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It seems that whenever a programmer comes up with an abstract game involving marbles and chessboards, the software house has to dress it up in some infantile space-age garbage. Is this because they consider Joe Public too bloody thick to understand a game concept unless it's explained in terms of strange planets and galactic spacecraft?

The instructions for Pile Up could have been written on the back of a matchbox, but the cassette inlay witters on endlessly about the energy crisis of the distant future, power stations and marble pilots. A load of tosh that boils down to this: Collect the balls from the chequerboard with your jet-propelled craft, steer between the rising columns, and deposit them at the transformer station where your score is registered.

A game as obvious fatuous as this isn't going to burn up the charts unless it's (a) great fun; (b) horribly difficult, or preferably (c) both. With Pile-Up, it's (b) only, the challenge resting entirely on your ability to control the joystick. The faster your craft flies, the more difficult it is to control, and the more difficult it is to control, and the more it crashes into floor, ceiling and columns.

The chequerboard is a 16 x 16 grid, seen in perspective 3D along its longest diagonal. On some of the squares are black marbles, and as these squares rise the marbles change colour, turning gradually from black to white to blue and, eventually, to red, when the square is at its highest point.

The instruction panel below issues you with your orders for each level. On level one you must collect all the white marbles, each worth 100 energy points. On level two you move on to the dark blue marbles, which are worth less and, being higher, are more difficult to pick up. And so it goes until you reach level seven, where the red marbles are so close to the ceiling that you can scarcely reach them.

Your craft moves swiftly - too swiftly - across this scrolling area, bouncing off every surface, using up its energy rapidly. The trick is to move it at a snail's pace, giving yourself plenty of time to avoid obstacles and home-in on the marbles. There's no limit, and as the game is over only when your energy runs out. The slower you move, the longer you play.

Like the inlay instructions, the on-screen dashboard is designed to make the game seem more complex than it really is. More of the digital displays you can safely ignore, especially the 'numerical values of the x,y,z speed coordinated', and concentrate instead on those which tell you how much energy you've got left, and how much you've collected. Also crucial is the tiny overhead scanner which shows your position relative to the square which you're above.

Collecting a marble requires some very precise manoeuvring, as you hover over it, watching the scanner, nudging your stick slightly until you're exactly on top of the ball. Once collected, the marble makes the craft heavier and sluggish, and you'll need to keep it afloat by constantly hitting the fire button on your way to the transformer station.

You don't get much help in all this. To one side of the chequerboard is a cafe where you can rest awhile, and next to it is a service area, where your craft can replenish some spent energy by drawing on the reserves it has already accumulated. But this is hardly worthwhile - you can lose more energy getting to the service area than you're likely to gain.

Other than being stupidly frustrating, there's no much in Pile-Up to recommend it. Graphics and sound are nothing to write home about, although I did like the title screen being part of the scrolling playing are, so that every time you fly over it you get a quick burst of the opening tune (an authentic reproduction of an inept guitarist tuning up in a squash court).

That's Pile-Up then. A very demanding and very expensive game that's not much fun to play and will appeal to only a few. Oi'll give it four.