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Some games ideas are obvious... once someone else has thought of them! Programmer Michael Lee has combined Space Invaders with Centipede in a game that's great fun.

Motherships move across the top of the screen dropping aliens as they go, and these then proceed to zig-zag in familiar fashion, your job being to see them off before they get you.

You can only move across the base of the screen, and when this is set up there are various rocks scattered about for the aliens to bounce off when they start zig-zagging down. The first mothership appears and a line of aliens is dropped along the top of the screen unless you can shoot the ship first. You get a bonus for that depending on how far across the screen the ship has travelled; that's on top of the bonus of having no more aliens descend from it. The aliens themselves behave like caterpillar heads. They're not linked, and if you shoot one it immediately turns into a rock which takes two shots to destroy. The aliens can fire at you, and one annoying aspect is that you cannot destroy their fire with your own - hitting it with your own laser merely halts it temporarily. As the aliens tend to fire rapidly it pays to turn them into rocks as soon as you can.

You have three lives to help you cope with all this. You earn yourself a bonus each time you score 20,000 points, and a small bonus if you destroy a complete attack wave. Your other defence is to erect an Energiser Barrier around yourself, and you need this should an alien make it to ground level and be zipping towards you. Pressing SYMBOL SHIFT creates the barrier, which destroys any alien running into it. While it also deflects enemy fire it does the same to your own laser, so remember not to fire when the barrier is around you.

The game is fast-moving, and I couldn't detect much difference between the fastest and slowest speeds, while the sound is as satisfying as you can expect from the Spectrum.

While Galactic Warriors could soon become repetitive for your average player, it's aimed squarely at those who think repetitive alien-zapping is the only way to live.