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A computer version of a pinball machine might sound a little boring, but Pinball Arcade from Kansas is quite enjoyable, and makes a welcome change from blasting nasties out in space or being chased round a maze.

The interesting part is designing your own pinball machine from the five pages of bumpers, wires, slings and targets provided. When you are satisfied with the board it can be saved on tape, to be loaded and used again. Quite a number of options are available - you can even alter the tilt of the bounce of the ball.

When playing, the only keys are Z and / for the left and right flippers and the space bar to compress the spring.

There are a couple of annoying faults however. Firstly, it will not run with the Plus 1 attached, and I am not going through all the bother of unplugging everything and unscrewing the Plus 1 every time I want to use the program. The reason is simple - part of the code placed in page &D is being overwritten by the operating system, causing a whopping great crash when it is called by the program.

The second fault is the fantastic amount of flicker when the ball moves. Hasn't the author ever heard of *FX 19? The addition of this command would make a world of difference. If Kansas cure these bugs and brighten up the loader a bit then it will be better value.

Roland Waddilove