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You don't have to be a brilliantly intelligent gamesplayer (like me) with thousands of admiring fans (like me) to know that there are some Amiga games which aren't ever going to translate that well to the C64. You know the sort of thing - Starglider 2, Dungeon Master, Carrier Command... and Faery Tale Adventure.

Come off it lads, you don't expect something which started life at about 50 quid and that got everyone shouting out state-of-the-art software left, right and centre, to go down smoothly as a spot of gnome punch with extra lizard's entrails on the C64. It doesn't.

Anyhow, here's the low-down on the story. Julian, Philip and Kevin are three namby pamby spoilsport brothers who've insisted on ruining the life of a bunch of stinking ghosts, goblins and ghouls. What the brothers are after is a magical talisman and they're prepared to go out into the big bad world of lakes, castles, manors and settlements to get their cowardy custard hands on it.

The adventure is graphically displayed and you pick options, get objects, use magic, etc using either the mouse or a combination of joystick and keyboard.

Sounds OK so far? Yeah, well it would be if it weren't for the pretty basic graphics and the incredibly long and tedious disk accessing time. Have they heard of data compression at Microillusion? Data compression, my foot! Even when you're just walking around samey ordinary grassland, there's a bit of disk access *every 10-20 seconds* and it takes about one minute of waiting around every time you walk in or out of a building!

Don't know about you, but I'd rather spend an afternoon washing my underpants than waste any time slobbering over a hot joystick waiting for another little bit to load. Especially with graphics as flickery and indistinguishable as this. I mean, if you're got a graphic adventure, you should be able to see a bit more of an object than just a blob.

Apparently, there's an in-depth game behind all this. And if you can be bothered to get any way into it at all you deserve a presentation Chuck Vomit perseverance medal. Oh yeah, and if you've already wasted 20 quid on it, bad luck! Hur, hur.