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Enthar Seven is the latest adventure from Robico, and the most enjoyable and exciting that I have played to date. BBC cassette owners - go out and buy a disk drive now. Disk owners read on, then go and buy the game!

The program comes in two formats, a twin disk pack for 40 track users, and a single floppy on 80 tracks. I played a pre-production version in the 40 track format.

On loading, a colourful title page invites you to either play the adventure, or to read other information about Robico (the publisher). This is really rather good advertising, as the spare space on the program disk is filled with screenshots of other games. Inventive stuff!

A detailed introduction to Enthar Seven explains that you have, er... "borrowed" a space hopper, and then realised you can't fly it!

Things seem to be going well until the hopper's orbit around Enthar Seven begins to decay. That is the first problem. Getting off the space ship before you spiral into the planet is the second.

This is fairly easy to achieve, but when you end up in pitch darkness with just a space suit and helmet to keep you company, you realise that something is seriously wrong. It took me about twenty minutes to sort that out, but once done, the fun really begins! The text is lengthy, interesting and incredibly atmospheric.

The game is truly huge, with 450 locations and 80 objects. I've only seen half of the objects, and cannot imagine what the rest consist of! There is so much to say about the game in such a short space, that I'll have to give you only a brief idea of gameplay.

The planet is split into seven sections, and by use of the teleport, instead of a clock as in Lords Of Time, you can jaunt around the planet, solving bits of each section before making your way back to the metal cubicle.

It seems that each section can be partially solved with objects found in that sector, before coming across a more tricky problem. I can't guarantee this, as the author Robert O'Leary has moved some of the objects around for the final version.

Remember the "Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury on telly, with those wonderful shots of wind-swept plains, and huge Martian constructions? This is just what comes to mind when you find yourself staggering blindly through a barren wilderness with only eight moves before you explode! There are caverns, houses, forests, swamplands, high-security areas, a barren wilderness, vast radiation poisoned wastelands, a dried-up lake, a river, and an acid pool, and even a storyline other than your own, about the Lorvox family.

I have yet to complete the game, having done about 73% but am determined to do so. Let's face it - I'm hooked! One part I particularly enjoyed was sneaking up on an extremely unfriendly security camera and rendering it useless - great fun!

If your input isn't understood and you repeat the same command, the program will get quite upset! This is all part of the fun, and in keeping with the humour that runs throughout the game. LOOK AT is permissible, along with many other sentence commands. This is particularly well implemented, for if the world following LOOK AT is not understood, the general surroundings are described instead. This is a lot better than a "I can't see a ... " message.

Typing USE (always a sign of desperation!) produces a very helpful message, and SCORE produces an hilarious one!

There is good use of Mode 7 colour (which can be switched off by people who like b&w eye strain!) and the INVENTORY and LOOK commands handle objects very well; a paragraph is presented instead of a long list - even AND is inserted before the final item. You can do some very complex things with some of the objects. For example, should you need a vacuum cleaner, and find one that doesn't work, you will have to remove the bag and repair it with another object, and attach a power cell, before you can proceed with the task in hand!

The "nuts and bolts" of the programming are good, with useful commands such as "@BUFFSAVE" which will store your current position in the memory buffer. It works like a saved game on disk, but is much faster and very useful for poor old single-drive owners like me!

Unlike another disk adventure I recently reviewed, this one doesn't "hang up" if you have the wrong disk in at any time, it simply informs you something is wrong, and asks you to insert the correct disk before continuing. The response times are not all that fast, and the longest is 24 seconds. However, all the commands can be abbreviated, and this speeds up the access time to an average of about five seconds.

Enthar Seven comes in a very professional-looking package, with an SOS card, an adventurer's notepad, and detailed instructions, all titled with Robico's smart gold on black logo.

It's available for BBC B on disk from, from Robico Software of Mid-Glamorgan, and costs £17.95 for the 40 track version, £16.95 for the 80 track version.