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If you find yourself dreaming about chain-link fences, pinning sheets of graph paper up on your bedroom wall and generally living a square-matrix oriented life, you are suffering from what we psychologists call a grid fixation. This game is for you.

Early in the 22nd Century it transpires that there is a small problem with the solar power stations set up to provide energy crystals for spaceships. The stations orbit stars, and due to a build-up of unstable disruptive energy pulses (watch out for the radioactive lentils) it has become impossible for normal craft to collect these here crystals. Note the normal.

What is clearly needed is an abnormal craft. Sun Star is that craft, faster, more totally weaponed and redesigned to do the deed with only a modicum of personal jeopardy. But somebody's still got to fly it, and since it's an abnormal craft the job description clearly calls for an abnormal pilot. Your card has been marked ever since you wrote a fan letter to Max Headroom's interior designer (love those parallel lines) as a griddie. Climb into that cockpit, six eyes, and learn the ropes.

Staring out of the window reveals a universe of squares as far as the optical reception organ can perceive. Most of these squares are blank, but, some are filled in with yellow or blue to show the walls of the maze-like grid upon which the game is played out. There are also white, green and red squares, which represent disruptor pulses, energy crystals and ordinary pulses. Fire on a disruptor pulse, and it will leap to a new part of the grid leaving behind it a green crystal for you to pick up.

Leave a crystal too long, and its resultant disintegration will set up matrix resonances that make all your previously collected rocks go pool Wonder if they're dilithium? You can (and indeed should) collect 10 of these pebbles before heading for the hyperwarp cell (they must he dilithium) and migrating to a new section of the grid. The hyperwarp cell can also recharge your batteries, and adds a little extra sage and onion to the game by being hidden in the middle of an almost inpenetrable square. There is a way in, but it's very small and moves.

There are a few guidance systems to systematically guide you. To the left is a "from the top" view of your immediate vicinity, and to the right a much larger schematic map of you and the things that surround you.

Both are pretty damn useful. There's also a meter for you to watch as your energy runs down, and indicators to track objects. Good stuff, all of them.

Tactics? If you must play to win, try and get to know the maps intimately. There's a lot going on, and not all that much energy to spread about, so try and get the fastest circuits off pat. And if he won't give them to you, do it yourself.

Guess who's discovered the magic of the pallete register? The between-games screen of Sun Star is by far the most potent argument against colour I've ever seen. Urgh.

The game itself, while a little on the blocky side (no finely detailed sprites here), is much easier on the eyeball. It's also infuriating and enjoyable, but a little more technical cleverness in the conversion could have produced some much more impressive graphics. Doesn't affect the playability though.

My feelings towards this game varied from the impressed (nice loading screen) to the appalled (the attract mode was horrendous) to the unimpressed (that's the playing screen?) back to the appreciative again (one more game won't hurt... ahem).

I'm writing this in the appreciative mode, which must mean the game has something to recommend it even if the physics in the game description is as genuine as an Arthur Daley guarantee. Why Sun Star? Would you buy a game called Guardian Daily Telegraph?

Humm... Tron light cycles, no not quite, it may look like Trail blazer but that doesn't fit the bill either. Sun Star is a different game, and certainly very addictive.

You don't need the six eyes my friend has refered to, but the usual homo sapiens quota is an eye too few. There is a fair sense of being on the grid, and in many ways it feels a bit like Ballblazer, the smigin of panic, the feeling of being lost and that there is something out there trying to get you.