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Oh dear, I've generally liked Durell's games in the past, and their recent Thanatos is one of my current favourites but Fat Worm has turned out to be about as enticing as the name suggests.

You play the fat worm of the title: a sluggish, spindly thing that is wandering around the circuit board of a Spectrum (cue for lots of puns about "bugs" in the instructions). Along the way you have to climb up and down the ramps of the different databases to eat the floating triangles, and you have to eat fifty of these before finally locating the disc drive and cloning yourself. The triangles replenish your supply of 'blaster sparkles' which are used to kill the crawler bugs, and you also have a supply of 'burper sparkles' for killing the creeper bugs who are flying around in sputniks. If you think that it all sounds pretty daft then you should try playing it...

The most interesting part of the game is the way the worm moves - he/she/it moves via alternate clockwise/anticlockwise swaying motions which are hard to control but actually create a realistic sluglike movement (mind you, the swaying of the screen display made me feel seasick).

The circuit board of the Spectrum is represented as a 3D overhead view, and from a programming and graphics point of view it's all quite clever. But from a fun and games point of view it all seems like a bit of a lost cause, and for £9.95 Durell have fallen short of their usual entertainment value.