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And now for something completely predictable... Monty Python's Flying Circus has some excellent touches, but very little gameplay - if only it were as exciting and innovative as its namesake.

Gumby, Michael Palin's dim-witted creation with a fetish for chartered accountancy, has lost his brain. To add insult to injury, it's split into four pieces and each has been hidden in a different part of the crazy world of Monty Python - your task, (as if you hadn't guessed), is to retrieve it through four levels of non-stop silliness. Level One sees our anti-hero hopping around platforms before transmuting into a fish-like creature for the Level Two underwater maze. Sprouting a pair of wings he flies through Level Three, undergoing a further metamorphosis for the bonus rooms, where he appears as a head on a springy foot.

Baddies include Vikings on wheels, ministers of silly walks and dead parrots, which Gumby batters by throwing fish at them! Flying fish can also activate switches and destroy cheese blocks, revealing food power-ups or tins of spam - make it to the end of the level with sixteen tins and you get a bit of brain. Surreal!

Monty Python's Flying Circus features authentic sprites and backgrounds, which do a fair job of capturing the wacky atmosphere of Terry Gilliam's cartoons, but the animation and scrolling leaves a lot to be desired. Worst of all, the gameplay is very repetitive, and while its namesake cut new ground in comedy, the game just rehashes old ideas.

I love Monty Python's Flying Circus the show, but the game just doesn't measure up - on budget, it's worth more than the 47% it got in Issue 66, but it's nowhere near as good as it could've been. Not that I care, of course. I don't care about anything really - I didn't even want to be a staff writer! I wanted to be... A *lumberjack*!!! All together, "I'm a lumberjack and I'm O.K. I sleep all night and I work all day..."

[Fair enough Ian, you're fired! - Ed]