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Up, down, to the right a bit, fire like crazy, up again and go left to avoid the flock of angry sheep. Your Falcon finally gets a serious blaster

Be honest now, for all the productive and creature things you can do with a machine like your Falcon, what you really want to do is blast aliens. All people go through periods of it, it's perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Llamazap provides the ideal outlet. It's fast, it's frantic, it's colourful, it's noisy, it's brilliant.

The action takes place over five worlds consisting of five levels each and it's a pure arcade game with all the power-ups, explosions and nasties intent on your death that that entails. Each level comes with its own backgrounds, sprites and tactical problems.

You control your choice of spaceship using Atari's new 21 button joypad for the Falcon - you can't play it without one. Get one from Atari for £29.99. Pressing the A or C button sends streams of bullets firing forward and the B button gives you extra turbo speed - this is pretty handy for running headlong into huge baddies and dying horribly.

To complete each level you have to zap all the enemies; sounds easy enough but the blighters don't particularly want to be shot at so they tend to fire back. You get extra points for completing levels with aplomb and saving any innocent creatures that happen to be wandering about. The levels are Defender-like, horizontally-scrolling and wrapping around. There's limited vertical movement too. Take too long on a level and little orb chaps appear and follow you about on a collision course. The longer you take the more of them appear, so getting on with the task in hand is vital. Complete a world and your progress is saved to disk so you can start on the next level straight away next time.

As soon as you start playing Llamazap you are struck by a certain twisted sense of humour. The nasties include killer sheep, homing cows and giant mutant fish from hell. There's a good reason for this, Llamazap was written by one Jeff Minter, a man of singular style and justifiably famous for stunning games like Llamatron and Defender 2. Llamazap continues the fine tradition of brain-busting playability and effects.

Llamazap runs on 1MByte Falcons and you can install it onto your hard drive. If you have more memory than that, it loads all the levels into RAM cutting out all the disk accessing. It runs in overscan on normal RGB monitors. The Falcon's 256 colour mode is used to good effect, it's wonderfully colourful and detailed. The sound is superb as well, with plenty of jazzy sampled effects and a groovy tracker tune blasting away at the same time.

The DSP chip is used to replay the sounds with good effect, it's one of the most sonically riotous games you're ever going to play. It's still short of the kind of sound the Falcon is ultimately capable of but it's still pretty groovy. Llamazap is also fast, no matter what's happening on-screen it stays swift and super-smooth. It really shows what the Falcon is capable of - simply wild games.

Not everybody's fanatical about shoot-'em-ups; wrestling with the controls of a spaceship plugging away at waves of aliens might not be your idea of nirvana - after all, it's not very mind expanding and won't help you on the path of spiritual righteousness. Fine, don't play them. If you do rate them, then you are in for a serious time. Llamazap is awash with gameplay. The controls are extremely responsive, and the levels look and play beautifully and it's heinously addictive.

Llamazap is not a game for wimps. If you are the sort of person who habitually bombs out on the first level of a game then you won't get very far. It needs lightning responses and dedication. Get into it and you're really in trouble. Time passes, people come and go, civilisations rise and fall. You sit transfixed, battling your way through another planet of strange creatures. Llamazap eats into all your waking hours and takes big chunks out of your sleeping time too.

If you've been waiting for a game to stretch your Falcon and your game-playing skills you can stop waiting. It's here, it's Llamazap.

You won't get far in Llamazap without getting a few optional extras bolted onto your ship. Blasting certain nasties releases little spinning llama tokens, picking them up enables you to select more power-ups, each one adds one to the selection. You buy the power-up using the numeric keypad on your new Falcon joypad. From fairly humble beginnings your ship can be transformed into a horribly beweaponed machine.

1. Change Ships
   There are different ships you can use to deal with the various levels. You can also flip to another ship when you've dented the present ship way beyond repair.
2. Speed Up
   Gives your create a zippiness boost, a must for the Condor.
3. Acid Rain
   This is the Phoenic, it unleashes a shower of nasty acid rain over the screen zapping everything for a short period.
4. Weights
   The special weapon on the Condor, a mass of heavy weights drops down the screen giving your opponents a hard time.
5. Insurance
   Just what you always wanted. Once bought if you get mangled and lose a life. Your new ship comes fully equipped with all the extras your previous ship had, A bonus every shoot-'em-up should have.
6. Lightning
   This gives the Falcon streaks of lightning flashing in four directions giving you the power to cause serious damage to anything that gets in the way.
7. Increase Firepower
   Boosts the destructive level of your weaponry. The Phoenix gets a hotter flamethrower, the Falcon a good scatter effect and the Condor gets more and meatier bullets. An absolute must.
8. Orb Two-Way Fire
   The Falcon's orb can be given a two-way gun firing little orange bullets, giving you a massive spread of fire power.
9. Slow Down
   Sometimes things are very fast and get a little too difficult to control, this slows things down a tad.
10. Shield
    This boosts your ship's shield to its absolute maximum.
11. Orb Laser
    The Phoenix can give its orb a devastating expanding ring laser weapon.
12. Orb
    This gives the Phoenix and the Falcon an indestructible orb that hovers close to your ship. Holding down the Fire button locks it into position. You can use it as a shield or as a nasty weapon. The Condor gets a rotating orb which constantly circles your ship. It can have up to four of these orbs.
13. Extra Life
    If you can resist buying all these goodies you can get an extra life by getting these three icons up on screen and flashing. The next token you pick up converts them into an extra life.

1. Fast, furious, colourful, loud and immensely playable. What more could you possibly ask for?

1. On the difficult side - only the very dedicated and skilled can complete it.