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This brings back memories of a spotty-faced youth wandering into an old arcade and discovering yet another version of Galaxians. 10p in slot, lasts as many seconds, pours coke over machine and exits stage left.

The brief instructions and hi-score table come up in the biggest text I have seen on the 464. Even Granny would be able to read it from the other side of the living-room.

Taking over the controls of your laserbase, you notice that moving to extreme left and right boosts you a little in the air.

There must be some use for this. But wait - What's that coming out of the starry sky?

Weird things dive at you, making as much noise as the Ed's little Jap sports car pelting down the NI25. They drop wee bombs on you, thus proving you're not as immortal as you thought you were. Some really cunning ones even shoot sideways.

There are shotgun-type blasts to rattle your tail feathers, and bombs which don't take quite so much notice of the laws of gravity as the last lot, and descend slowly, exploding into a billion pieces of glittering shrapnel (well, at least six) which totally muck up your thoughts on what was and wasn't a safe place to be at the time. The score for blasting them is hardly worth the trouble.

Meanwhile strange beasties are still squealing around above, dropping little messages on you. By now most people have the brains to push the fire button. Peow! One shot. Breathtaking oh-god-hurry-up pause for the next shot. Darn!

Too long - another one in the eye for immortality. After a while this whopping great sprite slides on, This, methinks, is supposed to be some giant psychedelic sparrow.

To me, it looks more like the north end of a south-bound baboon: but interpretations vary.

After pumping so many photons into it's er tail, that you're beginning to think that it's indestructable, it goes "Puff!" (as they say in France) and increments your score accordingly.

Now for your secret weapon: Pushing up on the joystick causes your ship to develop the dreaded photo-orgasmotronic field; absolutely impervious to even south- bound baboons. While you float upwards, and things come downwards, the bits you meet on the way come off a lot worse than you do. Shame you can only pull that stunt a few times.

Eventually even the hottest sky-jockeys become history, and you consign your monica (only room for three letters here) to the annals of the high score table. Then you do it all over again until bed time.

OK, so it's another Olde Wurlde arcade game. Somebody must like them, but there's a limit to the amount an already devastated reviewer's brain can take. This one works, has pretty flash Mode 0 graphics, and is only slightly more novel than Space Invaders. Once the pattern is sussed you can keep this up all night.

This brings wick memories of getting to school late because I had popped into Greasy Joe's for a quick game of Firebirds. This Amstrad version has all the bits I remember from the original. It is basically Galaxian style with different types of alien.

I enjoyed this game partly for the nostalgia and partly because of its "just one more game before I get on with some work", or maybe "Just one more try get the high score" appeal.

I am getting bored with spacey games. This title seems to be about two years too late for its own good, but at £1.99 I suppose you can't complain. The graphics are colourful and relatively smooth and the sound is OK. One thing annoyed me, and Firebird are by no means the only people to do it. When starting the game you can press the joystick fire button to select joystick or keyboard, but you then have to go back to the keyboard to select one or two players.

Could this not have been done using the joystick to save lazy people like me having to lean all the way to the keyboard?