This program is described on the cassette inlay as home entertainment for ages seven plus, which rather suggests that it is aimed at children, and that there may perhaps be an educational element to it. There isn't - or at least, if there is it's so heavily disguised that 1 didn't notice it.

Hypercircuit is an arcade game which involves chasing an assortment of nasties around a printed circuit-shaped maze which is supposed to represent a microprocessor, shooting as many as possible. It's quite difficult; the maze has a lot of dead ends, and it would be a challenge to work out a route which covered all of it, without having to search out and destroy the invaders.

The game is protected by a colour code system, the pattern for which is printed on the back of the cassette inlay, rather than on a separate card, which I thought was a good idea as it's less likely to get lost that way. There is an optional instruction sequence at the start, then you go straight into the shoot-up part. If you're lucky, that is. More often than not, the program crashed before 1 had got that far, and I never actually succeeded in completing a game before the screen went blank.

The graphics and sound are pretty good, and I think I would probably have liked Hypercircuit if it hadn't crashed so often, but as it was I got more frustration than pleasure from it.

M.N.