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Not an easy one, this. It doesn't sound great - you're piloting a Zeppelin (well, it looks more like the Goodyear blimp as featured at the Cup Final) to rescue various individuals from a variety of city locations. The graphics aren't fabulous, with washed-out shades of blue. So why did I enjoy it so much?

Well, for a start the program shows a good deal of care. It cares about the tedium of lengthy text intros and extended graphics interludes between plays, so there aren't many. It's clever enough to give you a pre-game 'practice mode', and it lets you decide the game parameters - how many games before the shutters come down, how many ships per game, one or two players. And it cares enough for veracity to give you a fiendishly difficult control problem: those Zeppelins are damn unmanoeuvrable!

A realistically tricky steering problem is what takes most of the program; there's only about 6,000 bytes free when it's loaded, though machine code would have been more economical than Basic. Since it's not a fast-action sharp-reflexes game, the slowness of Basic isn't particularly a handicap - and it's possibly a virtue, since the problem with steering is the leaden, lumpy, flying habits of the ship.

The action starts with a somewhat 2D city and desperate individuals screeching to the tops of skyscrapers. You drift into the top of the screen and go to collect them... avoiding buildings, naturally, but also steering clear of the curious red zap-filled clouds. Subsequent level (five different cityscapes in all) give you different steering problems to solve, including an evil one that has you negotiating a miniature gap in a suspension bridge to pick up the idiot who got trapped on one of the piers underneath.

The main appeal is the skill requirement. Presumably it is possible to become really proficient with the joystick, at which point the game becomes only average: but the difficulty is so great that the boredom threshold looks a long way off.