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One of the best measures of a good arcade game is the crowd that builds up around you while you're playing it.

Every time I loaded Drop Zone from U.S. Gold, people gathered around me in the office and wanted to play it. Some of them even scored more than me, which meant I had to keep playing just one more time.

The object of the game is to protect the men on the planet from the invading aliens and return them one by one to the Dropzone where the landing pad is located.

As the press release admitted, the game comes out of the Defender mould. Instead of the usual space-ship, though, you have a Jetpac-type of character who shoots from the navel!

The 3D landscape looks like it was constructed from the pictures that the Mariner (or was it Voyager?) mission sent back. It's a Martian red, and it scrolls beautifully as you zoom around.

Not that you get much change to zoom around once the alien hordes catch sight of you. The explosion when they catch you is what the blurb calls a "volcano" - like an expensive firework - and had several of the onlookers asking me to get killed off so they could see it again!

Beneath the landscape is your "high speed scanning viewer" - a sort of radar on which you can see where the aliens are. I decided it's called "high speed" because, unless I looked at high speed, the aliens caught me while I was still taking the information in.

You need to sit close to the keyboard in order to make use of the cloak and strata bombs. Although you have unlimited fire-power, the cloak runs out quite quickly and you only get three bombs.

Score over 10,000 points and you get another life and another bomb. The cloak is replenished as you complete each level.

You'll need to exceed 10,000 to get in the hall of fame too, but it's worth the effort to see the colour display as you enter your initials.

If you're an arcade freak like me, you'll love Drop Zone. It will set you back £14.95 for the disc version or £9.95 for cassette, and you'll need at least 48K. I fail to see why the disc should cost £5 more, but the tape is worth it if you can stand the 10 minute wait while it loads.

Come to think of it, you might as well use the loading time to relax - life will be pretty hectic once Drop Zone is up and running.