If you're even slightly bored by endless shoot-em-ups and chase-em-downs, if Defender leaves you drained and Pac-Man leaves you panting, if you're hungry for some unusual electronic fun with computers and games... then put on your overalls and take a stroll through the garden - Alien Garden, that is.

The world of Alien Garden is a graphically stunning geometric wonderland of shapes and colors, consisting of 24 colorful, geometric crystals arranged in four columns. Only a few crystals are on screen at a time because the world constantly scrolls up and down, reversing direction when it hits an edge of the playfield.

The crystal formations in the Alien Garden behave according to strict rules but you'll have to discover them game by game. Each crystal is comprised of perhaps fifty smaller pieces that sometimes yield points. But don't be surprised if you forget about scoring - a good round doesn't necessarily mean lots of points.

Meanwhile, your character - a cosmic insect equipped with mouth, stinger and wings - can move anywhere on screen, shifting the playfield right and left. As a game begins, all the crystals are identical but your critter can change that. You can do three things to a crystal as it passes by: 1) bite it with your mouth, 2) sting it with your tail or 3) stroke it with your wings. The crystal will react in one of three ways: 1) it will grow geometrically but retain its general shape and color, 2) it will change shape and color, becoming the next generation of crystal (there are 20 different generations you can put a crystal through) or 3) it will explode, removing the part of your body that caused the damage. Sometimes you die.

How do you know what to do in Alien Garden? You don't. You experiment. And you do a lot of dying at first. But a touch of the action button resets the game with the same set of rules so that everything you learned in the last game applies. If you turn the game off, then back on, the crystals will all be different and will react differently than during the previous game.

Certain generations of crystals will be "edible", meaning you will score points as you carve away pieces with your mouth. But here's the interesting mechanism that really elevates the strategy required: you get one point per piece of crystal you eat multiplied by the number of different generations of crystals you have grown in your garden. You will quickly catch onto the "farming" technique of finding a generation of crystal that can be both grown and eaten. First grow it with your wings (increasing its number of edible pieces) then eat it down to size. Believe me, you can create some complicated situations for yourself.