I really hate to do this to Sirius designer Paul Edelstein, but if you were all set to buy his maze game Wayout because of its incredibly realistic inside-the-labyrinth graphics, save your money and get his Capture the Flag instead. Capture the Flag not only does everything Wayout does, it does it forty times better - adding good game music, welcome movement system improvements, some beautiful graphics touches and (most important of all) fiercely challenging two-player chase action to the basic Wayout 3-D maze puzzle.

Turning Wayout into a two-player game with few other changes would have been enough of an improvement but Edelstein has gone whole hog here. Among other things, Capture gives you two separate 3-D maze views: one for the Invader, who enters screen left and tries to "capture the flag" by racing through the maze to one of the exits marked on the right, and one for the Defender, who enters from the right and tries to stop the Invader by tagging him before he can exit. Much like Wayout, each player's 3-D view shows the maze from his current standpoint within it, and there's also an overhead maze map (at the screen bottom) that displays as much of the maze as the two players have explored up to that point. Unlike Wayout, however, the number of mazes is infinite, being randomly re-drawn with each new game. You can also take either of the two roles, and either play solitaire against a very quick computer program or go true two-player against a human opponent. And where Wayout's logical but rather cumbersome movement system made working your way through any maze an agonizingly slow process, Capture gives you a two-mode system that sounds weird but works great.

There's also a gorgeous sunburst-colored sky over the maze (unlike Wayout's flat color), the joints between the walls are thicker (making it easier to "read" distances), and bouncy recombinant be-bop riffs come out of your TV speaker (like Wayout, the music gets louder as your enemy gets closer). I wouldn't want to push the negative comparisons with Wayout too far: the earlier game is a fine piece of work. But it's very rare to see a good game design wholly redone by the same designer, rarer still to see him improve on his original in every single respect.

If you're playing Invader, learn how to use the Walking Movement "fast-turn" feature. It's the only way you'll be fast enough to beat a good Defender.