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There is a devil allocated to games' reviewers who takes a diabolical delight in fulfi lling their heartfelt wishes.

When faced with the tenth shoot-em-up in three months, yours truly uttered a prayer for something different. Novel, even. It's not easy fi nding a snappy line for the same thing 10 times.

Well, my wish was granted. Impossaball happened.

The devilish thing about it is that it's a little difficult to describe.

You've no doubt seen Marble Madness and others of that ilk where rotund devices (balls) roll about a surreal landscape, avoiding trouble and placing great demands on the ballistic skills and joysticular dexterity of' the player. Impossaball isn't that.

You might even have seen the variants where the ball bounces instead of rolls, and bidden planes mask the worst excesses of the programmer's imagination. Well, Impossaball isn't that either.

It's a bit of a mixture of the two, but with a lot of originality too.

The game opens on a checkerboard top and bottom with a helping of parallax, and the Bouncing Ball amidships. To the right are a pair of ladder-like objects. These are the starting gates.

Joystick control is simple enough - push the stick. forward and the ball moves away from you along the checkerboard. Pull the stick back, and the ball comes back towards you. Left, and the ball moves left. Vice versa for right. Pressing fire makes the ball bounce higher.

Guiding the ball past the starting gate gets the fun underway. At the bottom of the screen are three numbers. The first is the number of cylinders left - we'll come back to that in a minute. The second is the score, which increases as you move to the right. The last is the time in seconds left to go.

From the roof and floor of the alleyway grow a variety ofthings. The first to look for are the cylinders. The idea behind the game is to bash these with your ball (psychologists into symbolism won't be detained for more than a few seconds by this) until they retract into the surface.

To make them do this, you must bounce the ball off their ends. There are so many cylinders per floor: to reach the end of a floor and claim any bonus that might await you have to clear the lot.

Trouble is the spiky things. These grow from the floor and roof too, but have this nasty habit of puncturing yer ball. At first. they are just a bit of a bother, making you bounce a bit higher or a bit later. A bit farther down the floor they become a serious hazard as they cluster about the cylinders.

Then they get really nasty. After the first six cylinders, you will no doubt have picked up the technique of positioning the ball beneath a cylinder and bouncing up.

This is not terribly useful when there's a spiky thing just where you want to bounce, so you have to catch the end of your chosen column on the fly.

And just when that seems a little less than impossible, along come the Wandering Spiky Things (the computer journalist's vocabulary is truly remarkable). And these wreak real havoc.

Just remember the old maxim. "If you can't think of three hundred different combinations of spikes and cylinders, you haven't played Impossaball".

Some games make me perk up. Some make me yawn. This one made me yawn. But then I had been playing it at three ayem

There's something about this particular combination of simplistic, surreal graphics and gradually increasing complexity of play that I'm an absolute sucker for. Definitely the pick of the month for me.

To be played with high volume Tangerine Dream via headphones. Yum!

We often argue at ACU, usually about how good a game is or isn't and who is going to wash the cups. We rarely argue about who is going to keep a game after it is reviewed. Impossaball is an exception. We all wanted it.

How does Hewson do it? It must be the best software house around. True, much of the brilliance only shows on the Crumbodore 64, but with John Phillips on the CPC they are showing true colours. The best game yet for 1987.

Parallax scrolls have always impressed me so with Impossaball it was love at first sight. The control you have over the ball is excellent and the shadow helps you know where you are.

If I really want to find fault then the colours are a bit bland and the ball could've been shaded but that is nit-picking. Perhaps I'm just miffed because Liz got to keep the tape.