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You're looking at somebody who's just returned from the kind of train journey that would make Jimmy Saville get out and walk. Hot, sweaty and packed - more like the age of the drain than the eternal bliss portrayed on the box, so I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the Saville dream. Loco, on the other hand is just the thing to restore faith in an intrinsically hideous mode of transport.

Alligata have given you the chance to play trains on a grand scale, not the bullet-shaped beasts in common use today, but a classic Casey Jones type steam engine, along the bottom of the screen is a bird's eye view of the tracks along which you are travelling, and the rest of the screen is taken up by a side view of the train as it streams across the landscape.

Using the joystick, you guide the train, switching tracks to avoid or lay waste the various assailants which attempt to put you alongside the Dodo on the extinct list. These tend to come mainly from the air in the form of airships and planes, dropping bombs the size of buses. Occasionally, a runaway handcart, packed with explosive comes belting towards you along the track which can also be disposed of by the method outlined below.

You have two methods of defence, firstly steam, which seems not to be the common or garden variety, but the extra special heavy duty type - more than capable of wiping out anything it touches. Besides this you have steam blasters for anything daft enough to find itself in front of you.

Loco is made by the graphics. The train is a good three inches long which makes a change from the two pixel horrors some programmers seem happy with, and the detail in the background is superb. At first I thought it was too easy until I noticed there was choice of levels. At level five it's impossible.