One of the things that any child hates to be is a failure. This is a pseudo-educational program which helps him or her to be just that.

The basic idea behind the game is sound; using a Space Invaders format with words taking the place of the aliens. The object is to shoot down the word by pressing the key corresponding to its grammatical definition (verb, noun or adjective).

As the game proceeds, the speed of descent of the words increases, giving you less time to decide which button is to be pressed.

If you fail to hit a word, you lose a life. OK, that's fair enough but the speed of the aliens increases if you miss giving progressively less time to react. This is hardly fair on a child who finds the game difficult! The game also needs a range of levels of difficult to cater for children of differing abilities.

The list of words was limited to those of five or less letters and consisted of roughly 70 words (according to a quick peep with a machine code monitor). Several of the words were suspect and I doubt if the list was based on a standard key word list.

M.W.