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It's a nice idea and it certainly looks good on the outside. Take five wacky games and bundle them all together as a compilation. Give it a sporting theme a la Summer Games, only with an intergalactic angle and you've got something that shows a lot of promise. The problem is that, despite its weirdness and the funny chat which comes as part of the package Galactic Games hardly measure up to Olympic standards.

The first event on the program is the 100 metre slime in which you participate as a worm athlete. In each of the games, you take the form of an inhabitant from another planet, with the possible exception of this one as you must be the representative from Earth. The 100 metre slime works much the same way as the 100 metre anything else - you waggle joystick and the worms slime their way toward the finish line. There are a couple of intergalactic enhancements though.

You must lubricate your path with slime from the fire button to avoid overheating, if you don't the result could be spontaneous combustion. Should you fall behind pulling sideways on the joystick sends you on a 'superslither' - a quick way to gain groung on your opponents. The 100M slime is OK, but even the cute worms that wink at you won't keep you interested for much more than a few parsecs.

Event number two is space hockey, and I have to report that it's a lot more exciting on the ground. The game is played on what looks like my mum's red chequered tablecloth, she'll be furious when she finds out. The puck is a living creature which looks like one of those smiley things and the goals are black holes into which you can fall just as easily as the puck. The game is played just like those air hockey tables you used to get in amusement arcades, but isn't nearly such good fun.

Looking for something better I tried my hand at psychic judo, another zany idea that turns out to be fairly dull in practice. These being's brains are in their stomacks and they sort of attack each other with sychic burps and defend themselves with mental screens. Burps are like bolts of black gunge can can be thought-controlled like guided missiles. The left side of the screen shows player 1's view and the right, player 2's so you're viewing a tunnel from either end so to speak - a bit like Deactivators. As will all of the games the graphics, and just about everything else come to think of it, are pretty crude simple stuff. I got bored with burping at this other guy after about, ooh, three parsecs... give or take a couple of parsecs.

Now head throwing is a different ball game altogether. The Hrunton participants in the event have detachable heads. You head for the white line (like in the Earth sport javelin) using maximum joystick waggle to build up speed. At the critical moment (You must lose your head at all costs) you hit the fire button and hold it while the anglemeter approaches the 45 degree marker, then release it. the Hrunton's head departs from its shoulders and flies skywards. Now is the time to waggle the ears for extra lift, then, just before touchdown fire again to angle the head - if the nose fails to stick in the ground it's no throw. I particularly like the way the head then flies away pursued by the headless Hrunton's body. A good laugh, if a little short lived at five parsecs.

The metamorph marathon looked altogether excellent and in fact could have been Galactic Games' saving grace. In this event you control a creature capable of taking many different forms and must negotiate an obstacle course. The metamorph can turn itself from a pulsating blob into a runner with superfact legs, into a burrower, into a jumper, and finally into a flyer complete with helicopter blades. Sounds good, doesn't it? Trouble is, I'm as much in the dark as you because the damn thing wouldn't load. Zero parsecs of fun as far as this one's concerned.

All the same, on the basis of the four fifths I did see I'm sorry to say I couldn't even put Galactic Games in the bronze medal class. It's nicely presented and the introductions to the various games will make you laugh, but when you're paying full whack for a game, even a multi-load, multi-event one, you expect a little more and Galactic Games doesn't have it.