When was the last time you can remember playing a totally mad-trash shoot-em-up? These days game companies tend to concentrate on graphics presentation, whereas in the 'old days' video games consisted of simple, brightly-coloured sprites and overpowering sound but with gameplay that left you breathless.

Jeff Minter has long-professed his admiration of early 80's coin-ops, particularly Williams games such as Defender and Robotron 2084, and was the man responsible for the Amiga version of Defender II. Minter thought that it was a crime that there wasn't a version of Robotron available on home computers so put his talents to the task of producing his own interpretation.

Furry Monsters and laser creeps

You take control of a laser-spitting llama (yes, a llama) who travels through a series of 100 zones attempting to rescue innocent stranded creatures from alien mutants. In order to rescue the camels, goats, llamas and sheep the heroic animal must walk around the screen picking up the creatures while fending off attacks from the aliens.

To help you kill the enemies, is a directable laser-weapon, which can be locked in one direction by holding down fire. This allows you to attack in one direction.

Once you've managed to clear all the mutants from a screen, you can usually progress to the next and if you collect all of the lovely creatures before you finish, you get a bonus score! However, some waves are classed as ' Hard Waves', which require you to collect all the friendly creatures before you can finish the level.

Free for all

Not since PGA Tour Golf has a game managed to grab the attention of the entire Amiga Format staff, with much joystick-wrenching and swearing to be witnessed. Even though the game is pretty old fashioned with its frantic sound effects and simplistic graphics, it packs a hell of a punch in the gameplay department. The game is very easy to get into due to its simple nature, but it's very difficult to put the joystick down once you've started, so be prepared for some long nights of game playing!

There are a few quirks, such as the odd glitch in the sound and graphics every now and then and the fact that the collision detection tends to go rather awry fro time to time, but even this doesn't detract from the highly enjoyable and furiously addictive gameplay.

Since the game is shareware, the only asking price is a plea from Jeff and send him a fiver for his efforts, this game shouldn't be missed. So get those fivers out!