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Double hoopy hot stuff! All you (slightly) wrinklies out there will probably remember Voidrunner as an all time Commodore classic from Jeff Minter's vivid imagination. Many eons later, here's MAD's Speccy conversion - and it's one of cosmic wonderousness!

The first thing to say is that Voidrunner is no relation, poor or otherwise, to Bladerunner. It's made up of pure violence, going back to the good old days when Speccy programs were lovely and violent and Speccy players were glad of it. Voidrunner deals in ultra-death and hyper-violence - nothing more and nothing less!

All you do is command your crack corps of ships (you start with four, flying in Red Arrows formation) against the remorseless onslaught of wave after wave of aliens. There is no firepower, time or energy limit, and the whole screen is free for gameplay. You start with five lives, but for every wave you vanquish, you gain another life, up to a total of nine.

There's nothing very sophisticated about the enemy either. They have eight basic forms, few can actually attack you, and those that can are easily avoided. Most are just cattle to the slaughter!

So, okay, where's all the fun in this? Well, Voidrunner has none of this messing about with poncy graphics and whizzy sound. What it does have is more aliens moving faster in more directions in true pyrotechnicolour than any other game of the type. And what's more, on each level you get onto, you get more ships which can fire independently at all angles until the whole screen's just one boiling mass of total death and destruction. It's one magic game.

A simple but sensational shoot 'em up of awesome speed and multiple levels. Not for the faint-hearted or weak-wristed.