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My Maths teacher used to bend my ear with Modern Algebra (revised edition) for copying my homework. So go stand in a corner Gary Partis, author of Psycastria, and do a million lines "I shall not copy other programmers". While Gary shivers outside the headmaster's door, I'll tell you his crime. He has copied Uridium, gulp.

Want to know what Psycastria is about, what it looks like, how it plays? Then go and read our Uridium review in last March's issue. March was a long time ago, couldn't he find something a little newer to crib?

To be fair (and why should I?), there are a few differences, but they don't alter the general feel of the game, they just make it a few warp factors more difficult. Unlike Uridium where your aim is simply to shoot your way through a mass of Polo mints to reach the end of each of the sixteen fortresses, in Psycastria, you have to blast ten energy cylinders along the way before you can land at the other end.

And then what? Just to be faithful to the original, Gary makes you go all the way back at a preset speed but this time you don't have to avoid all those carefully cribbed Uridium-like walls and telegraph poles. The idea is that you try to get extra points by pulling off any targets you missed the first time round.

Then you move to the next base. This one's a sea base - same style of graphics but different colour. Do the same thing here and move on to the next base, a moon base. Mightily similar graphics here but a few craters let you know you're not still at sea. And so it goes on. And, like Uridium, there's a blast interval between levels.

What's Psycastria got that Uridium hasn't? Well, it's got speech. It's got speech that can be turned off. It's got speech that's so annoyingly stupid, it has to be turned off. How about: "Ha, ha, ha, space sawdust" for banality? It's also much more difficult to play. On higher levels, walls don't just appear at intervals, they're built like a maze. Cunningly, Gary puts his energy cylinders in increasingly tricky places, like right next to a wall or down a cul de sac, very cunning that. And the weirdies are crazier, less predictable and give you less of a chance than England against Maradona.

I really should praise this game for smooth scrolling, good manoeuvrability, impressive graphics and nice music - but I won't. We said all that about Uridium, and Psycastria is little more than Uridium taken to extremes.

If you've already played and enjoyed Uridium, you probably won't get the same sustained thrills from Psycastria simply because you're now playing newer and more original games. So that'll teach you not to waste money on cheeky clones.

For those of you who missed out on Uridium, Psycastria is a much stiffer challenge, and it's one pound cheaper. But I'll bash you with my maths book if you go out and buy it.