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Here you play a home computer programmer who has decided to go into business selling your own products. Since the program typifies the decisions that have to be made in real life you'll soon be wishing you hadn't bothered!

You start by deciding what kind of programs you want to write - arcade games, adventures, educational programs and so on. Naturally I decided on adventures. You then have to decide what aspects of your programming you want to highlight. To do this you have twenty points that have to be allocated to different features, quality of programming, addictiveness, packaging and such like.

Since I had chosen adventures, I gave the maximum eight points to programming, five to packaging and seven to addictiveness. I can definitely say that judging from my performance this is not the right way to allocate your points.

You are then given an option to sell your program to raise money to add to your original investment of five hundred pounds. The decision made, you enter into the game.

The game is cycled monthly until you are either bankrupt or have made a quarter of a million pounds profit. If this figure is reached, the Electron assumes you have the financial acumen to be a millionaire and ends the game.

At least I assume it does. I couldn't get that far. Each month you make decisions which are totalled to give a monthly run down on the state of your business.

This shows the number of programs you have on the market, your sales, stock, rates payable, assets and any outstanding loans. You are then given the options for the month. You can write a program, sell your products to retailers, convert your existing programs to other computers, try to obtain a loan, sell out - which will give you your score - or see Honest Harry, who will undoubtedly try to sell you a load of cheap cassettes at a bargain price.

To increase your profit, you are asked how much you wish to spend on advertising, how much you wish to spend on duplicating cassettes and how many you want duplicated. Your decisions are evaluated and the program then gives you a news sheet - which in my case always seemed to mean bad news.

Then you are shown a graph displaying your sales figures for the year, and finally the run down of your business again.

It generally took me between one and two years to need a bank loan. This is where I discovered the only bug in an otherwise professional program. You are allowed to borrow a thousand pounds each month.

Once you take out a loan you are charged ten per cent interest each month. I borrowed £1,000 and six months later owed £7,600! I've heard of inflation but this is ridiculous! It appears that if you borrow money one month and do not pay it off the next you are treated as if you borrow money each month, though you don't, at least, pay interest on all of it.

This program has been available on at least one other computer for a while. Although a truly professional job it is not that different from other similar games already available.

Overall, somewhat marred by that bug discussed earlier. The rest of the program is superior, though similar, to other strategy games currently available.

Merlin