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You either love adventure games or you loathe them. I love them, and this one is a beauty which should appeal to novice and experienced adventurer alike. Your task is to track down the Golden Bird of Paradise which has been captured by an evil wizard lurking somewhere in the heart of Firienwood.

The game starts by giving a brief description of your surroundings and then waits for you to type in instructions to determine what it should do next. Instructions are either a direction (e.g. NORTH meaning go north) or a verb followed by a noun (e.g. ENTER BUILDING). If you are lucky, the computer responds with some new information; if you are unlucky, it responds with "I don't understand" and you must try something else.

Firienwood features the usual gamut of fiendish puzzles, magic passwords, knife-throwing goblins, quirky humour, and all manner of treasures and monsters to be dealt with en route. You can also save a game to tape, ready to be resumed at a later date.

The game is written entirely in machine code which makes for some very fast responses (and also stops you from cheating!) but means the program has to be *RUN rather than CHAINed into the micro.

Although there are no graphics in the game (What do you expect in 32K?) good use is made of colour - non-committal messages usually appear in purple, warning messages in red (severe warning messages in flashing red), useful information in green, magic messages in yellow, etc.

It's impossible to fully check an adventure program in a few days, but an initial examination reveals a large number of locations and puzzles to keep an adventurer happy for weeks.

Nice one, MP Software!