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As I make no secret of the fact that Arcadia is my favourite game, I was naturally pleased to receive Imagine's latest Spectrum offerings, Ah Diddums and Molar Maul. Both cassettes are very attractively presented in very imaginative (no pun intended) cassette covers, and both packages come with a lifetime guarantee, something which few other software houses offer. Instructions supplied with the tapes give detailed instructions on loading and playing.

I loaded Ah Diddums first, mainly because the cover appealed to me, plugged in my joystick and prepared to fight off the other toys in the toybox. Ah Diddums, as you will have probably guessed, is rather an original idea, concerning a tubby teddy and his mission to comfort the baby. What Teddy must do is take some toys to Baby so she will stop crying, but it's not as simple as that - you see this game has many sub-pots going on. If Teddy comforts Baby then the mother will qute sensibly put the lights out. "What is wrong with that?" I hear you cry. The trouble is that the toys in the toybox can only play with the light on, so they will do all they can to sto Teddy comforting the baby.

Sounds confusing - well, there's more! Teddy is in a set of 99 nested toyboxes, and to escape from any one of them he must pile building bricks up in a certain order. Also in the toybox (well, most of them, I've yet to get out of the first) is a Jack-in-the-Box. This bouncy little fellow takes the pressure off any sticky situations you might have got yourself into. Amongst the toys you can pick up is a peashooter, which I'm still trying to work out what to do with. I tried shooting the soldier who was in the box with me, bt all I ended up in doing was making it turn more vicious.

Ah Diddums uses amazing high resolution graphics and sound. It even uses colour, something I dearly missed when they brought out Schizoids. Also, Teddy has one amazing walk! I think this program has the edge over Arcadia, but I will not definitely give this the accolade of 'My favourite program' until I have mastered it.

Moving rapidly on, I then loaded Molar Maul. The way the title page was built up was quite fantastic.

I pressed a key and a large set of teeth were displayed on the screen - they then opened and the play area, the inside of someone's mouth is, if not very convincingly, displayed in full gruesome colour. The idea of the game is to fight off the deaded 'DK's (de-cays - geddit?) with your trusty toothbrush and supply of Imagico toothpaste. The game is very fast, and no matter how quickly you can brush one tooth, another is being attacked. The teeth are colour coded so you have an idea of how long they will probably survive.

You have three toothbrushes per game, and you can easily lose these every four cavities you get. You are not helped by the sweets which appear on the tongue, the 'DK's rush over and their power is increased. Altogether, I think Molar Maul is the most original, addictive game for the Spectrum I have played in a very long while.

Both Ah Diddums and Molar Maul are available for £5.50 from Imagine Software, Masons Buildings, Exchange Street East, Liverpool L2 3PN.