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Come on, admit it. There must have been a time or two when you've cast an envious glance at those arcade adventures from Ultimate for the Spectrum and wished they were available for your Atari.

Be jealous no more. Bubble Bus has produced Starquake, an original program but one that is graphically very much in the mould of those earlier Ultimate classics.

You control Blob, an owlish little dumpling who must scour the caves of an alien planet and amass various items.

The planet's core has gone has gone critical - Blob's job is to find it, fill it with the right objects and thus stabilise it. Ah, the wonders of modern technology!

Blob is delightfully animated, scurrying this way and that along terra firma as he explores the caverns.

Being subject to the normal rules of gravity, when he trundles off the edge of a precipice he falls until he meets the ground again. No damage is done unless he strikes something nasty on the way down.

His freefall can be slowed by pulling back on the joystick. This causes a small platform to appear under him and stop him dead.

This facility can also be used on the ground - fast and repeated pulling back on the joystick erects a ladder of these dissolving platforms which can be used for getting at otherwise inaccessible places.

Blob can also get airborne by alighting on what looks like a white breeze-block. Once on it, he can fly merrily around the caverns.

Another fast way of travelling is by using one of the transporter booths. To activate, you must guide Blob into a booth, type in the code of any of the other booths and bingo - he's there.

There are hundreds of different caves, each one a separate screen. Wander off the edge of the screen and another pops up.

The caves are filled with alien vegetation, machinery and neatly animated flying foes.

Energy is lost each time Blob is touched by an alien (but he can zap them) and he loses a life if he blunders into such fatal items as sparkling machinery, or a spiked plant.

Blob has five lives and a limited amount of energy, zap and platform-building power.

Everything about Starquake impresses, from the title screen to the high-score table, from the use of colour and sound to responsiveness and playability.

Bubble Bus has produced a superb game. Starquake is top notch fare, quality dripping from every byte.