You have to feel for David Papworth. After providing Amiga Power with such great games as Super Obliteration, he answered our call for a Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine clone. Only that was a month after we'd already snapped up the mighty Super Foul Egg for our coverdisk. And a month before Amiga Format stole it for theirs. Tsk.

Having initially been sent an unplayable demo of the game, I was keen to get the opportunity to play Outfall and this month's PD provided me with just that. And while little has ignited this 22-year-old imagination of mine recently (but that's the effect PCs have, I guess), when I sat down to play Outfall for note-taking I soon found myself engrossed. Which is always a good sign.

If you've played Doctor Robotnik or Super Foul Egg, you'll already know that the aim of the game is to build a series of coloured balls (in a similar way to Tetris) together, with the fourth adjoining ball of the same colour causing all four to burst and other surrounding balls of the same colour to drop and merge. For each series of balls which burst, a boulder appears in your opponent's column which can cause obvious problems.

Because it's only natural to draw a comparison with Super Foul Egg, I shall. Outfall is not nearly as good as its predecessor for a number of reasons: the controls are 'sticky', the speed with which the balls drop rarely increases sufficiently to match the infectious trickery of Super Foul Egg (regardless of the difficulty setting), the sound is relatively poor and at no stage go you feel the urge to scream: "Taste my foul egg, you cur!" It's good, but not that good.