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Why are aliens always so nasty? Why don't they just try to be friends instead of invading all the time? in R-Type the aliens are the evil Bydo Empire, and a more horrible race of aliens you couldn't hope to find.

The game starts, and you guide your R-9 fighter through the smoothly scrolling landscape in the tradition of the classic Scramble arcade game.

The aliens soon attack, keeping formation dependant on their type. You soon recognise one and predict its movement - although knowing when it is going to shoot doesn't necessarily make things any easier.

Shooting at them isn't just a matter of hitting the right button - in R-Type, the longer the fire button is held down determines how powerful the eventual shot will be. Firing a powerful energy bolt will kill several aliens at once.

Some dead aliens will leave a gem for you to collect. This is where the fun really starts. Picking up the gems will arm your ship with all sorts of exciting weapons. The first gem will give you The Force - a separate spaceship that will follow you, or attach itself to your front or rear, effectively doubling your firepower. Later gems will provide homing missiles to destroy enemy installations, reflection lasers that bounce around killing anything in their path and ground lasers which crawl over the surface.

When you have collected all these, and also have The Force flying next to you, every time you shoot the entire screen is taken up with enough firepower to destroy a small planet.

Somehow the aliens will always manage to get you, and when you get to the huge rotating ring of armed alien things, you'll need everything you can fire to stand a chance. If you survive the ring you will meet the most revolting alien you have ever seen. To kill this one you must... no, it's just too horrible to describe.

R-Type is based on the arcade game of the same name, and a darned good conversion it is too. At the start you are given five credits. Every time your game ends you can use one credit to continue from where you left off - an idea taken from the arcade version, and a stroke of genius.

The graphics are detailed Mode 1 and quite large, if not exactly colourful. The aliens look just so... well, alien. And the larger, multi-segmented ones move around very fast.

The programming is excellent, the gameplay is superb and with several stages to load from tape, R-Type will keep you busy for a long time.