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Ice Station Zero first appeared several years ago, and following 8th Day's policy of tarting up its old releases and putting them out again, here's the new improved version. But is it improved? Sadly the answer would seem to be no. It's now got graphics, and more text thanks to compression techniques (such as The Press), plus a RAM save/load feature, but the basic game is still the same and that now looks very dated and not worth the rather high asking price of £2.99.

The adventure begins with you outside a small snow-covered tent, with a blizzard obscuring your view except for a high ridge of towering glacial ice to the east. (I think we can safely assume that it's cold.) Inside the tent there are some objects, very few of which you can examine, while outside to the north are some huskies tied to a sledge (Mush, mush!). EXAMINE SLEDGE. "It does seem a shame to leave them tied up." It also seems a shame that after a response like this you have to SEARCH SLEDGE in order to survive the first few moves.

If you do survive the peril of the wolves, you might be able to make it across the ice floes. This is trickier than it should be because, after jumping to the first floe, if you try to JUMP EAST again you're returned to the previous location, whereas if you just type EAST you make it across to the next ice floe.

As usual with any 8th Day game, there is a heck of a lot of adventure in there, but I for one wasn't encouraged to seek it out because the whole thing really did look very dated indeed. It needed PAW and a complete re-write to make this one worth digging out of the archives, and it in no way compares to the shot in the arm that Smart Egg gave to Quann Tulla/Federation. A rare failure for 8th Day.