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I've got to hold my hand up here and say I have never been a paper delivery boy. I never did a milk round either. I just couldn't face getting up that early. I spent my holidays rubbing down cars instead. And looking at the life a paperboy leads, I'm pretty glad. Elite's eagerly awaited conversion is pretty off-putting. It's a hazardous business delivering the news. But I suppose it is set in America.

Your job, for which you probably get paid peanuts is to deliver newspapers to subscribers who live in one of those nice white middle-class American suburbs. Just like the kind of area where directors set gruesome horror films like 'Friday the 13th' and 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' in which hordes of fresh faced teenagers are hideously butchered and mutilated. Are you sure you don't fancy staying safe and poor?

Don't say I didn't warn you. Fortunately you begin on a Monday which is comparatively quiet. Avoid any dangerous obstacles and lob the papers in the mailboxes. That's the game quite simply. I always feel well-disposed to games which are neat, original and don't feel it necessary to give you a load of old cobblers about the planet Zog trying to destroy the world.

As the game begins, you find yourself pedalling along at the bottom of the screen. Controlling the bike is easy, no dodgy reversed controls or complicated joystick waggling. Push forward to speed up, pull back to brake. Steer left and right. Delivery papers by hitting the fire-button. The rest is down to your own skill, speed and timing.

You'll know where to deliver because subscribers all seem to live in yellow houses and have delivery boxes marked 'Sun' on them. Not, of course, our beloved sizzling, soaraway, topless, fascist version, but The Daily Sun - in which your week's exploits are recorded.

You don't even have to get off the bike to deliver. Just a snap of the fire button as you whizz past will send a paper spinning towards the house. You don't have to hit the box, the door will do, but be warned if you miss, the rag's likely to go through the window (it must come with a cover-mounted brick) and the owners will cancel your subscription.

The other side of this is, if they do cancel, next time you go past you can break their windows, chuck one in the many bird baths that abound in this yuppie paradise and even bust the headstones that seem to be dotted around in this weirdo area. All these actions get you a bonus.

Presumably those gravestones that lie around mark the remains of past paper boys because you've got a pretty dangerous job there. You can't drive over drains, or up kerbs and there's plenty of railings in your path. To make matters worse, you're assailed by mad dogs, trendy skateboarders wearing Raybans, motor controlled toy cars, C5s and runaway tyres.

If that's not bad enough, there's a crazy on a chopper bike driving up and down the crossroads waiting to get you as you cycle past. And, worst of all, on Saturday Death will run out of the end house and have a go at you. Blimey! Fancy living nextdoor to death! Can you imagine nipping next door for a cuppa?

Negotiate that lot and you'd probably need a pack of tranquilizers and a padded room to recover in. But your boss in the corner newsagents isn't content with just putting you through this surburban assault course. Oh no, he's laid out a practice circuit for you to improve your skills on. Negotiate the obstacles and hit the targets with papers for a bonus.

At the end of the week you'll get a newspaper with banner headlines and a picture of you proclaiming, "Congratulations are in order". That assumes you stood a week at the job. If you lost all your subscribers you're simply confronted with the headline, "You're fired". Thank God for that, you say, and have a lie-in instead every morning, just like the Ed. [You're fired - Ed]

Paperboy is a great game. It's a change not to run across a screen and annihilate everything that moves. It's an original idea and a well-executed conversion. There are a few graphic bolts such as the car and the drab colours in the street, but the scrolling is great and the gameplay tenacious. It's just good fun whizzing in and out, firing volleys of papers through windows. This is increased by the sound effects of the breaking glass which pierce the otherwise irritating tune. The characters are nice and large as well so the whole thing isn't too hard on the eye.

Elite have delivered!