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British Telecom seem to associate themselves with birds. First there was that revolting yellow parrot, Buzby, and now there's this thing called Firebird, which thinks it makes software.

First thoughts were to put a bomb under it and reduce it to bits small enough to forget about, but on reflection it's difficult to give it a total slagging when you consider how cheap - sorry about the pun but it's the only word for it - that it is. The business of low price software is something of a Catch 22. Peanut-priced games are very nice but unless they're good there's not much point in having them. To put it another way, do you cough up a tenner on something that keeps you up to see the sun rising or do you spend five bob and forget about it as soon as you walk out the door?

Which brings us back to Duck, another bird from BT. Cheap, but so primitive you could compare it with King Kong and see a hairy genius. Basically, the game features a man, I think, with a gun and a flock of geese flying overhead. All you've got to do is pick off the geese without letting any fall on your head and avoid the odd, seemingly indestructible, egg that plummets from the heights to land unbroken at your feet. Even less occasionally, a duck comes down to ground level for a chat, and somehow knocks you to the ground if not avoided... to the accompaniment of the most revoluting noises ever heard coming from a computer.

It's a rather slow game without much in the way of action. Protecting a country field from a plague of ducks doesn't have the same ring to it as saving the Universe from a fate worse than death, and it's unlikely that anyone with the savage lust for violence of the seasoned games freak will get any satisfaction from it.