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According to the patchily translated inlay, your mission in Galactic Conqueror is to annihilate the enemies of peace throughout the galaxy. We're supposed to be peaceful then, are we? In that case the world in general would dearly love to know what those large lasers are for.

The idea is to defend a totally peaceful military base with totally harmless enormously dangerous lasers, is it? Great. Obviously being peaceful doesn't actually extend to not killing people.

Since everyone on Earth has forgotten how to be nasty to people, the impending threat of rebels with large things that go Bang! is taken seriously. Attempts to give flowers to the rebels have mostly failed. They kept the flowers. They even returned the couriers. In bits.

Some bored technicians just happened to have completed the utterly harmless ultimate fighter, Thunder Cloud II. This proves that even in the future, version ones seldom work. Everybody, in their nice peaceable way, has forgotten how to pilot spacecraft so you, as a power boat champion, have been chosen. Here it becomes obvious that this is a French game - such a daring piece of illogic could only be carried of with continental panache.

Rebel planets appear like zits on the galaxy map, and you can navigate your way to the planet using a faintly confusing crosshair system. After that, you're on your own, kid.

The view is rather cunningly placed behind your craft, as in that ever so popular game AfterBurner. And, just like in AfterBurner, you run into visibility problems when trying to see ahead - you get in the way.

We are talking advanced states of anger and resentment here. Various things fly and shoot at you. Missile silos launch missiles and mines try their very best to be in front of you.

Your job is to prove, with the aid of a megawatt laser, that being peaceful is much more fun than being nasty. The blue terrain must be the sea, as there is about as much scenery as there isn't in Milton Keynes.

Once a certain number of rebels have been dispatched to rest in peace there comes the next bit. This entails doing exactly the same as before, except you can do rolls, just like in AfterBurner. Yet again there's no scenery, but everything moves very fast.

Titus goes really all out on the third stage because even the blue bit that could be the sea is dispensed with, There is only space, the final frontier.

Once you've done the third bit, guess what? Yep, go back to the start and do it all again. The ennui is overpowering.

Galactic Conqueror is almost an AfterBurner clone. They share the same good traits - speed, speed, and er.. that's it - and the same bad ones - poor visibility, tedium, repetitiveness. There is nothing new or exciting here, which comes as a surprise after the definitely odd and clever Titan. All in all, it's a great cure for insomnia.