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Pac-Man is possibly the world's most durable computer game character. Of late, he's enjoyed something of a rebirth as Namco have developed a few new game concepts around the basic idea: Pac-Man eats powerpills and fruit to keep him going and bump up his score. If Pac-Man eats a *big* pill, then the ghosts run away 'cos they know he can now eat *them*! But after a while the *big* pill wears off and they can chase him again. It is a brilliant game design, always was, adn it's odd how even today it can still be given new life by a few inspired Japanese game designers.

In Pac-Land, the scenario is viewed from the side, and a little Pac-Man in a hat runs through Pac-Land whilst being pursued by ghosts, only this time the ghosts have got little cartoon cars and planes and can bomb him with smaller ghosts... It's weird but you get the idea.

So that's the Namco design, what about the Grandslam conversion? Well, it's as faithful as you can really be on 8-bit computers, really. The game design is so simple it would take a complete aardvark to program it wrong, and so even the Spectrum version I looked at was playable and addictive, in the way that all simple and cheerful games are.

The graphics are monochrome in the Speccy version naturally, but not bad for that. Well drawn and although not animated in a lot of frames, the animation is appropriate and smooth with it. Obviously when the screen is full of sprites, the program slows down, but then again I always said the Spectrum should have had hardware sprites like the C64. It's been optimised so that it's not too noticeable though, so even at its most juddery it doesn't get you into trouble with the enemy ghosts.

Easy to play? You can do it with one hand. Easy to beat? Think again. It looks easy but the timing is critical, and you have to know what's ahead. On the whole, I thought it an above average conversion on the Spectrum and one I'd come back to again.