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Once upon a time, there lived a professor. Evil, warped and epitomising nastiness, he spent his days devising plans for the general debasement of mankind and you in particular. (I'm precising a bit here. For the full and bloodspattered details you'll have to see the blurb).

After a particularly beancurdling incident he decides to plug a recently-invented supercomputer into the National Grid and ruin everyone's day by making their microcomputers seize in mid-bitbash.

This couldn't be allowed to happen, of course. Think what it would do to the Amstrad share price, after all So a brave, intrepid, fearless and above all really stupid hero is called for.

If I were you I'd be a touch insulted, but you being you decide to bravely step forward and lay down your life for your National Grid.

You are issued with a helicopter, fitted with a 0.5 Whitte (oh, very good) computer and a few standard fixtures and fittings. Lasers, shields and all that jazz, if you must have it listed for the umpteenth time. And into the bowels of the supercomputer you helichop.

The fun starts immediately. Oodles of laser emplacements encrust the evil prof's pet.

There are also teleporters, which save you fuel, speed your journey and enable you to have a free zap at the ENCTS which have taken an instant dislike to you and your craft.

The ENCTS - Extremely Nasty Crawly Things - are a slight and unserious cover for a quick bout of bloodletting, just in case you got bored with the rest of the game.

The supercomputer's structure is mazey in extremis. There are the traditional things lying about, you have to get them, decide what to do with them and then find a way of doing it, all with no help from the game itself (or indeed the processes of logic).

Most of the game is free from the more rigorous application of reason or reasonableness, by the way..

The ultimate objective, the disabling of the monster mainframe, is accomplished with the help of an N-bomb that is hidden somewhere. Other things can be used to help, or can be transmuted into fuel or batteries for the laser.

You can always transmute an object that you'll need in the game, but don't expect to finish as there's no way to detransmute.

Controls throughout the game are joystick to move the helicopter and user-definable keys you can redefine at any point in the game) to use, pick up, drop or otherwise mangle the objects. There are also options to pause, check your time or top yourself.

This last option might well recommend itself to you in case you feel your sanity is ebbing away faster than your shield. There are occasions where you can get, trapped for good anyway, and these present a more legitimate use for the suicide button.

If you're particularly foolhardy you can speed things up by going into fast mode (shades of ZX81s), but don't expect to live too long.

If all the above seems a little disjointed, complicated and confusing, then you haven't seen FlySpy yet...

What did I do to deserve this? This game is manic! After perusing the instructions I thought I was confused. I was wrong. After playing the game I knew I was confused. After half an hour, I was dazed.

It's fast, colourful, messy and £1.99 worth of experience to be tried, especially after a frustratingly slow 3D game. The author, one Richard Aplin, is destined for great things, I can feel it in my water.

You can tell this is a budget game because they didn't want to fork out for a bigger inlay card. The text is so small I tried photocopying it larger, a magnifying glass and in the end resorted to squinting.

The graphics are brilliant. Smooth sprites, shading which gives a good metallic effect and a lot going on. It is strange. I either think this is an amazing game and underpriced or it is just another spritey game with good graphics but I can't decide.

Still, it's cheap. Buy it and decide for yourself.

Humm. odd. When you buy Flyspy you certainly get your moneysworth. The idea of tying points to fuel ensures that even if you do nuke the computer you will still want to play again and save the fuel to bump up your score.

Different objects weigh different amounts (a feature promised for Thrust II) which adds to the skill of flying your helicopter. A great budget game.