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Romulus is a complex game about debugging mega-chips at a futuristic Transputer Plant. That's why the cover shows two poorly-drawn space fighters blasting away at some rocks and tree stumps. Brilliant marketing, Quicksilva.

Besides having irrelevant and tacky packaging, Romulus - written by a Brian Aldriss fan calling himself Dee Zasta - also features some of the most incomprehensibl instructions I've come across: "Stop the circuits randomising on the chip generation unit... because the T-States you set will affect your progress when you are in the channel of the substrate." Que?

Well, you're not going to learn much by reading that, so the best thing is to load it up and get stuck in. After about an hour or two, you might just get the hang of what's going on. And, then, surprisingly, you'll find that Romulus is actually very rewarding and addictive.

The opening sequence is where you get to stop those circuits from randomising. It's a screen with flashing lights, rapidly changing numbers and some cryptic words - MTYPE, TIMSPO, T-HOLD and so on. What you do is press Fire a few times, stopping the numbers from changing. The resulting combination decides what kind of time you're going to have in the following shoot-'em-up section.

In this you're piloting a small craft over some scrolling knobs, panels and other vaguely computer-looking bits and pieces. From all sides there's a barrage of peculiar shapes - these must be the bugs you're after. While you zap away like crazy, about the screen the Time and Refresh meters are decreasing at speed.

Refresh is, apparently, 'the speed at which the power to shields is transferred'. Whatever, hitting the Space Bar during this section will, sometimes, give an opportunity for Refresh to be increased by sending you into another shoot-'em-up, similar in style, to gain some bonus points. When this is over, play returns to the previous section.

When the time for blasting bugs is over, the Transition stage is entered. This usually means playing one of two types of quick reaction games to score bonus ponts. The first of these, Trans: Stage 1, is desperately difficult. It features three pairs of boxes, with coloured patterns scrolling in different directions at different speeds. You've got to match each pair of boxes by altering the (x,y) speed in the upper boxes, using the joystick to get the pattern scrolling up, down, left, right and diagonally, and to accelerate and decelerate. When all three are matched, then the correct colours for each much be selected from the sequence at the bottom. A patheticallly meagre amount of time is allocated to achieve this, and this section takes a lot of practice, so don't give up too easily.

The other option, Trans: Stage 2, is a race against time and the computer, in which 'a given number of piles' must be set up 'across two substrates'. In other words, you've got to join two rectangles with some flashing lines using a laser, and reach your target number before the computer-controlled laser does. This isn't quite so impossible.

After the transition stage, it's back to bug-zapping in the channel, and so it goes until all five craft are destroyed.

Confused? You will be, particularly as there's much more to Romulus than the sketchy outline I've given here. The instructions mention some 'alien miners' to look out for, and intercepting these after clocking up 100,000 points will send you into yet another transition game featuring coloured shapes and changing sounds.

The whole caboodle is completely programmed, very fast, very demanding and, ultimately, very habit-forming. Just don't get put off by the lousy packaging, and be prepared to put in a lot of hard labour and sweat.