Gold in them there tunnels

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Although the bottom may have dropped out of the gold market in the financial world, in Gold Digger, from Firebird, it is still a much-sought-after commodity. Your aim in this nice little arcade game is to tunnel about underground, collecting the various nuggets that lie in your path. You have only a limited time to collect them all, but even so it seems easy enough, doesn't it?

However, your task is made decidedly tricky by a group of "misers" who are out to stop you. They follow you around with the unerring homing instinct of a Scotsman after a bargain, and a nasty collection they are too! The first one has an annoyed expression and several legs and looks like a red spider with a hangover. The others resemble a smiling green pumpkin, a yellow frog in goggles and a dozy purple robot.

All the misers are determined to prevent you digging up the gold and all have their own method of chasing you. If they catch you it's curtains, so you either avoid them, or tunnel under a rock and hope it squashes them.

Should you succeed in collecting all the gold, you find the next screen is more difficult, as the number of misers increases until eventually it is almost impossible to stay alive.

On the whole, this is a good game, with reasonable use of colour and sound. In fact, I found the sound rather overpowering at one stage.

While loading, the computer goes into a strident version of "Clementine" - the sort of version Reginald Dixon might have produced given a fairground organ and half-an-hour of glue-sniffing. However, this can be switched off.

My only complaint is one that can be levelled at several games. There is a pause button that freeze-frames the game, which is useful when in a very tight corner. Unfortunately, it is the R key, well away from the other controls and difficult to hit in an emergency.

However, I've temporarily solved the problem. I can catch the R key every time with my forehead. The only trouble is, my micro is beginning to look rather battered and I seem to be getting an awful lot of headaches lately.

James Bibby