Killer B’s From the ‘50s : FROM THE DESERT. Rating: * * *. IBM, Tandy and compatibles, Amiga; 640K RAM required. List: $49.95. Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.

It’s June, 1951, and you are all that stands in the way of certain doom for the planet. A huge meteor has struck somewhere near the desert village of Lizard Breath. Soon, there are reports of giant ants marauding through the outback. You’ll have to fight them with guns, tanks, jets, anything you can get your hands on. Can humanity survive?

If the story sounds familiar, it is. Cinemaware’s “It Came From the Desert” adventure is based on 1,001 B movies of the ‘50s: mysteriously irradiated mutants threaten peace, freedom and The American Way.

“It,” which the gamemakers call an “interactive movie,” follows the travails of geologist Greg Bradley as he first gathers evidence of the giant ants’ existence, then leads the Army, the police and the townsfolk against the intruders and finally, enters the ant colony to dispatch the Queen.

“It” offers a RAM-busting menu of game playing that could use some serious technical work and a much better manual. Nonetheless, the game is a clever, creative and entertaining variation on the trite, predictable adventure game formula.

There’s not a troll, a sorcerer or a swordmaster in sight, but there’s Dusty, a good girl with a heart as big as the desert sky; Dr. Wells, the prophet of the laboratory; Bert, the hardened newspaper reporter, and, of course, a red-headed heartbreaker who thinks Greg is just swell.

How ironic that one of the better antidotes to the cliched adventure games of the 1990s comes right out of the cliched monster adventures of the 1950s--which, come to think of it, Hollywood invented to compete against the ultimate cliche, television.