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Star Ray emerged as one of the shining shoot-'em-ups on the Amiga earlier this year. It had superb graphics, great sound and incredible addictiveness. In short it is one of the best arcade games on the Amiga. Not C64 owners can blast away with their own version.

The plot and game style remain the same. For those who haven't seen it I shall recite from the holy oracle known as the in-lay. As a little sprog you always wanted to be a pilot, so when you grew into a bigger sprog you joined the academy, became an ace pilot, and consequently ended up being sent on a dangerous mission. The basic objective behind all this bumph is to protect the generations which reside at the bottom of each screen. This is initially quite easy as the aliens haven't yet decided to attack, but like all good alien mercenaries from beyond the stars they materialise and start pulverising you, your generators and just about anything else.

At this point you don't really have time to take in the graphics or sound so let me babble on a bit. The graphics are really smart, a very faithful 8-bit representation of the 16-bit original. The parallax scrolling is there, and it looks absolutely fantastic at high speeds though sadly at slow speeds it becomes jerky. Shame on you, Logotron.

Star Ray scrolls horizontally and is not dissimilar to Defender, though being a pst modern shoot-'em-up, it has to have collectable features, which come in the form of lettered pods; A gives you improved acceleration, V higher top speed, T rapid fire and so on down the list.

So far so good, but what weakens the game is a shortage of playability. It's impossible to whizz forward with guns blazing carving a path through the alien ranks. You just seem to collide with everything else.

To blast them, you need to slow down and carefully line yourself up to fire. So that cuts down the pulse racing action. I must say I'm very disappointed, it looks like the programmers went all out on visual accuracy and left themselves with very little room for anything else.

Not that I want to be too hard on Star Ray, it is a hard job converting from a machine as powerful as the Amiga, and then making a presentable presentation on the C64.

More varied than, say, Drop Zone, Star Ray cannot match the old classic Defender clones for action.