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Just about everything gets cashed-in on these days, so when Halley's Comet came around Firebird jumped on the bandwagon. Unfortunately they left their jumping a little late and the real comet had been and gone in the time it took them to write the game.

True to standard Firebird form Comet is available across a range of machines, the Amstrad version being one of the best. The scenario is like this. You are the ship's computer, piloting a manned probe to explore the comet. This consists of five simple games. You only get one life and have to win 20 games before you reach the comet. These are selected at random from the five types.

Your first task is to stop the dreaded germ bags from contaminating the oxygen supply. This is an asteriodsesque game. Your weapon is a spiked spinner which destroys the bags. There is a time limit which ticks away in large numbers as you try to grab the bags. The joystick control is good and the sprites fairly smooth. Early on this is a very simple game but as you progress the number of bags to catch multiplies without an increase in time.

One of the problems the real comet probe had to cope with was getting signals back to Earth. If the antenna had moved away from the receiving aerial the spacecraft would have lost touch. This would make it impossible to direct the antenna back on course and all that lovely data would have been lost, In the game you are operating the dish from inside the craft - as it gets knocked by the lumps of stuff flying off the comet you have to redirect the antenna to give the best possible signal. This is done against a very rapid clock. Working the aerial is perhaps the most boring of the games.

The most confusing is the game where you have to control the life support system. Like Amstrad User this spaceship needs a constant supply of coffee to keep going. The well being indicator shows how happy you are while the bladder indicator shows if you need a "P".

Originality is not Comet's long suit, one of the best games is a version of Missile Command. The Earth's defence system has decided that you are a threat and has launched an attack.

Your ship sits in the middle of the screen and the missiles come at you from all sides. You can fire anti-missile missiles. These cause an explosion to destroy the incoming assailants. There is a fair bit of inertia to the joystick control and you can't move your sights over your ship.

The fifth game is a little like the android control section in Paradroid, an excellent Commodore 64 game from Hewson. [Good grief, we'll be doing adverts for Sinclair games next! - Ed] You have to repair some circuits inside the computer by matching a binary pattern. To do this you have to send signals through wires.

When you reach the comet you have the usual task of saving humanity. This takes the form of destroying more germ bags. Your bullets are little stars. The comet surface bubbles and rotates - destroy enough germ bags and the world will be saved.

I like a game which is actually made of several simple games so that you are given a variety of different things to play. I also like a game with a bit of nostalgia interest so I can definitely award Comet two brownie points.

It's made up of five reasonably simple games but they make a nice collection, particularly one which is a bit reminiscent of Asteroids and another which is like a circular version of Missile Command.

The title screen with its Animator-like wire frame lettering is quite impressive and the whole thing seems to have a nice polished feel to it. Overall a very nice game.

Comet is a program which is more than the sum of its parts. The individual sub-games would shame any budget label but as a collection they don't seem half as bad. The scene when you reach the comet is by far the best - your bullets being particularly good-looking like the things you have to shoot or dodge in the Star Wars arcade game.

I hated the scene where you controlled the ship's coffee machine but loved the space missile sequence.

The icons along the bottom - including a girl known as Maxine Headroom - have no effect at all.

I would say that Comet is not particularly good value for money.

Comet is one of a new genre of computer games that relies on the fact that if you lump enough naff games together they make one reasonable one. There are some neat touches in Comet that make the game quite entertaining but overall you probably won't want to play it much after the real comet has disappeared over the horizon.

Comet is just about good enough to stand on its own without the comet connection. At least Firebird can console itself that if the game doesn't sell this time, they can sell it next time the comet comes round.