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We looked last month at a pre-release version of Starquake by Kenton Price (whose Qman and Gimpo games should have pleased a few when they appeared as listings last year in A&B).

At that time I was impressed with the game but found it hard to play due to a lack of instructions and a few bugs. Thankfully, the bugs are now removed but the gameplay is still very difficult.

Not hard, but difficult. Any fool can leap Blob round the screens of this game, collecting objects and zapping nasties but nobody seems to have considered it important enough to tell the poor old player just what you're supposed to do!

A game stuffed with 500 screens, secret passages, zap rays, skeletonauts, smash traps, key code cards, flexible thingydoos and flowers is fun to play but ultimately frustrating. Common sense dictates that you've probably got to solve some puzzles to reveal further areas of the game and that pieces of a planet's core must be gathered so it can be rebuilt but somehow that's not enough for me.

Even the cryptic Ultimate games like Knight Lore or Alien 8 gave you more clues! You may have further details of gameplay if you've played Stephen Crow's original Spectrum version of this; if so, please let the rest of us in on the secret!