a bonus score. This can make it dangerous for you to fly low shooting like a mad thing, an essential Defender tactic. It is necessary for you to be a short distance away from the alien before you can blow it up. If you are too close you can blast to your heart's content and the alien will stand and take it.

None of these 'bugs' detract from the playability of the game, it is still a fine program. The scrolling is smooth, the sprites fast and the explosions magnificent. The sound is reasonable, even if it does cut out at unexpected times. Perhaps I have spent too much time reviewing Defender clones and have become too fussy. The best around is probably Alligata's Guardian for the Beeb. Given the CPC464's superior graphics and memory it is a shame that they could not top it. Defend Or Die is both fun and addictive. I know I will return to it when I feel the need to blast something.