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When a software company like Ocean pays good money for the licence to a load of rubber balls, then things are surely getting desperate.

The balls in question are Mad, and they're not really balls so much as disembodied heads, with protruding tongues, bulging red-veined eyes, horns, warts, scars and fands. They've got cheerful names like Slobulus and Swine Sucker, and appear occasionally on children's TV when the adults are safely out of the way. A spokesperson for Ocean described them as 'pretty gross'.

On the computer screen, however, they're about as stomach-churning as Bobby Bearing with a hare-lip. They inhabit a world of pavements, dustbins and gym equipment known as the planet Orb, and they spend most of their meaningful lives trying to bounce each other off the walkways and into the net which is suspended below.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the programmers who've been given the thankless task of somehow making a game out of all this are Denton Designs. They've succeeded in producing something that is so well presented and playable that you almost forget how stupid the whole thing is.

For starters, the Dentons have opted for a novel overhead view of the action, so that instead of watching the balls bounce along from the side, what you see are balls which get bigger as they bounce high, and smaller as they fall back to earth.

This is a bit weird at first, and after an hour or two it can do strange things to your eyes, but overall it works very well, and the effect can be quite startling, especially when a ball zoones off a trampoline for an extra high bounce.

Once you've orientated yourself, you can get down to the serious business of mugging other balls and exploring the tricky terrain. To begin with, you're controlling one particular Mad Ball called Dust Brain, who sets out to find the seven other Mad Balls, and recruit them into his gang by knocking them into the goal nets.

The maze of paved paths is riddled with holes and chasms, and there are dustbins, pyramids, catapults, springboards, rubber tyres and eggs to bounce over or onto, all accompanied by suitable sound effects. Bouncing over this obstacle course would be bad enough unmolested, but as it is, your progress is usually hindered by unfriendly balls trying to spin you off the path.

You'll soon discover that most of the attacking balls aren't Mad at all, but featureless balls called 'bureaucrats'. Booting them into goal scores a few brownie points but otherwise doesn't get you very far. Every time you mug a genuine Mad Ball, however, he rolls down a tube to join any others you've captured, bobbing up and down patiently in a window below the playing screen.

Each Mad Ball has its own peculiar characteristics - Screemin' Meenie is a super-fast weakling on a strict coke diet, while the slower-moving Slobulus is much stronger and dines only on cabbages. This adds an important strategy element to what is mostly a joystick-busting arcade game, allowing you to swap the ball you're playing with for a captured ball which is better suited to the environment and the scattered food supplies. So Dust Brain can be exchanged for another by dropping him down an open dustbin to join the captured Mad Balls, knocking the last in line out of the tube and back into play again.

A lot of attention to detail has been lavished on this staggeringly mindless game, which is crammed full of nice touches, like the clang as you bounce onto a dustbin lid, and the tiny click which scampers around frantically, just after you've released it from its egg, and just before you stomp on it. Keyboard and joystick control is responsive and realistic, simulating very well the unpredictable rebounds and bounces.

I can't remember the last time I had so much fun bouncing severed heads in and out of dustbins.