This manages to sound a little like the sort of dreary double bill playing at your local on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Actually it's an adventure game and a strategy game. It's only Rock 'N' Roll follows the option menu strategy formula, the idea being to make it to the top of the music recording business. You have several main options like doing a tour, doing a concert, hiring a manager, making a record, buying a status symbol or writing a song for your group. The program's method of writing songs would have done David Bowie proud, with the cut-it-up- and-stick-it-down method that results in such gems as:

Why does she like puking
Shall I wipe your nose
So give me some
Da wop bop do
Kissing is like a dirty joke
Don't you phone her up
Don't do that, it's rude
Sing it baby
She never did like dribbling
Shall I tickle it
So lay down and be nice
Come on feel that beat

With songs like that you could be getting a contract from Virgin any day! (They'll probably put the hit single out on K-Tel later). Other elements of the game include your energy and happiness status, popularity and fan clubs. Since you start off with very little In the way of loot, concerts are restricted to busking and tours are way beyond your reach. It's also impossible to make a record unless you have a record contract - and getting one is not simple. Drugs probes and various other scandals can affect your popularity, and, as this is a real simulation, the more scandals you are caught up In, the more popular you become.

Tomb Of Dracula is another matter altogether, a sort of graphics and text adventure where you enter the tomb - a series of character block-sized rooms, some empty, some with treasure and some with ghouls In them. Depending on what number of silver stakes you are carrying (you start with 7) you will either beat or be defeated by whatever ghoul you meet. Skill plays no part.

Use of Colour: Poor
Graphics: Poor
Sound: Reasonable tunes, but otherwise poor
Skill levels: One

It's Only Rock 'n' Roll manages to be fun at first, but the program (which takes ages to load) turns out to have a complete insufficiency of options to make it very interesting or very realistic. Thus it bores within minutes, or as soon as you realise that you are more in the hands of luck than skill. The Tomb of Dracula is frankly pathetic. The graphics representations are drawn in mosaics of character blocks and wouldn't frighten a two-year old. And there is little thrill in meeting 'A Zombie ' which requires fifteen silver stakes for its defeat. You are carrying 18. Oh good. Bye bye Zombie, what next? It's about as skilful and thrilling as being sick on the floor.

Tomb Of Dracula is very boring - it's written in BASIC, the graphics are poor and I didn't like it. Rock 'n' Roll is better, but I am amazed that K-Tel would spend so much on TV ads and packaging for such programs. They should have spent more money on the games. There are better programs to be typed out of magazines.

Now and again you get to see the show you are putting on in Rock 'n' Roll - a drummer drumming, playing synths etc., which is quite good but I don't think it's worth buying It for that. It certainly isn't worth buying it for the Tomb Of Dracula.