It's Shingo Sugiura's Fruit Worm, a sort of super-sized version of the classic 80's romp Millipede. You know the drill - you, as a worm, roam around eating fruit and each fruit makes your worm one podule bigger. The trick is to eat as many fruits as possible without eating yourself or crashing into the border, or indeed any of the obstacles littering the playing area.

Graphically this game is not bad - it's done in Mode 2 so the cherries and associated fruit sprites are multicoloured. Your blue snake, and the plain black obstacles are a bit of a copout but are functional. Sound is brilliant - four channels riffs open up the game, announce your demise and proclaim a high score. There's a score, and a high score table reminiscent of the Acornsoft games for the Beeb between games.

Sadly however, it is extremely frustrating to play. The keys are the regular ZX*? combination. What the author has done is little more than just increase the sprite size 100% of a BASIC 8x8 CHR$ romp. The worm therefore jumps a massive sixteen (!) pixels across or up the screen with each move, resulting in a very jerky feel. In proportion to everything else this of course only gives the player a very small playing area, 18 x 12 squares in fact. As soon as you start gobbling up that fruit, of which there is a copious amount, those squares start to get filled with your ever-expanding body in record time.

The key detection also leaves a lot to be desired. The game sometimes appears not to notice that you pressed a movement key, leaving your worm to plough mercilessly into scenery or the surrounding wall.

Perhaps recognising these flaws, and to compensate for them, in Fruit Worm you do not in fact need to eat all of the fruits - eating about three-quarters of them will send you on to the next level.

I suspect Fruit Worm is one of Shingo Sugiura's earlier works (Later outings can be found on the PD circuit and in other magazines of the era!). My typical gaming time - before all three of my lives were wiped out! - was just over a minute! Although persevering does reward you with different types of fruit and an increased level of difficulty, it is too 'buggy' to be fun.

Fruit Worm was written by Shingo Sugiura and is available on the Your Computer 3.12 companion disc. It runs on all BBC computers, and the Acorn Electron.

Dave E