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Life really is hard in the music business.

In order to reach number one, Rankin' Rodney must negotiate all twenty screens of the game. Each screen corresponds to one position in the chart, so the first screen which you encounter is number twenty and the final barrier is number one itself.

The idea is to collect the musical instruments which are dotted around the screens. There are also 'bum notes' (a musical term) in there as well, which must be avoided.

There are also patches of distortion (another musical term, though more polite) which will do serious damage to Rodney's health.

Although the idea of the game is great, it's let down badly by being totally unplayable. Rankin' Rodney dances about the multi-coloured mazes, but can only walk on one colour at a time. So if he's on a blue square and wants to hop to collect an instrument on an orange square, he'll need to change colour.

To do this, he must jump on to one of the multi-coloured triangles which will change him to a random colour.

This method is far from satisfactory. Moving round the maze is too complicated and the game plays more like a strategy puzzle than an arcade game.

As one book reviewer said, once I put this down, I couldn't bear to pick it up again.

The music is good though. Each screen plays a different tune and the rhythm is really strong. The cassette claims to exploit the C64's sound to the limit, which is true. It's a shame that the accompanying game is so poor.

The facilities are all there - you can choose which screen you want to start playing from and you can also save the high score table to cassette, which is something I've not seen before.

All in all, a pretty boring game. If you only want to sit and listen to the music, then it's worth the £6.90 from Task Set. But if you're after a decent game for your Commodore 64, you'll have to look elsewhere.