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U.S. Gold are releasing this as a 'special limited edition' in an attempt to convince us all that if we don't rush out and buy it straight away we will all have missed our chance to experience this "software legend" (their advertising people certainly know their stuff).

The trouble with legends is that they don't always measure up to their reputations when you eventually get to see them in the flesh - especially when they're being translated from a dedicated arcade machine onto the Spectrum. I'd never seen the arcade original but someone told me that it was a sort of 3D Pac-Man. That sounded promising, despite the fact that the main character is called Bentley Bear, so in went the tape.

The 3D Pac-Man description was fairly accurate in that Bentley's task is to wander around a three-dimensional 'castle' which is made up of structures of ramps and walkways which become increasingly complex on each successive screen, collecting little pills which are dotted along the main pathways just as in Pac-Man. As you'd expect, there are various types of monsters that home-in on Bentley (I hate that name!), including things that look like centipedes, trees and ghosts, and also additional items of treasure that can be collected or left where they are in order to block the path of the pursuing monsters.

Of course, as each screen is in three dimensions rather than the original Pac-Man's two, the game is a little more complicated. Bentley has the ability to jump over monsters rather than simply moving left/right, forward, backward, and it quite often happens that he will move behind a section of the 'castle' structure. When this happens, the program allows you to 'see through' the structure so that you can follow Bentley's movements although you are unable to see the actual path that he is on.

The drawback with using 3D structures is that the graphics are that much more complicated and in order to get everything onto the screen the moving figures and blocks which make up the structures all have to be quite small. This makes the game quite fiddly to control. Most of the paths around the screen are so narrow that it's not at all unusual for Bentley to shoot past one when you actually want him to turn into it. So you have to slowly double back and line him up precisely, before going down the path. By this time, of course, every monster on the screen has homed in on the hapless bear and sent him to bear heaven. As a result of this fiddliness the game's addictiveness suffers considerably. Instead of trying to do an exact conversion, the Spectrum version would have done well to keep the castle structures a little less complicated (along the lines of Addictive's Kirel, which had similar 3D structures but ones which were drawn larger and more clearly, yet were still complex enough to present a challenge).

By trying to pack a bit too much onto the Spectrum's screen the programmers have made the game too cramped to allow you to build up some speed and get really involved in it.