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Remember Marble Madness and all those other ball bearing spin-offs? Well, you can add Incredible Shrinking Sphere to the list. ISS is a complicated sort of a game in which you control the aforementioned sphere on a metallic 3D pinball table landscape.

But there's more to ISS than a bit of fancy work with the flippers and the odd surreptitous nudge. The plot, it has to be said, is the usual load of old cack.

The Sangfalmadore Run is really bad news. If it was a ski slope and you wanted to find Prince Charles, the Sangfalmadore Run is where you'd look. Get the idea? Normally the daring types in the Sphere training Corps - the SAS of Sangfalmadore - do the run a couple of times before breakfast just for kicks. But because of some inhospitable seismic activity (that's an earthquake to you) it's out of bounds.

But Colonel-in-Chief Matt Ridley is not the kind of man to let an earthquake interfere with his early morning entertainment and he does and gets stuck so that you can rescue him.

There are eight levels to the Sangfalmadore run, each divided into four plates. You can pop down a hole in one plate and emerge in another than pop back up again if you want. This is quite a handy trick to escape from the assassin spheres that chase after you. Of course, you can always try to shoot them instead.

Like pinball, ISS has all sorts of bumpers, flippers and weirdo gadgets for you to experiment with, but you won't find any of those on an ordinary pinball machine. Most useful are shield icons which make you invincible to the assassin spheres. Most of these icons are self-explanatory - chaotic bounce, firepower, prison, black holes and so on. The best way to find out what they do is to roll over them. In any case it pays to keep on the move to avoid the craters which appear in the planet surface.

There are certain parts of the terrain which you won't be able to negotiate unless your sphere has the right characteristics - achieved by rolling over the appropriate icons. For example, some runs are very narrow and you have to roll over a shrink icon before you can get down them. Your sphere must have low mass and high speed to get over a ramp without flattening it.

It says in the blurb that the idea for ISS came from the pattern on a pair of slippers. I don't think they could have been the Marks & Spencers ones with pictures of puppies on that Bohdan Buciak wears. Anyway this one gets the toes up from me.