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There are moments that make working with computer games worthwhile. Moments such as the arrival of Guardian, for example, untrumpeted and fantastically good (and, incidentally, with keyboard control on the A1200 version if you select the joypad option and use the arrow keys: cheers Mr. Programmer; no cheers Mr. Instructions), or being asked what's wrong with a game and having those criticisms acted upon, or being introduced to Knights Of The Sky, or being sent It's A Skull (the Valhalla Remix), or finding a photograph of Louise Brooks in the pile of largely terrible magazines we keep being sent, or pulling off a Gravity Force 2 power-swoop from the top of the level to hit the other ship three-quarters of the way down and pummel him into submission before he quite realises what's going on.

And then there are moments like the arrival of Vital Light. Why have Millennium released Vital Light? Five minutes into playing this game I knew, to the marrow of the bones of my soul, that it was wholly, hopelessly, fundamentally, irredeemably terrible and I refuse to believe the company's playtesters could have missed that and still have been able to look each other in the eye.

The game is a wannabe puzzler where rows of coloured blocks fall and where you, with the aid of a rotating disc firing coloured beams, have to turn all the blocks in the row the same colour so the row disappears before crashing down on a ricketty barrier. Complete a level and the barrier moves up a notch so you've less room to manoeuvre. Complete eight levels for a password, and complete fifteen levels to move to the next stage.

Vital Light is extremely boring. Blocks fall, you could how many green ones there are as opposed to red ones (say), you select from your finite supply of green or red appropriately and you shoot them. The only possible trick comes with being able to turn blocks any colour, so if you couldn't be bothered reaching blue (or whatever), you could turn the entire row yellow.

Of course, you'd then quickly run out of yellow and be scuppered. So all you do is remember to use the 'correct' colour, as having more such blocks that you had ammunition to paint would clearly be impossible. There's an attempt to complicate matters by having two shades of each colour (a hit cycles from light to dark and back again) but it just means more shooting. Power-ups do things like freeze the blocks, some blocks have to be made specific colours, some rows fall faster than others and obstacles appear occasionally to get in your way or knock out your gun, but Vital Light is still a game of sitting there and shooting things with coloured beams.

It's only when lots of small blocks fall or a faster row brings down a wedge of blocks that things change, but even these moments are only mindlessly panicky and irksome rather than exciting. The computer opponents are a joke - there's an option to 'meet' them, but this involves merely watching while they rattle off a feeble cross-talk routine (rather than, for exmaple, being able to challenge a different one or betting that you'll win the next match, or something), and they don't appear in the game itself. (They're supposedly the people dropping the blocks.)

Even the two-player mode is pitifully dull - you play exactly the same game, but split the playfield down the middle in co-operative mode, or bang into your opponent to put off his aim in combative mode. And, as a shiny cherry for the game's unpleasant sundae, the blocks in a level fall in patterns so if you lose the first time round, you know what to expect in the rematch.

Vital Light is crap.

Uppers: Combined mighty being cogitation led to "The preview captions were quite funny".

Downers: The controls are horrible, using 'up' to fire, and fire and left/right to cycle through the colours, so moving diagonally (as you do almost inevitably) means you fire the wrong colour. The basic idea is flawed: there's no facility for planning ahead, you're just shooting down a row at a time. It's repetitive, it's uninvolving, it's extremely dull even with two players. *And it doesn't even recognise a second drive!*

Calling Vital Light a puzzle game is a lie, and as a shoot-'em-up it's excrementally bad. Vital Light is awful, and Millennium must surely know that.