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We've all heard of "Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble", and indeed what has been cooked up for you here is certainly very nasty.

After removing the pumpkin-coloured disc (well, it makes a change) from its sleeve you push on to find the idea behind Hallowe'en is really quite simple.

It's ladies' night and they have gone out on their broomsticks leaving you to clean up the haunted house. Household chores are not very pleasant, but usually don't present much of a problem you may think. Prepare for a surprise.

You must rid the house of a vicious lot of killer pumpkins, bouncing skulls, venomous spiders and chilling choppers.

Worse is yet to come. You find out that they are trying to rid the house of you!

You start, a lowly wizard, at the bottom of a five-floor screen with only a wand for protection. Movement between the floors is made possible by an assortment of ladders. Your aim is to kill all the skulls and pumpkins on the screen before moving on to the next one.

To kill them, you must first zap a hole in the ground with your wand, pulled mysteriously from the depths of your robe, and when a nasty falls into the hole you zap it until it falls to its death on the next floor.

Although it is not necessary to kill your enemies - except, that is, the pumpkins and skulls - doing so adds a fair amount to your survival score, as the authors call it.

There is a time limit on every screen and, if you reach it, you lose a man. You also lose a man when you run into one of the enemies.

After every third screen comes a challenging stage. this time you find letters moving around, and you try to zap them in the correct order to spell a word.

If you manage this - and it is not easy! - you collect a large bonus and you get onto a different challenging stage after the next three screens.

If you don't get all the letters in time, or if some of them disappear when you run into them, you must do the same challenging stage the next time. You don't lose a man if the time runs out on a challenging stage.

Altogether there are ten different stages with increasingly difficult combinations of enemies to defeat. Once you have completed the last stage, it is repeated until you lose all your men.

Hallowe'en takes a lot of getting into, especially the set-up option. This allows you to change a whole range of game parameters (number of enemies, type of enemies, length of time for screen, etc). It takes a lot of experimentation to work out what all the parameters change, as the instructions provided are minimal. When using the set-up option on my copy, the game just stopped!

Luckily there is a restore set-up function which sets all the parameters for you, but this also clears the high scores.

The controls take a bit of getting used to, as the paddle button is used for jumping, zapping and climbing ladders. The instructions say the game can be played with either paddle or joystick, but it is impossible to use the joystick for the two-player game as both players are on the screen at once, each using one paddle.

A tremendous element of luck is brought in by the random placing of the figures on the screen, mainly on the higher stages. Screens can move from the relatively easy to the almost impossible depending on this.

Hallowe'en is the first 64K game I have seen and it does seem to have a bit more going for it than the usual arcade game.

However, it did get very frustrating when it was impossible to go on, and it would surely have been more enjoyable had the set-up option worked.