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Here's a game that will keep you spinning topsy turvily all over your TV screen.

No matter what I did in Looping, my light aircraft kept crashing tragically into buildings, balloons, bullets and the runway. The first thing to do with this game is learn the mastery of manoeuvring your little blue plane around the screen and the obstacles plonked in your path by the meanie minded programmer who devised this game.

What's so confusing is that the joystick controller used for directional movement of the plane seems back to front. You have to pull the knob down to make the plane fly upwards and vice versa, while you are watching the plane from a sideways-on view. And that's why I kept crashing! Still, others who grabbed the joystick fared better than me so there's hope for everybody.

On the screen you'll see a gantry with its rocket, the runway and radar followed by some strategically placed buildings. To start the game you must make your plane take off, fly a loop and fire to destruct the rocket positioned at the left hand side of the screen. All this, of course, occurs after you have selected your skill level. While you are looping the loop all over the screen you must also shoot down blue balloons which fly through the sky. These craftily float up from the ground ready for you to bump into them - if any do, your plane will disappear with a big bang.

With a bit of luck and a lot of skill, having blown up the rocket you must do another loop and fly to the right of the screen. On the far right hand side is a gate (but you can't see it at first) and this automatically opens when you destroy the rocket. You must navigate your plane, which incidentally sounds just like a radio controlled aeroplane, through the gate. Now this is a very tricky operation indeed but after a few attempts it gets easier, if that's any consolation. And here's the really infuriating part of the game.

Once safely through the gate you are suddenly confronted with a maze which you must fly through, and it's only possible to travel through it with precision flying. Your best course of action is to follow the path with the least number of tortuous twists and turns.

But even if you do master the navigational controls you are still not out of danger. There are green drops (on the higher skill levels) to dodge and twinkling monsters to shoot before you can make a timely exit from the pipe maze and enter the final phase of the game. First of all you pass into an outer room and you have to dodge or shoot the bouncing balls which appear all over the place. If you can do that you must try and dock your craft against the oblong right hand side of the inner wall. Once that's done, that's it, the game's over. And you start the game all over again...

Looping is difficult to play, and the Colecovision joysticks don't help matters. The actual object of the game in terms of addictive quality is not very clear, because there is no incentive to play again. The scenario is the same (except if you try the higher levels) on each level, and once you have docked your plane you just go right back to the beginning. As one colleague put it: There just aren't enough things to blow up in this game!" A bit morbid perhaps, but it's what is so often appealing in an arcade game.