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What a brilliant idea! No Ian Macaskill and Michael Fish, no snow at Easter, no wet summers, no late hurricane warnings. So there are you after several years in deep space, returning home looking forward to relaxing in perfectly adjusted temperatures only to find all the weather stations have *gone piggin' wrong*! I suppose you'll have to fly around the 24 weather stations and close them down before you can put your feet up. And that is Special FX's new game Firefly.

You begin on a grid, a sort of galactic chessboard, and move a figure into a square. This takes you into the first level, the idea being to work your way through the levels, and hence across the grid so you can trip the switch that shuts the whole thing down.

Shutting down each level is the core of the game. You pilot your ship around the various zones looking for power units. To shut each unit down you have to collect four pieces of, well 'cosmic snot' was how programmer Tony Pomfrett described it to me. Anyway, when you have a handkerchief full of it you can enter the unit and shut it down. Turning off the power is little more than an exercise in timing.

As you explore each level (a small map at the bottom of the screen shows you where you are) you'll have to use transporters to hop around various sections. To utilise these you have to succeed with another piece of deft timing. Your ship spins in the centre of a lot of green and red lights and you have to hit three green ones. Each time you hit a green light though, the ship spins quicker.

A mass of aliens dotted round the various systems will also sap this energy. Your only defence is a fairly puny ring of boomerang bullets which circle your ship. The only way to restore lost energy is to shoot the odd floating fish which passes every now and again. Hitting it and catching it causes the background structures to bleed blue droplets Wizball-style which can then be collected to top up that lost energy. It's a bit like cosmic Lucozade.

Once you succeed in shutting down the four power units you'll be taken back to the grid where you can move your figure another zone closer to the main switch.

Firefly takes its inspiration from an old game called Zone Ranger. Firefly is a particularly original game in its own way and has lots of ideas contained within it. The graphics (put together by Karen Davies) are colourful and detailed, the sound neat and effective whilst the little sub-games give it a diversity of interest that I found missing from something like Hunter's Moon which it resembles. In all, Firefly is a very polished package and it proves that Hysteria was no one-off.