Ho-hum, another day, another shoot em up. But wait, there is something very different about Disposable Hero. In fact, there are two things very different about it. The first is that it looks gorgeous and the second is that it is incredibly difficult.

"Ha!" I hear you snort. "We are seasoned veterans, we have tangled with every plasma-death-spitting alien in the galaxy, and you want to know the problem with shoot em ups? They are just too damn easy".

Well, it is an oft-heard complaint that many shoot em ups are not challenging enough, but Disposable Hero is truly difficult. The bad news is that it is too difficult. And o not just take my word for it, everybody in the office who picked up the joystick came to the same conclusion: Disposable Hero looks great, but it is ridiculously tricky.

If you were to draw Disposable Hero's family tree, somewhere in the roots you would find Xenon 2. Disposable Hero puts you in control of a spacecraft which you must steer past various bad things, and blast your way past some stubborn end-of-level and mid-level meanies.

The Xenon 2 influence is most pronounced in the 'shop' element of the game in which you collect various engine and weapon power-ups, by finding the blueprints on your travels. These power-ups are built in a factory, and when they are ready, you collect them by landing on a blue factory dome.

The six levels are full of adversaries of a flying, fishy, futuristic and demonic nature and it is all stunningly well drawn. The ship is easy enough to control, but it can be a pain not being able to reverse. The collision detection is reasonable, and the factory element well-constructed.

Oh, by the way, the reason for all this blasting is that the Free World has been ravaged by warfare and you have been chosen to penetrate alien strongholds and return with the blueprints that will help rebuild its techonology.

All the plus factors about Disposable Hero would normally see it heading towards an Amiga Format rating of the mid to high Eighties, but even with a fully tooled-up ship, it is too difficult. Lightning reactions count for little and too often the game comes down to relentless pounding, which does not make for good gameplay, no matter how strong the graphics are.

If you are a seriously committed shoot em up freak, you might D-Hero a challenge. But for most people it will be a frustrating, but good-looking exercise in getting blasted to bits.

Lloyd Grossman writes: "Secreted around the AP offices amidst the posters, the stacks of disks and the subliminal messages are many books of lists. You can't see them most of the time, and casual visitors are probably oblivious to their existence, but they're there, lurking, and from time to time various members of the team write things in them."

Some of them are bulky and dog-eared from frequent use, such as the Big Book Of PR Lies (where we write down the promised release dates of games, and which we then use to taunt companies when they fail to deliver the goods) or Songs That Stuart Plays That Everybdy Else Hates (currently running into 14 volumes) but there are many more discreet ledgers.

There's Dave's Book Of Observations From Afar, which hovers mysteriously over the filing cabinet and Cam's List Of Ominous Dreams, which is taped under a desk and booby-trapped with a block of C4 plastic explosive.

And finally there's the office book of Nice Touches, a fabulousy beautiful but slim publication of finest vellum bound in softest calfskin into which we employ a scribe to write Nice Touches in perfect copperplate handwriting. The in's barely dry on the latest page, and our scribe is laboriously adding gold leaf to the illumination down the side, but peering over his shoulder I can share these few paragraphs with yo.

NICE TOUCHES IN DISPOSABLE HEROES
* Getting power-ups in shoot-'em-ups is always a bit of an inexplicable, not to say surreal experience. What usually happens is that you shoot a spaceship which explodes, dropping a little blob which then gives you a power-up if you fly into it.

D-Heroes has a much more logical system which involves you picking up blueprints of various fabbo new weapons, and then landing at the occasional but conveniently placed research stations. Your ship has a certain energy output and all the modifications draw varying amounts of power, so you've got to work out which add-on configurations will fit into your energy output. You can then add bigger, better and more weapons that fire off in all directions, home in on enemies and generally making killing everything in your path a lot easier.

* The spaceship itself is a mass of little Nice Touches. When you nudge it forwards, the engines flare briefly to start your acceleration, and the truly wonderful thing is that instead of blowing up after a single hit, your little craft can absorb quite a few shots before plummeting to the ground, which is not only a Nice Touch, but also a Good Thing.

When your energy bar's getting low, smoke starts to dribble out of the ship, and each successive hit adds to the smoke until you eventually give up and belly flop onto the ground. Almost entirely implausibly, the programmers have worked out that it's totally frustrating to gain masses of power-ups only to lose them on a difficult level, so once you've got them, they stay for the rest of the game. Hoorah!

* Realistic water effects are a hugely pretty features that adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay but look fantastic. Flying low over these pools rewards you with a delightful reflection of your craft, and when various huge mechanical beasties tramp their way across the screen, each football is marked with cute splashes.

* Most surfaces have bolted-on gun turrets. These animate in microscopic detail, spinning around and elevating as they try to draw a bead on you.

* Much of the evil nastiness in the game comes in the form of quasi-biological lifeforms that look like insects but fire off laser blasts at the slightest provocation. Indeed, one of the levels seems to be set entirely in the mouth of a large critter with retractable teeth, so as well as dodging the flak you've got to watch out for massive canines that leap out of rotting gums at terrifying speed.

So why the emphasis on neat little touches rather than the actual game? Well, because we've all seen the game before, haven't we? It's a horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up, so what else can you say about it?

It plays like Project-X or R-Type 2, and although it's better than these two in some respects (most notably the masses of dinky little animations and the ability to survive a couple of hits) it doesn't really have any features that would make you drop what ever you were doing and dash out to the shops to buy it.

Maybe it's just me being overly cynical, but I really can't see what Disposable Heroes does that R-Type 2 didn't do better a couple of years ago. Like Pac-Man clones and Pong games, horizontal scrollers seemed to run their course before suffering a drop in popularity, and this resurrection doesn't add to or enlarge on any gameplay features that weren't covered fairly comprehensively in R-Type 2.

Okay, so there are masses of biological enemies, but there were plenty of these in the excellent Apidya, which may have had annoyingly sudden death, but also featured some of the most impressive music ever heard in a computer game.

Am I sounding wishy-washy? I hope not, but the problem is that it's too good to slag off but at the same time is very hard to mention at allwithout going on about R-Type 2 D-Heroes plays like R-Type 2 (but not as nicely), looks much like R-Type 2 (but not as pretty) and has the same combination of big frightening baddies and small annoying ones as R-Type 2.

This means of course that it's a good game, but at the same time hardly a novel or unique one. Like this review, it's just going over the same ground time and time again. Sorry.

Anyway, that's what it's like, so I'll end on a bit of blurb about the game that may or may not set your imagination alight. It's got six long and tough (really tough - in fact, this is one area where it does expand on R-Type 2, because it's much harder. And R-Type 2 was no pushover, either) levels, each of which feature a number of super huge and impressive boss enemies.

The music's entertaining but unremarkable and you can save your high scores. I found it hard even on the easy level, but I dare say all the pros will relish having a go on the manic arcade setting. And that's, um, that really.

There was a point, a couple of years ago, where shoot 'em ups were ten a penny. You couldn't open the review pages of a magazine without seeing 'Deathblazer' or Alien Run or some similarly macho name staring out at you, promising the wildest ride of your life, and another joystick consigned to the bin. A lot of them were awful, but some of them were wonderful.

Unfortunately, the genre slipped into a coma when Mario and Sonic made their collective presence felt, and since then we've been slowly choking on a bubblegum diet composed entirely of sweet cartoon characters and chocolately platforms and even more sickeningly fluffy 'heroes' whom we're all expected to wear the T-Shirt of.

God, it's only Syndicate that's kept me sane. But what's this? Could we be returned to the glorious days of 'shoot first, shoot a bit more, keep on shooting and forget the questioning'? It could be, if Gremlin's latest acquisition, Disposable Hero, is anything to go by. Why, it even has a stale and tacky plot! No bad thing in itself, especially when it so blatantly and pathetically tries to hide the fact that the game is nothing more than an all-out violence orgy!

For those who are interested, the game is set way into the future - somewhere around the twenty eight century, after most of the human race has been wiped out by aliens. Well, what did they expect, poking around all over the unknown universe to see if they could find life, only to start all-out war with it when they struck lucky.

Now, only a small pocket of resistance is left. In a word, you and as the Disposable Hero, you have to go against the might of the alien armada across an alien landscape.

Have I made the point that it is a pure arcade blaster with little need for thought and stacks of work laid out for both your joystick and your index finger? If you thought Project X was tough, then you ain't seen nothing.

This game throws everything, and I do mean everything at you. The landscape attacks you. The small scaly things that crawl over the landscape attack you. In fact, anything that moves is likely to have a pop at you if you turn your back on them for a second.

Of course, the millions of alien 'things' that fly around go for the throat in a big way. To think, all you have to fight back with is a tiny little fighter with a pathetic laser gun and your own resources. Not that's the strict truth, of course.

You can upgrade your ship's weapons and capabilities, taking this small, harmless 2CV of a craft and turning it into a gunmetal grey Capri with furry seats, a stereo with at least two dozen bass speakers and some rather nutty custom fairing.

For full information on all the weapons available, check the panel on the opposite page. What that panel won't tell you, however, is how you actually manage to get the weapons.

There's no money involved. You don't need to trade a single thing and you definitely don't get weapons as reward for your gun prowess. Instead, a more sensible system is employed. Each weapon and improvement requires a certain amount of power to function, and your engine is only capable of putting out a certain amount of gigawatts. In the same way, the hull only has so much room, so the trick lies in balance.

You can have any weapons you like, provided that your engine has the juice to power them and there's actually room for them on the ship. Naturally, the first thing you'll need to get is a bigger engine, after which you can quite comfortably fit a three way firing cannon, an energy shield and a couple of homing missiles, which should make life a hell of a lot more violent.

The graphics are very attractive, you have to admit, but there are a few points where the finely detailed sprites and backdrops can cause major problems. The backdrop is made up of two components: the scenery which is purely decorative and scrolls along in the background and the foreground obstacles, which are hard, unbreakable and completely fatal should you smash into them when you can't tell the difference between the two. The whole things does look stunning though.

It plays well too. The ship manoeuvres well, and responds quickly to the joystick commands that come thick and fast in the midst of battle. Autofire is automatic, so all you need to do is keep your finger on the button to unleash a 'stream of death'.

There are four difficulty levels to choose from, so the enemy are never too overwhelming, just whelming enough, and the variety of attack waves and enemy styles keep the whole thing interesting. Not the most original game ever, but a fun blast that is good for a few weeks.

The CD32 should have some absolutely scorching shoot 'em-ups by now. Software companies have been churning out absolute monster blasters for years for far less impressive tech-spec machines than Commodore's console, so where are they? Gremlin is not well known for its shoot 'em up pedigree, but they have given it a damn good shot through with Disposable Hero.

Take to the helm of a lightweight star-fighter and scrape your way through five levels of complete carnage. It has to be said, Disposable Hero is tought with a capital T.

There is so much packing the screen that you are constantly fighting two enemies at once, the never ending barrage of enemy fighter and the complicated intertwining backgrounds and detail on every level. There is so much going on it is incredibly hard to keep your attention on shooting with accuracy at gun emplacements and the like. Most of the time it is a case of dodging and shooting into thin air!

The graphics are fabulously detailed. Enemy ships actually look battle scarred and possess little animated bits of machinery on their surfaces that twist or click as they speed towards you. The secret of success is in the various pods/domes you will find. They hide shops where you can stock up on weapons. Your ship will only carry so much though, and certain combinations will not do, so cunning choices have to be made to stay in the game.

There is a total of 32 weapons to choose from but you do not have instant access to them all. Scattered throughout the hostile enemy levels you will find various bonus pods that have to be collected to buy better equipment.

And boy are you going to need those upgrades! The enemy fighters move F.A.S.T. Quite often it is better to dodge the on-coming traffic then stand and fight it. Scooch down to the bottom of the screen, pausing to get a look at your reflection, and then speeding straight up to the top again will get you out of many a scrape.

But be careful! Space between the backgrounds and sprites is very tight. If you keep your head and make it to the end of the level you will find the big boys waiting. Gigantic guardians hand around and block your path onward. Apart from being deadly they possess fantastic detail, like steam and moving parts animated to full effect.

Disposable Hero is a vital addition to the lagging CD32 software library. If you do not buy it, I cannot imagine what else you must be using your machine for!