TERRORISTS. Arn'cha sick of 'em? I mean, you have just got a little nation coming along quite nicely, when all of a sudden these blokes turn up and make a mess of the whole thing. Or another scenario: Small country, heavily repressed populace. They have the cheek to start up a free market economy based on the plants of the Erythroxylacese family. Nothing wrong with that, nice little earner, but for the fact that the extracts of the Erythroxylon plant just happen to make people go unhealthy happy and selfassured for a very short time, and then deeply unhappy. Yep, you guessed, it is cocaine I am on about.

Hey, but these things are no big deal. I mean, given a helicopter gunship and lots of other stuff, a guy could get rid of all those problems and still be in time for his morning expresso.

But The Powers That Be have thought of that, and would not mind if you got rid of some criminals hiding out at the North Cold, er, the North Pole, rescue some boat people, destroy some pinko commie subversive missiles, pledge allegiance, and tell some of those Middle Eastern types that, "Hey, we do not dig being shot at - that is our job!".

As you have probably twigged by now, Fire is not about being New Age and mellow about humanity in general. You (who else?) pilot the helicopter gunship called Fire (must have taken weeks of work to think that name out) and you have got to show that the right side of an argument and the safer end of a gun are one and the same.

You scroll along, in a pleasantly Defenderesque manner, shooting everything that you can. Isn't this a little uptight of you? Maybe you should be flying around giving flowers to people and saying that all this violence is very negative and all the guns should be melted down and poured back into Mother Earth and the Pentagon could be turned on its side and painted purple and there would be dancing and poetry and general being together. C'mon people, sing May The Circle Reamin Unbroken!

On the other hand, there is always the option of keeping doing what you are doing; chilling out is not an option. You could admire the scenery (it is very bright) and the defoliate it and burn the rest down. You could watch the other helicopters as they plummet groundwards like a machine whose dues is definitely ex. Look at the little village huts. Don't they look lovely in the afterglow of an evening's raid?

Fire is one of those deeply annoying games that does not let up the action or the noise all the time it is loaded. It starts with the obligatory (awful) French Guitar musick. It then goes on to a rather nasty helicopter taking off from an aircraft carrier bit, and then to the game itself. Once the game is over (very quickly, you only get one set of shields) it is back to the aircraft carrier bit.

To be fair, there are worse games than Fire. There are not many, though.

Who said there were only seven stories? Well, it is looking more and more like there are only seven computer games. This five-stage, one-player game harks right back to those early days, the days of Defender.

You are in control of a helicopter, viewed side-on, moving across a horizontally scrolling landscape. The idea is to do good deeds on each of the five levels by destroying baddies who send jets, helicopters, tanks and so on against you. On the first level you are trying to put a halt to drug trafficking in South America, before moving on to rescue some innocents in Beirut.

It is all very similar stuff and it has been seen before. Everything is well animated and colourful and it has been well put together, but it is very dull.

Defender had something in it to get excited about ten years ago, and if a bit more thought had gone into the game design of this version it might have been turned out a bit better. Which is not to say it is complete rubbish by any means, but if you are really after a new shoot em up there are plenty of better ones to choose from around now.

It is hardly even amusing to see a game claiming have a sharp contemporary edge and then subsequently discovering that it is about as politically informed as Noddy. Fire reckons that it puts you into a world of drug busting, hostage rescuing, and boat people. In fact it turns out that the A-Team is more realistic. At least you can laugh at the manual. How would you like to 'destroy terrorist aviation and chimic manufactories of a warlike country in the NearEast? Me neither - Southend may be ugly but it does not deserve to have its airport nuked.

Gamewise, Fire is nothing special. It is a left and right horizontal scroller, with a passing resemblance to Star Ray - you fly a helicopter and you have to kill almost everything on screen. Fly five different missions, each set in an equally 'political' dodgy area, and it is split into two parts. The first part has you wiping out the heart of the problem. For example, in the Drugs!!! mission you have to destroy all the plantations but leave the villages and hot air balloons intact. In the second stage you have to fight a big nasty, in this case an armoured train carrying illegal drug supplies.

Graphically, the game is nice. It is fast and colourful and some of the sprites are arcade quality. There is five level parallax scrolling, as well as a bit of vertical scrolling, just to add a bit of height to the play area. The sound is not too bad either, with a soundtrack that - a little predictably for a European product - uses a sample of the word 'Fire' repeated in various pitches and tones.

It is fun - I won't deny that - but it is a little repetitive.