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No, not a sequel to Ghostbusters but a innovative adaption of the classic arcade game Battlezone. In other words, a very good rip-off by those very nice Design Design people. It has more features than the original such as hidden line removal, wire guided missiles (well, joystick then) and a way of ending the game other than getting blasted or pouring Coke over the controls.

The patter on the cassette cover and in the high score are a mite more colourful than this article could hope to be. This game is in the tradition of their last hit, Dark Star, and uses the same high speed loader (which even works on the 664),high score table, key definer and other bits (including the programmer and secret design studio in his bedroom)

For those people who have been living in a pit on a desert island for the last ten years, the basic plot is to manoeuvre your tank around a plain littered with cubic and pyramidal obstacles. There are other tanks on this plain which you can spot with the aid of your radar scanner. They are a bit unfriendly but are slow and can be dealt with using a single shell. The scenery is done in (flicker free) 3D wire-frame drawing from the viewpoint of the front of your tank. One improvement on the original is that the battle tanks have hidden line removal. Instead of seeing through the tank, it appears to be solid. The game ends when your shields are worn out or you have destroyed all the objects. Just one small omission from the original, you forgot the moon guys.

There is a bit of scenery in the background to the game which scrolls smoothly past and includes mountains and an erupting volcano. The mountains and volcano are in the options tables, the mountains can be made to disappear and the volcano can range from being dormant to a super-duper 3D turbo Meagacano spurting out red stuff very realistically. What are those strange green flying squares for?

Other options allow you to use wire-guided missiles to destroy the foe as well as ordinary, boring anti-tank shells.

The problem is that while you are guiding the things you are not guiding the tank. The other tanks realizing this, home in on you whilst you are in the sitting duck position and convert your tank into a piece of metallic Emintaler cheese. Not surprisingly, the enemy gets increasingly violent throughout the game but they have a sense of glory in combat and only take you on one at a time.

You can practically ensure a nice explosion by selecting an option which views things from the point of the missile, this is very dramatic. You zoom across the landscape, dodging the obstacles, until you hit a tank, an object, or run out of guiding wire. The view then snaps back to that of the tank in time for you to see all the little bits of debris bouncing around. This is very nicely done with suitable boinging sound effects.

Speaking of the sound effects, they are done in glorious technicolour stereo (when played through a speech synthesiser or your hi-fi) but are mostly of the whirr, bang, crump type. I prefer playing to ACDC at full volume. The game gives you a chance to recharge your shields by squatting on rotating red squares. These can be scouted for by firing off a missile and viewing the scenery rapidly.

Another hint is to sit on one of these squares and blast the enemy as they come for you.

As with Dark Star, the high score table is filled with apologetic graffiti on start up and the caps shift on the keyboard is backwards i.e. you type in upper case until you press shift. The high score comes up with messages when some names are typed in. Try typing in Dark Star, Mon and Rommel (a version of the same game on a Spectrum). Telling it to go forth and multiply also gets a response.

The game has its faults, the [control] [shift] [escape] does not self destruct, overlapping objects tend to change colour and you don't get any sort of bonus for finishing, but it is very playable and promises to be better than Dark Star. Just one last word to the authors, "Tanks for the game folks."