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Dome Trooper is excellent. It's Quilled, like so many independent adventures, but it has a highly original plot which is both well thought out and executed.

The Illustrator has been used to provide graphics that complement the adventure, and the author has made clever use of the special features such as the Flash command - at one point, a huge CocaCola sign flashed on and off above a futuristic equivalent of Piccadilly Circus.

It is the far future: humanity seems to have become divided into two factions, the people who live in the domed cities and the evil barbaric hordes who infest the desert outside.

You know enemy agents within your beloved city have been told to poison the city's air and water supplies with a terrible drug that will kill everybody within days.

So here you are, armed with your trusty blaster, standing on the edge of the desert outside City Dome Alpha. What now? Well, you could bodly stride into the desert and take on the enemy on their home ground... or do what I did, which is turn tail and zip back into the safety of the city. Anyway, there's enough exploring to do inside the city walls to keep any adventurer happy for ages!

Inside the city you find just about what you'd expect - people and buildings. You can zip about by using the transporter system, which acts like a lift and takes you to different levels of the city.

On the top floor there's the hydroponic gardens where the city's food supplies are grown, tended by robots. Then there's the main living areas, filled with bars and low dives and gun shops and restaurants... The people you meet seem to be scared of you. Either that, or they want to shoot you.

Dome Trooper proves that, with help from The Quill and The Illustrator and with a generous helping of imagination and hard work, it is possible to put out good adventures for a reasonable price without plagiarising other people's idea.

Label: Matland, 29 Moorland Road, Michelover, Derby Author: M. Holmes Price: £2.95 Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Gary Rook

****

Nice one. Lots of invention, neat puzzles of about the right level of difficulty. And it's cheap.