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Why anyone who likes darts would want to wait while a cassette program loads up a simulated version of the game is beyond me. You could walk down the road to your local pub in half the time the Atari recorder takes to load the program!

On the other hand, if you are under-pub age, and don't have a dart board, this will give a very reasonable feel for what playing darts is like,

Well, almost. Holding a joystick is not quite the same thing as throwing a dart, but the program has some nice touches.

The graphics in this game are a delight. The screen displays a marvellous old English pub, with a clean-cut youth poised to throw - no leather jacketed yobbos in this pub, please.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, an enlarged version of the dartboard appears, with a ghostly hand hovering over the bulls eye, holding a dart. You have to manoeuvre the hand to aim the dart at the treble 20, or whatever.

The joystick controls the hand's movements, but what makes this game difficult is that the hand behaves like it was owned by someone who's worked his way through 15 pints of bitter. It doesn't stay on line for more than a fraction of a second, so you have to keep steadying it.

There are various skill levels, so that with increasing skill level the hand gets more and more twitchy. Pressing the fire button 'throws' the dart. And just as in the real version, there is a wire hazard, which means that if you hit the wire, your dart will bounce out.

Up to four players can play at one time, and if you are really bored, you can play against the computer who will, of course, thrash you soundly, since it controls the whole thing anyway.

You can choose to play 301, 501, 901, or 1,001, and you can opt to begin with a double, or to omit the double and go straight for score. One pleasant thing about the computer version of darts is that the machine does all the arithmetic - well, nearly all. It won't tell you what to aim for to 'get out' in a make-able score, say 138. You still have to stir your brain to that extent at least.