Asteroids was one of the most popular of all the old Atari classics and many a youth was misspent blasting rocks in an arcade. Personally I couldn't see the attraction of the game, and the stupid control system used to annoy me.

This clone of the game for Java-enabled phones is pretty faithful to the original. You take command of a ship (well, a white triangle, actually) and must blast rocks (blue pentagrams) to smithereens using your laser gun (red dot) without coming into contact with them.

As well as accurately mimicking the blocky graphics of the classic, it plays the same too. You need to thrust and turn using the keys on your phone, which proves to be a pretty intuitive control method. It's not very fast to start off with, so the game is easy to pick up even if you haven't played it before. What's more, the instructions can be called up whenever you want through the Pause menu.

Unfortunately there wasn't enough in this version of the game to excite me because it's basically just a copy of the original. Perhaps with a little innovation in terms of gameplay I would've finally gotten hooked on Asteroids.

I know a lot of people love the original and if you're one of them then this is probably an essential download for your phone.