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The first thing you should know about Space Ace is that it's the most popular demo at Amiga dealers for eons... well, since Don Bluth's first 'laser disc' adaptation, Dragon's Lair, appeared anyway. With smooth, high definition animation that for once lives up to the hype 'cartoon quality' and this time it even runs on a normal unexpanded 500.

Space Ace has the sort of graphics that make most programmers feel like giving up and going back to the Vic 20. A blinding demo, unquestionably (they've even managed to eliminate the tiresome disk swapping of its predecessor whilst cramming it into half the memory) but is it any good as a game?

I found Dragon's Lair the most infuriating, irritating and downright awkward piece of software ever shoved under my nose by the editor. Every scene was governed by joystick moves more counter-intuitive than the instructions for assembling an MFI wardrobe translated into Serbo-Croat. Personally, I feel that fiddling around trying to work out which particular tweaks you apply to progress to the next scene is singularly unrewarded by two-and-a-half seconds of interesting graphics. At least Pavlov's dogs were rewarded with the occasional bowl of Pedigree Chum.

Fortunately, Space Ace isn't nearly as bad. The manual comes with a genuinely useful selection of tips for each stage and a complete explanation of how to get past the first stage which might well stop some less keen people tearing out their hair in apopleptic rage. That doesn't mean it's easy, or I like this sort of thing, but it's nice to see designers making real improvements to their software. Don't buy this expecting fluent gameplay, but it is possible to get a reasonably satisfying distance into the game withot giving up other activities like sleep, work, school, etc.

The storyline isn't exactly War And Peace - space hero defeats monsters to rescue girlfriend - but there are plenty of decent twists and surprises to make it a little bit more than a slideshow. If your nose is still pressed up against the glass of your local dealer's window as you stand transfixed by this miraculous feat of computer programming I would still think once or eight times about shelling out the asking price for this sort of entertainment. Buy Space Ace to impress, dazzle, amaze or overwhelm, but don't buy it to play, certainly not at this price.