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It seems almost an eon since this game first appeared on the Spectrum way back in early 1985. It was one of my favourites then, and was considered by many to be a minor classic.

The idea behind the game is devastatingly simple. The alien mothership has landed on Earth, and sits astride a long, straight, highway.

You control, with keys or joystick, a task force of five Vortans - mobile droids with more than a passing resemblance to Daleks - whose job it is to shunt the ultimate weapons system, the Lasertron, up the road until it can be detonated inside the mothership, itself at Zone Zero. Blocks and oil drums lie in your path, and a vast assortment of unpleasant foes advance towards you.

Your droids are armed with lasers, which can be fired in bursts, and which take a few seconds to recharge, although, not surprisingly, you haven't got all day to beat off the alien invasion.

Put like that, it all sounds little more than your average shooting party. What elevates it are the 3D graphics, the smooth manoeuvrability of the Vortan droids, and above all, the demands the game makes on your powers of quick, strategic, thinking. While it is possible for shoot-'em-up addicts to send their chief droid accelerating up the highway at speed, zapping rapidly to left and right, this won't get them, on the Lasertron, very far.

For a start, you can only control one Vortan at a time. While it scoots back and forth firing at encroaching nasties, the rest of its team ponderously pushes the Lasertron forward until it comes up against an immovable object. At this point you've got to figure out a way of removing the obstacle, always bearing in mind that in doing so, you might be allowing the task force to continue straigght into the path of a floating mine - one of the many balls of energy that criss-cross the road ahead.

Oil drums can't be destroyed, but they can be pushed, either by laser blasts or brute force, out of the way. You can also use them to hem in a mobile mine, thus rendering it harmless.

Only when the Vortan under your control is destroyed, by touching an alien or running into a lethal obstacle, does control switch to another in the task force - the last in line. When all five Vortans have been lost, the game ends and Earth presumably succumbs to the alien always ensuring that a replacement Vortan is on hand.

I tend to get my Vortan hugging the kerbside whenever possible, thus reducing the number of directions from which the enemy can attack. I've also found that several laser bursts off the screen can terminate any aliens which are lying in wait - to this extent the game is truly interactive.

Throughout the game the background graphics are impressive. The highway runs through crop plantations, buildings and over bridges and viaducts. Colour is restrained but effective (though you wouldn't lose much by playing it on a black and white TV), the sound effects are no more than what's required, and the title screen - itself quite a graphic achievement - plays some stunning music, with even a passable imitation of an electric slide guitar.

So what's wrong? Well, in converting the original game to run on the C64, the programmers have introduced some unavoidable glitches. Whenever there are too many moving sprites on screen, they tend to fragment or overrun each other. This fragmentation is only temporary; as the sprites move on they reappear.

Enough carping. Highway Encounter remains a seminal slice of programming, and the gameplay is still extremely challenging. If your brain's not completely rotted from too much mindless arcade fare, then you'll be irredeemably hooked.