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What made the original Dragon's Lair such a hit when it first appeared in the arcades was the quality of the graphics made possible by the laserdisc system in the arcade machine, and as somebody said to me while I was playing it - "It loses something in translation from laserdisc onto the Spectrum, doesn't it?"

Surprisingly enough, it's not the graphics that are the main let down here - they may not be up to laserdisc standard, but they are perfectly acceptable - it's the gameplay. I found the game so hard to play, and spent so much time trying to get past the early stages that I just gave up in frustration after we'd had the game for about a week.

For a start, the loading and setting up instructions aren't very good. The prompt to press a key to start a game appears before the option to select joystick/keyboard controls, which is a bit daft, and it took me about fifteen minutes just to work out how to select the controls and get started. I nearly gave up before I'd even got started.

There are nine sections in the game, including falling discs, burning ropes, the Tentacle Room and so on, all taken from the arcade version, but I wanted to give up after two days of trying to get past the very first section. This was the falling disc, where you have to keep Daring Dirk on the disc as it descends the shaft into the dragon's castle. As you descend, an Air Genie keeps appearing to try and blow you off, and you have to keep Dirk balanced on the disc. But the stupid demon starts blowing before it appears on-screen, so you've hardly got any chance at all, unless you can guess where it's likely to appear.

The main problem is that it's hard to judge when you're doing the right thing. There are times when it looks like you're positioned in the right place to hit something or leap across a gap, only to find yourself dying on the spot. In the end, the game becomes more a matter of trial and error than of skill or reflexes - if you play the game enough times then by a process of elimination you'll work out what to do, where to stand and so on, but that doesn't make for a particularly exciting game I'm afraid.