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On the checkerboard landscape of a surreal planet, a light to the death is about to take place. You are cordially invited, of course.

The plan is simple. You fire at them and they fire at you. Who hits, wins. You are a standard model homo sapiens, equipped with one fairly nasty laser, a jetpack and the indispensable sunglasses. They are a collection of aliens, They don't wear sunglasses. They do have lasers.

In the original arcade game, where you sat on a bouncing seat in front of the screen, the aliens were dazzling: Space Invaders, with graphics designed by Walt Disney on acid and painted by Bosch under the influence of a ginseng cigarette.

One-eyed mammoths, stone faces with glowing eyes, cities fl oating on what looks disturbingly like half a brain, huge trioptic robots with guns the size of submarines, nightmarish trees (if you can't imagine a nightmarish tree, you haven't been in an arcade recently) and dragons.

The dragons, looking not unlike the models that wander about Soho during Chinese New Year, are part of a bonus score scheme that I still haven't figured out. Just shoot them and you'll be OK.

All of these, except the trees - you have to dodge them - fire at you with pulsating ovals of light, which would be excruciatingly beautiful if they weren't so deadly.

And on the Amstrad? It's still faster than it has any right to be. The graphics are rendered as a solid backdrop with multicoloured wireframe opponents. Everything is recognisable from the arcade version (just as well, since Elite is using coin-op pictures on the cassette insert, tut tut).

The areas through which you fly in best 2001 style have the right wierdo names - Geeza, Moot and so on and each new area is heralded by a change in tempo and style of the music.

Each landscape brings on a change of aliens and a complete new set of arboreal extravaganza to fly into while you're trying to dodge the oval-throwing nasties. And when you make high-speed contact with a tree, an oval or an alien - and you will - the wonderfully evoked curve of your crumpled body wandering earth (or wherever) wards is almost worth dying for once or twice.

Not that you'll have much choice in the matter. Catlike, you start with nine lives. The first time you play, they last somewhat less than nine seconds.

You have to decide whether to fly high and miss the trees but hit the aliens, or fly low and vice versa. To do both, and remember to press fi re at reasonable intervals, might seem impossible at first. After a while it progresses to being merely ridiculous. Whatever you do, there's always the next screen.

Playing Space Harrier without the hydraulics is a bit of a let-down, but given that the system costs thousands of pounds it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

The effect Elite has managed to conjure up is stunning. By using split colour palettes the planet surface looks great. I found the wire-frame aliens very difficult to see and watching someone else play is boring.

The game condenses the thrills of the arcade game into the CPC. The sprite which you control looks every bit as good as the arcade original. One of the best coin-op conversions I've seen.

Space Harrier was the first arcade game I saw which used the new Sega chip set. As a result the later games such as Enduro Racer look familiar.

The effect of these chips is stunning, huge sprites with hardware scaling and more colours than you can think of' names for. The conversion to the Amstrad is a triumph.

The screen shot may not look too hot but get behind the joystick and you'll be hooked.

The word went out that Elite was doing the conversion of this game. The care-worn cynical hacks laughed out loud "Like to see that on a Spectrum", we guffawed to a man. Well, I haven't seen it on a Spectrum, but the- Amstrad version seems and plays better than I'd thought possible.

Sensibly the graphics have been reduced to simple sketches and speed made paramount. The music is up to scratch, the trees are as unavoidable as ever.

One gripe - the fire rate slows down dramatically when there's a lot on the screen. But for out and out monster mashing, it's a beaut.