This game about painting houses comes with a comprehensive twelve page set of instructions. Don't let this put you off - it is in fact a simple game of slapping emulsion all over a house.

Each house has a number of rooms connected by lifts and steps which allow you to move from one to the other, painting as you go. You have to paint the entire house within a time limit which gets shorter on the higher levels.

Each dwelling has a selection of hazards which you must avoid. For example, Brenda the Brat puts handprints on the walls and has to be kept quiet with a candy stick.

A series of malevolent buckets also causes problems with flying half pints whizzing across levels, dumb buckets shuttling up and down floors and their leader, the bucket-chucker, pursuing you relentlessly. Don't worry though, some of them don't appear until higher levels.

Avoiding these horrors is mostly a matter of jumping, ducking or moving quickly to another storey of the house.

There are 48 levels in total. Each level consists of eight buildings containing six levels. The graphics are good and you can choose one of eight different painters to use as your character.

Each of the skill levels is different, which stops the game from getting boring. For example, on level two your painter uses invisible paint! And on skill level six, not only is the paint invisible, but you have to paint all eight buildings in the dark!

After you have completed each building, you are given a word which will eventually make up a sentence. This makes the game even more addictive. I recommend all Commodore 64 owners to add Bristles to their shelves. Painting has never been such fun!

It's not the graphics and it's not the sound that makes Bristles a good game - so what is it? I'll tell you. It's a new and original idea, with the option of four people playing the game. It offers very good family entertainment.

Graphics are rather simple on characters and houses but there are elegant touches at times. Sound is really just as good when it loads as in the actual game. I took great delight in discovering the word at the end of the screen and this seemed to add to the challenge.

Definitely a competent piece of software for your collection.

Home owners who have been promising to redecorate their houses for years can now do somebody else's from the comfort of their armchairs. This version of the simple painter games has much more to it than its crude predecessors.

There is lots to keep you alert with things moving everywhere; most of them trying to return you to the basement.

Certainly more fun than the real thing.