A good shoot 'em up has always been a favourite among games players. Even hardcore football management and role-playing types can easily be talked into picking up their joysticks for a 10 minute session of 'blast anything that moves', and one of the first games to really shape the genre appeared on the humble Commodore 64 some 15 or so years ago.

Andrew Braybrooke's Uridium was a masterpiece of coding, game design and playability. The control you had over your ship as it skimmed over the huge alien behemoths in space was revolutionary. Piss-poor collision detection was thrown out of the window, never to be tolerated in a shoot 'em up again, and Andrew was among the first to introduce the concept of learning what was going to come next in order to kill the stuff that was important and dodge the stuff that could be left alone. The game came stuffed with masses of 'one more go' appeal because of this, and Uridium subsequently found critical and public acclaim. The game went on to be translated to all the other 8bit machines of the day and enjoyed equal success before the sequel arrived on the 16bit machines a few years later to rather less applause. Big up respec' is due to Mr Braybrooke and this wonderful game.