It's just as well that the software industry doesn't follow the pessimists. Just think if they followed that "the end is nigh" bunch - there would be no such thing a future sport. And where would we be then? No Future Basketball, no Speedball, no Speedball II, and God forbid, no Cyberball and no Stormball.

Just a few weeks ago Dan Trent was wishing that the world was at an end. He was a major star on the Stormball circuit before he lost his hand in a freak accident while playing. Thanks to the miracle of modern surgery he was fitted with a mechanical glove which enabled him to keep playing the sport he loved. And now he's back, hungry for success.

You can take on Dan Trent and the rest of the Stormballers to make your way to the top of the league. The basic rules of Stormball are a doddle. Two opponents move around on hover boards over their own half of the pitch. The ball is then thrown into your opponent's half, hopefully in such a way that your opponent can't intercept or catch it.

By throwing the ball over bonus tiles and score multiplier you rack up points. The player with the most points at the end of the four quarters is declared the winner.

This is a one or two-player action-packed game. In one-player mode you can practise against a droid known as SIDD to hone your skills. When you have attained the appropriate skill level you are ready to enter the league.

To play the professionals you must first put up some money - the better your opponent the more money it costs to play him. If you win you get back your original stake plus the same again as a bonus. Of course, if you lose it is back to the training ground.

If you are really confident of a win you can always stake a bet outside the arena with Dodgy Dexter. He is the man responsible for getting Trent back into the Stormball arena after his injury but he is despised nonetheless, and the feeling must be mutual as the odds the gives on your winning are never that good.

Control fo the man is fairly easy - simply movement causes the board to move over the pitch, and to catch the ball position your man to one side as it passes. Then throw it back and try to aim it so that your opponent can't reach it. This can be frustrating as he catches it with no difficulty and you race all around your half in a seemingly pointless pursuit.

If you become bored with the computer-generated pitches you can always design your own. Stormball really only comes into its own in two-player mode where the screen splits to allow both players the same view. There's loads more pleasure in beating a mate than beating the computer opponents. But this is the same for all games in this genre.

Unfortunately, a less than brilliant use of colours mars what could have been an excellent sports game. When it comes to the crunch, buy Speedball 2 instead - it's infinitely more playable and more fun than this. Stormball is a real disappointment, but Millenium will bounce back.

So what have I got to do? But why? These two questions demand immediate answers in any sports sim. Sport stresses, on a basic level, physical action above mental effort. So, to focus a player's abilities during the vital first seconds of play, the goals need to be obvious for both scoring and motivation purposes. Unfortunately, in Stormball, while it is crystal clear how you play the reason why you'd want to is initially left begging.

Stormball is a futuristic hybrid of squash and tennis played on a symmetrical court. The two players roam their half of the pitch on small hover pads, in pursuit of a floating ball. Catching and throwing the ball into the opposition's half scores a point for every tile it passes over.

Scores total up until the ball is caught by the other player, or it rebounds off the force-field walls that surround the court, back to you. Bonus and penalty squares litter players' halves, again placed symmetrically. As the game gets tougher, these become the major targets, because they score hundreds and not single points.

A match sees the two players vying for position, looking to find or block that high-scoring opportunity. Each pitch is laid out differently, so the first quarter of any game is concerned with experimenting to find the most lucrative point areas, trick squares and opponent's tactics.

Degrading
These mechanics are easily grasped, but motivation is difficult. On a practical level the perspective of the floor makes life difficult. The pitch is flat and the tiles are shades of the same colour, so seeing where to hurl the ball is a matter of luck and judgement.

On a gameplay level, once the best scoring area becomes apparent Stormball can degrade into a tit for tat slinging match because the early opponents fail to anticipate shots, no matter how predictable.

You quickly learn where opponents will throw the ball so you can limit the points damage, but they don't learn this lesson. While victory under these conditions is still sweet, it is hardly unexpected and lacks any real tension.

The logic behind the game only becomes apparent after a solid session against the higher-level opponents. At the outset the lack of goals leaves players uncertain why they are being outscored. The mechanics and tactics of scoring only become obvious after you've spent hours chasing the ball around your own half watching others rake in the points because when you're scoring it's hard to tell exactly which tiles are being hit and with what result.

Hard knocks
Experience is the only way to gain the necessary skills to judge which tiles should be attacked or defended. Once gained the game changes into a tactical cat-and-mouse battle and the enjoyment level is suitably upped.

The future-sport trappings can be ignored and it becomes a 'squash plus' game, where two or three shots are traded just to suck er an opponent into a vulnerable position. Unfortunately it lacks impetus to carry you through to this stage and demands real commitment.

Stormball's graphics and sound misrepresent the game as a futuresport of the Speedball stable. Once a few matches are played its real character emerges, revealing a sedate, tactical game. This transformation takes time and that is Stormball's weakness. It is worth struggling through to the later stages but many find the struggle to get this far too off-putting to be worth the effort.

Following in the pixel pathway of such futuristic games as Speedball 2, M.U.D.S., Cyberball and Disc, Stormball's been programmed by Paul Caruthers, the brains behind such hits as Archipelagos, and 3D shoot 'em up, Resolution 101. The scenario is woefully familiar: In the near future Stormball has literally taken the sporting world by storm and is watched by millions of fanatical fans. It's a deadly sport, played with superfast hardened metallic balls capable of shearing off the odd arm or two - and that's if you're lucky!

The pitch is made up of a number of coloured tiles in an enclosed arena. There are over 40 such pitches to choose from, each with a different layout and combination of high and low-scoring tiles. There's also an editor option with which you can create up to 60 new ones.

Stormball isn't a team game, but involves two players in a race to accumulate the most points in a four quarter match. Points are won by slamming the ball across an opponent's half of the pitch - each tile the ball passes over scores a number of points depending on the tile's worth. Various tiles act as blockers or ramps and some can boost the speed of the ball or wipe out your score for that particular throw. Additionally, there are bonus symbols which appear at random and, when hit, can bestow greater speed on a particular player, incapacitate your opponent for a limited time, add 500 points to your score or 100 credits to your bank balance, and send shards of energy in all directions picking up masses of points into the bargain.

There are some nice touches such as a stats breakdown after each quarter, a practice droid to hone your skills before taking on players from the professional league, and being able to place a bet on the out- come of each match. Unfortunately, the game fails in the playability stakes. The players move awkwardly, it's hard to distinguish the different coloured tiles, and the scrolling is far too jerky for my liking. The 2D sprites superimposed on a 3D playing field only highlights the lack of animation in the players' movements and points are practically scored at random in many cases. It's also incredibly slow.

Obviously, comparisons will be drawn to the Bitmaps' Speedball, if only because the game is widely held to be the best of its type. Perhaps if Stormball had adopted that game's overhead view, the gameplay would have been more accessible. As it stands, Millenium's new release is nothing more than a glorified 3D version of Arkanoid, and a very slow one at that.