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Creepers is the first game from the Virgin stable I've played but it's yet another variation on the "shoot them down" principle.

The objective is simple: protect your own interests i.e. stay alive. The aliens are dropping down to pinch your energy blocks, and you have to zap them if you can, before your energy runs out, and before they zap you.

To play the game is really just a question of finding the right spot to rest your fighter, and to keep pressing the fire button. The game features both joystick and keyboard controls, so you can choose. The choice of the particular keys is strange, and not one that I've seen before: U - Up, Spacebar - Down, H - Left, K - Right and RUN/STOP - Fire. A little bit awkward, and for a change I preferred the joystick.

You appear on the left-hand side of the screen, in your fighter, and can point left or right and up or down. A cluster of inverted 'A's is hanging from the top of the screen to your right (A for Alien I suppose). Also on your right, but at the bottom are your energy clocks. These are what the 'A' drop off and pick up every so often.

If you keep firing, you seem to get most of them, but as there's little variety on this pattern of events, there doesn't seem a great deal of incentive to keep on playing.

What variety there is, is restricted to 'watchers' which appear every so often and bob up and down. This is described as taunting on the cover, but in fact can be avoided by staying put and firing away. There are also some movements going on behind you, which is why you can face backwards too. This movement doesn't seem especially harmful though.

The programmer writes, on the leaflet that comes with the program, that he would like to have a go at programming adventure games, and maybe this would give him a better opportunity than Creepers has to display his talents.

I'm not very impressed with this at all. The game seems to lack any motivation, and the absence of variety will probably send you to other pastures fairly quickly. The game is also spoilt by the way you can do nothing but fire away, moving about very occasionally and still seeming to get quite respectable scores. It's not that it's too easy, it's just far too dull.