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If you can't beat them, join them. That was the strategy used by the author of this game. Unfortuantely, he hasn't joined them: this is a very much below par version of Manic Miner.

In this version, you have to escape from a cage in an alien zoo. A button at the top of each cage must be pressed to open the door to the next. You climb to the top and down again to do this, while avoiding the occupants. Unlike Manic Miner there are no collapsible and moving walkways, no poisonous stalagtites or bushes and only one type of alien in each cage. The platforms are just block graphics and all screens look pretty much the same except for colours and aliens.

The game lacks the wit of Manic Miner, the extra lives don't dance, there are no silly names and objects like "mutant Telephones", and nothing to touch the Monty Python boot and pedestal of the original.

Instructions are a separate program - a brief screen setting paragraph and control keys which, incidentally, are a little weird.

This isn't particularly bad, it just isn't a patch on the old block off which it is a chip.

M.T.