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Orange squash is very nice on a hot day and Orange Juice sounds great on your record player, but the juicy fruit flunks out on your computer.

Orange Squash from Merlin Software is almost a good game - pretty graphics, lots of screens... but it's impossible to play.

The game is a Manic Miner-style climbing game in which you control a cute little orange called Oswald.

As Oswald hops his way to that great orange tree in the sky, he has to deal with several nasties with the customary zany names.

The sparkling wits, or should I say twits, at Merlin seem to think that calling certain of the nasties things like Eugene's balls and the Awesome Camels is hilariously funny. It may be to a minority of people actually in the software business, but it is meaningless to just about everybody else.

Screen one features the Rollerballs which Oswald has to shoot as he climbs the platforms collecting the lemons. To get onto the Awesome Camels on the next screen, he has to touch a flat at the top of the screen.

Although this sounds like a fairly simple climbing game, in practice it is nothing of the sort. Oswald moves far too slowly. It takes several seconds to get to where he makes his first platform hop - which is intensely irritating at the beginning of each new game.

Jumping from level to level is also a bit of a hit or miss business - more to do with luck than skill - and just far too difficult.