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On the face of it, Disney really ought to have been able to come up with a winner or two. Unsurprisingly though the software has been designed for the PC or Amiga and isn't best suited for C2N-equipped C64s. If anyone can come up with a three-year-old with a long enough attention span to survive the lengthy cassette loading period (about eight minutes for the initial load, and that's once we'd got past the Donald Duck security check) I'd be pleased to hear!

Once you actually get into the programs, however, they work fairly well. Mickey's Runaway Zoo is the best of the bunch. The graphics are stunning and the animations are lovely. It runs through number recognition 1-5 and then 6-9. Mickey's animals, which have all broken out of their cages, have to be retrieved. Your task is to press the relevant number key to activate the animation sequences.

The screen has been cleverly designed so that the numbers beat some relation to the picture they are hidden in - i.e. the 9 on the applecart shares its hiding place with nine apples; the 7 is amongst seven palm trees and so on. This gives parents considerable mileage for counting work, talking about numbers, relating them to their environments and so on - very neat and well thought out. Nice one. Wait.

Donald's Alphabet Chase is just as wonderful to watch. The letters that our duck has to chase from pillar to post all get up to some amazing shenanigans: they pop out of kitchen cupboards and stick out their tongues, they trip Donald up on the soap in the bathroom whilst others start to pull yards of loo paper off the roll! There's one in the paddling pool which spits out water and splashes him. Just amazing! It kept out audience utterly captivated time and time again!

On the other hand it would have had rather greater potential if we all lived across the other side of the Atlantic. American schools may introduce their tots to upper case (capital) letters, but unfortunately we don't. All this program actually achieves is to give you a spot of laborious keyboard practice whilst you watch the screens, pretty though they are.

The third of the trio - Goofy's Railway Express - teaches the long-suffering tot all about shapes and colours. It's extremely easy to get the hang of. All you have to do is hit the space bar every time a shape pops out of the train's smoke stack. Whatever you catch cleverly rematerialises into part of the landscape. Very Disney-esque animations, decent sound effects and great use of the graphics.

Sadly this potential is crippled on tape. Seven minutes to load the game in, then - picking 'medium' from the three choices of speed - you get an average of 24 seconds actual playing time per screen, with each screen taking at least a minute to load. With six different screens when the train chugs in one directio and the same six in reverse order as it comes back again, it means that, for a total of four minutes actual playing you have to sit around and twiddle thumbs for just under 20 minutes!

Just how "goofy" go they really think the punters are? The only thing that we actually learned was a revision of our colours, from the different coloured stripes on all those loading screens!

The manual really could have been better thought out. It contains some rather half-baked ideas for parent-child activities to follow up with - rather in the Fun School-style, but minus the brains of the Database people.

They'd probably have been better served giving the parents some idea of what to do with a fidgety three-year-old every half minute or so, whilst you're waiting for the next screen! Of course, with a disk drive, it might work better, but it's still going to be painful - this is definitely the weakest of an interesting, and graphically superb new educational range.