This is a version of American football played with robots, tanks and other armoured things. It's futuristic, you see.

Before you play it'll help if you know something about American football. To me, it's just 22 well-padded men shouting things like, "24-27-31, hup hup!" then running head-long into each other with bone-pulverising force. Jolly good fun to watch, sure, but more confusing than trying to put your dad's compact disk player back together.

Luckily, ignorace doesn't spoil Cyberball. You soon learn how to try different approaches, and the rules are pretty easy to pick up. What you get, then, are loads of armoured men and machines smashing into each other a lot, while you control the guy who's got to get past all this carnage to score. And pretty good fun it is, too.

The best thing is the two-player mode. Here yuo can gleefully destroy your friend's team with massive hardware displays. Barry was not happy, I can tell you!

Cyberball is fast and smooth with pretty good graphics. The only is, once you get good at it, it's quite easy to beat the computer. A friend is an essential accessory.