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An early contender for the strangest game of the year, CRL's latest release ID is something that defies description. It is, basically, you talking to the computer and trying to find out about yourself before you, the computer or both of you goes mad.

ID is an electronic personality that was transmitted across the galaxy in the days before man existed. Purely by chance, it happened to land on Earth. By doing nothing but watch human history develop, it has an enormous store of knowledge if only you can tap that source. You can learn from it, teach it and help it, but first you must gain its trust. The bulk of the screen is devoted to your conversations, but at the bottom is a box representing the percentage trust that you have achieved. This starts at zero and you must take it all the way to 100% if you are to succeed.

You can ask or tell ID anything you lise, but what sort of responses you get depend on what sort of mood he/she/it is in, ranging from happy through neutral to gloomy and sad and includng a strange feeling that it calls scrungy. It is difficult to know what to say to ID as its response varies every time you play, although you can save your current position.

Certain words or phrases stir some sort of emotion deep within ID and your trust starts to rise. ID may ask you questions about your favourite colours of friends or ask you to give the name of something tall, etc. The answers you give affect ID in curious ways and he may end up telling you that blue was never his favourite colour, or it once was, or both! You scratch my back and I'll steal yours, ID replied cryptically to one of my comments.

With a trust factor of well over sixty per cent, I still had not got the faintest idea of what was going on. The comments I was typing in were certainly getting odder. ID of course would just argue that I was going mad. The worrying thing is, it might just be right!