Tron 2 (Disney Interactive, PC)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Just 20 years ago, computers were moving from being things only universities or military establishments could afford and into the home.

This generated a certain amount of angst among technophobes, which the movie Tron exploited in 1982.

The villain was the Master Control Program, a nasty piece of software which gets ideas way above its work station and wants to take over the world.

Jeff Bridges played the hero, a computer hacker who is digitised and beamed into the computer to do battle with MCP with hologram vehicles and laser weapons. This was when we were being wowed by games like Space Invaders and PacMan, so it seemed exciting stuff.

It has taken two decades for a game to imitate art, but Tron 2 was worth the wait.

The plot picks up nicely where the movie left off. Tron (which was the name of the program that let Bridges get inside the computer) has been refined to the point where it can replicate a human_s genetic code and digitise them into any network.

But an evil corporation, fCon, steals the program and uses it to digitise hackers codenamed DataWraiths into the world_s computer networks.

You play the part of Jet, the son of Tron founder Alan Bradley who has been captured and digitised by fCon.

If you saw Tron, you will be impressed by the way the graphics capture the look and feel of the movie.

Although it is a shoot-_em-up, first-person action game at heart, Tron_s laser-inspired graphics set it apart from the rest of the pack.

And computer terms are cleverly woven into the gameplay. For example, you earn version upgrades rather than experience points, other digitised characters communicate with you via ping signals, patch routines replace health packs, and you have to use spe

cial sub-routines each time you enter a new level to neutralise that system_s viruses.

A large part of the game consists of racing light cycles in contained environments, which look rather like enormous silicon chips, and trying to make your opponents crash.

The main weapon is a sort of laser disc, and the multiplayer mode sets up to 16 players in Disc Arenas where this is the only weapon.

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