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Now here's a blast from the past! The Gridrunner games, by Jeff Minter, seemed to bypass the Acorn machines entirely, although they were released on every other format known to man. Heck, they even graced the (much less powerful) Commodore 16 and Vic-20 back in the day.

As you might expect from Jeff Minter, Matrix is a fast and furious shoot-'em-up game. In some ways it's a derivative of Centipede, in that you start off at the base of the screen, and a caterpillar-type thing starts at the top of it and comes wiggling down towards you, bouncing off the sides of the screen when it reaches them. However, Matrix is a much more manic blast than ever the most febrile Centipede clone. There are limpet guns running along the Y and X axis, and explosions that pepper the area whenever your bullet takes out a segment of the 'pede.

It's tempting to dismiss it as a mindless blasting game in which you'll be lucky to survive more than five minutes. It demands a greater degree of concentration than is humanly possible, in that it takes place in quite a cramped playing area, and being struck by a single bullet equals instant death. Now whilst you might be able to "live with" this level of difficulty, I frequently found that this conversion is even more unsporting than most. It seems that, when the limpet guns fire at you, the game checks for whether their beam will collide with you before it actually plots it on the screen. This results in the somewhat amusing spectacle of you successfully avoiding the 'pede, and all the potholes caused by your previous duels with it, only to unceremoniously self-destruct with the only visual clue as to what got you being that you were in the line of sight of one of those limpets!

If the 'pede reaches the bottom of the screen it breaks into pieces which come barrelling diagonally up the screen like super-charged pinballs, bouncing off all sides of the arena until you can pop underneath them and blast them. This elevates your stress levels to such an extent that, when you do get killed (which is often), you feel positively murderous as a result. Ho hum.

Is Matrix worth playing? Well, if you like grid-based shooters, sure. Personally though, I found it too hard to persevere with for long. Now that's not because you don't need real skill to progress in it. You absolutely do. Indeed, you need eyes in the back of your head to try and keep tabs on the bullet-hell that envelopes you from a few seconds in. The actual problem with Matrix is that, even if you've honed your skills to perfection, the game is complete chaos throughout. Yes, you might manage to beat level two if you're prepared to put in hours of work to hone-up those reactions, but you might just as easily say goodbye to the same level by fluke alone.

Often you also find yourself boxed into either the bottom row of the arena or one of the corners just before you get mercilessly shot to ribbons.

This is, of course, no criticism of the conversion. The same gameplay is present in the original C64 version, and all of the conversions for other 8-bit machines. There are very few manic shooters like this on the Beeb... so it fills an obvious gap just by being one.

No doubt there will be those who hate Matrix, those who like it and those who love it. And, considering there's absolutely nothing to it as far as backstory or scenario goes, there's not a lot more to even say. If the screenshots tickle your fancy or you've enjoyed any of Jeff Minter's shooter games on other formats, get it. If you haven't, try it. And if you don't like games that at least give you a sporting chance to win more than one level, steer clear!