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The trend towards games that are born out of merchandising and licensing deals continues, and has now got to the stage where some games have virtually become computerised adverts for particular products. The trouble is that so far, most of these games have been so feeble that they've not been very good adverts either or the product or for the software houses involved.

Action Biker, produced by Mastertronic, in association with KP (the crisps people), does little to change the state of affairs, I'm afraid.

Clumsy Colin is the character featured in the advertising campaign for KP 'Skips' (Skips being small crunchy objects consumed in great quantities by young children, but then, so are caterpillars), and it is the adventures of Colin as he travels around streets and houses on his bike that form the basis of the game.

Colin has to find his friend Marti and get him to a spaceport, but to do this he needs to locate fifty objects hidden in some of the 150 houses in the game. What I don't understand is that the instructions tell you that the game ends when Colin wakes up (woken by an alarm clock or collision with other vehicles!) - but surely if he's on a motorbike he should be awake already - it's all very odd.

The (static) drawing of the various houses and streets is fine, but the graphics for Colin on his bike, and the other vehicles on the roads are small and quite flickery, and only move across the screen one character square at a time rather than being smoothly animated (like the bike in Microsphere's Wheelie).

Along the way, Colin can enter some of the houses to find the objects he needs. The cassette inlay has a couple of screen shots of the interior of these houses and they look quite promising - being Atic Atac-style overhead views of the rooms. But, once you get into these rooms you find tht there is nothing to do there. If there is an object in the room, then a line of text will appear telling you that you've collected the object, but that's all; there's no animation, no combat, no manoeuvering to collect the object, just a static shot of Colin standing in a room, which I'm afraid didn't prove terribly addictive. Neither, for that matter, did the rest of the game. I'd "skip" this one if I were you (Yuk, yuk!).