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THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH?

Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen for Circus Games, with four action-packed events available for your entertainment. Once the customary menu screen has been set to your satisfaction, the evening's proceedings start with you being cast as a brave tiger trainer. You are allowed three attempts at three tricks and with a cage full of very hungry looking tigers, the evening may well end right here.

The next event takes you way up in the air to the trapeze where, after donning your leotard, you have to complete another three tricks without a safety net. We stay up in the air for the next event which is the tightrope walk, but as usual things aren't as easy as they sound. You don't just have to walk across the tightrope (that would be enough for most people), somersaults, backflips and a unicycle ride have also to be performed for maximum points.

And last but not least the trick horse-riding rounds off what I hope has been an entertaining evening. Here the three tricks have become four, and range from avoiding being knocked off the horse by a custard pie-lobbing clown, to gracefully leaping through a series of hoops. That's showbiz folks!

If thought those endless Christmas circus specials were boring, then be assured this is even worse. Blobby sprites, poorly drawn backdrops and repetitive gameplay make for a show that never seems to end. I hope Superman is better.

MARK ... 39%

THE ESSENTIALS Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair Graphics: blobby sprites on dull backgrounds Sound: fair 48K title tunes but few in-game effects Options: definable keys. Play one or all events

'If this is what life under the big top is like, then it's not for me. But at least life In a real circus would be more exciting than watching the sloppy sprites in Circus Games do silly tricks with a whip, a rope and a chair) Worse still, you have to wait an age for each event to load. But all the events are extremely simplistic anyway, and about as entertaining as Jimmy Tarbuck's golfing anecdotes. When you've finished a game, you even have to reload the starting menu! The 'greatest show on earth' is a joke which looks like it was programmed by the clowns.'