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Microdeal, a British company operating from St. Austell in Cornwall, have recently brought out an Air Traffic Controller game for several different micros, all claiming high resolution graphics and other exciting features.

Microdeal also market a similar program, Space Shuttle Simulator. Microdeal sell the program on tape or disc, and although I got the tape version for review it loaded with no errors first time. It's &2E blocks long.

After a pause, a little title screen comes up in Mode 5. I guess a title screen sets the trend for a whole game, really. It's one of those little things that doesn't add to the enjoyment of the game, but can give it a professional feel right from the start. Oh dear, Microdeal.

It was at this point that a sudden suspicion crept into my mind, but I immediately dismissed the idea. No, they wouldn't have written a game that relies almost solely on smooth, quick movement in... in Basic - would they? Of course not.

The program then wanted to know if we were using the keyboard or the joysticks - a point in its favour - then moved on, after a five-second pause, to the main game frame. It was at this point that the awful truth reared its ugly head. Little two-triangle aeroplanes flicked slowly from pixel to pixel in black and white.

Pressing CTRL-BREAK and OLD revealed 10K of BASIC controlling events.

I for one expect to find a well-written, adequate fast game in the box when I part with my money, like those of Acornsoft, Program Power and Superior Software, to mention only a few. Programs like Killer Gorilla, Q*Bert and Planetoids, machine-coded and beautifully written, are really worth the money. Games such as this one you'd expect to see in the listings section of Big K - after all, it is totally in Basic...!

To be fair, though, it also has 'landing' and 'take-off' screens, but these are in much the same vein as the first. You just alternate between the two screens until all of the five machines you started off with are crashed. A major fault in the program design is that these 'planes' weighing 'tons' each, have no inertia! They do 180 degree turns at massive speeds on a pinhead!

When all the planes under your control have finally done their Pope impersonations on the tarmac, you're treated with another badly-laid out high-score screen, and asked if you want another go. If you say no, the program prints up endless triangles in different colours (the programmer probably thought this would have 'em spellbound) until you hit ESCAPE.

In conclusion, if this is the state of the art in BBC flight simulator-type games, then forget it now. Alas. Although it seems like a good idea, the implementation of this particular product has not come off very well.