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This interesting little disk appeared in our office seemingly from nowhere. No fuss, no hype, nothing. Funny that, especially, when you think that this was one of the hottest coin-op licences of last year. You'd think it was blatantly obvious that Activision haven't bothered to promote this because it's not very good. Not true.

Galaxy Force is technically mindblowing. The most realistic 3D sprite-based graphics yet, combined with one of the largest cabinets ever to grace my local arcade - an entire pod. Not only did oyu see that very sharp right-hand bend in the corridor, you felt it too. If I was to tell you that Activision have got the game as close to the arcade version as they possibly could whilst retaining the speed, you'd say I was mad. If I then said it was even better than that, you'd take away my dog licence.

The idea behind the game is the same old song and dance everybody else uses. Some alien force has taken over a small system of planets, and you have to fly over each planet, killing everything you come across, and then fly down a tunnel network, killing everything you find down there until you reach the main reactor and destroy that too. Destroy all five planets and you live to tell the tale to all your disbelieving friends.

The only thing the programmers seem to have sacrificed is the amount of background objects. Rather than having a ground surface completely covered with interesting features such as waterfall and volcanos, you are now presented with a two tone scrolling plain, with ground objects dotted about sparingly. Everything else has been kept the same. All the enemies are there, including my personal favourite, a massive snake-like thing that looks like a piece of wavy carpet appearing from level three onward. Even the main ship is identical to the arcade.

The conversion plays brilliantly too. The weapons system is an upgraded form of the Afterburner missiles, only now you can look on to all the enemies on screen at once and fire a death-dealing volley of missiles with one click of the fire button. Can there by anything this satisfying?

The fact that there are only five levels, and that you can start on any one you want means that the fun might be a bit short lived, but at the moment I don't care - I'm too relieved!