Volfied

The speed the games industry moves at can leave even a fairly young person sounding like a Great War veteran twittering on about how he was shortchanged by the local baker back in 1927, back when the world made sense.

And so it is that the one-time cutting-edge arcade experience has been overshadowed by the raw power of console, leaving a disillusioned, prematurely-aged band of the population hanging around on the Xbox Live service, chatting to 14-year-olds on their Bluetooth headsets, desperately confused by all the n00b patois.

Thankfully, Volfied is a game that may just be able to save a few of these souls from this sad fate. It originally hit the arcades in 1989 and this mobile version is designed to be a fairly accurate take on the original, rather than a reworking. As such, it has you controlling a tiny spacecraft with which you have to draw lines within a single screen playfield. Once you make an enclosed shape from those lines, that part of the play area is blocked out.

To complicate things, the screen is full of nasties. Each level features its own huge boss character surrounded by a gang of smaller minions. The different types of baddie move about in varying patterns, and so require different play tactics. You can destroy the smaller enemies by cutting them off with your line, but the boss always remains on the other side of the part of the shape that gets enclosed. Levels are finished by blocking off 80 per cent of the screen.

This may all sound quite simple, but Volfied has another funky feature in its armoury. Part of the visual allure of the game is the large sci-fi themed bosses that positively dwarf your little ship. But as an important requirement for arcade purist is high-score potential, the game designer had to think about the fact that the boss takes up about 20 per cent of the screen.

To combat this, when you block the boss within a small space without actually blocking out the rest of the screen, the mechanised leviathan starts shrinking. Keep on barricading it in and it'll shrink to the size of your own ship, which is pretty darn small. Some of the bosses end up looking truly comical. This should, in theory, make it possible to get 99.9 per cent of the screen blocked off. It's still something of a feat, though.

Volfied definitely caters for the more hardcore gamer, but is it any good for the fledgling button basher? Well yes, sort of. The game may be tricky, but it allows you to start from later levels once you've completed a certain number of stages. Every ten stages unlocks a later start level. Fair enough, it means that if you're truly useless you might not make it to the final 16th level without having completed 160 rounds, but you'd have to be pretty terrible to get to that state.

So Volfied is well suited to both casual gamers and the more hardcore crowd. Levels can only take a minute or two if you rush through them, but painstaking strategy can also be employed to get those real high-score peaks. The only niggle is that the boss characters start to be repeated later on in the game, but there's still a large number on show.

Which is great news for those who hanker after vintage treats. So forget about re-mortgaging your house to buy that original arcade cabinet when you can have just about as much fun on your mobile, and for a lot less money, too.