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I was first introduced to Pipe Mania through a demo on the cover disk of an Amiga magazine and, although it only featured four levels of the game, I played those four levels over and over again. Something appealled to me about checking the piece that was in the dispenser and then having to work out, sometimes many moves ahead, where that piece would fit best within the empty grid. The four blank levels were like a canvas on which I learned to build up very intricate passageways of pipes, crossing them over each other, recrossing them, watching the points stack up. Like a lot of people of who discovered this famous puzzle game at the time, I was hooked after just one game. In fact, at the time I discovered Pipe Mania I didn't have an Amiga but the game (along with Sim City and Fiendish Freddy's Big Top 'O Fun) was one of the reasons I wanted to upgrade to one, and the Amiga Pipe Mania was the very first game I bought for my new toy.

By the early Nineties, the Electron was looking a bit long in the tooth compared to the Amiga (and the Atari ST), and it had never really attracted conversions of even the best-selling software of the day (There was no Electron version of Robocop, for example). So the fact it even got a conversion of Pipe Mania (and indeed Sim City) was something of a surprise. One suspects that Pipe Mania had created such a buzz, and was theoretically such a easy game to convert to the 8-bits, that its publisher just decided to take the risk of paying for it to be converted to every format. And, my word, who got the job to convert it? Well, none other than David "Repton Infinity" Lawrence.

The game is a monochrome rendition of the old favourite and each sheet presents a 10 x 7 squares grid. On the left of the screen sits the dispenser which shows you the next five pieces of pipe that you have to lay. On the right hand side counts down the timer bar, which starts full and sinks to empty, whereupon the 'flooz' begins to flow through whatever pipeline you have constructed. When you start the game, the 'start piece' is plotted quasi-randomly in the grid itself. You then use the ZX*? keys to move around a square cursor and pressing RETURN places the piece of pipe in the dispenser into the selected square underneath the cursor. On early screens, you must join up enough squares to meet the minimum 'Distance' requirement shown at the top of the screen. On later ones, you must not only meet the minimum 'Distance' requirement but also connect the pipeline to the 'end piece' which is also plotted somewhere in the grid.

The amount of time you are given to take a good look at the grid and the pieces currently in the dispenser when each sheet starts decreases as you get further. The grids also become more and more complex, as do the pieces that you have to place. For example, on the early levels, all of the squares in the grid are available to have "something" put in them. On these levels you can be at your most creative because the Distance requirement is low and, as soon as the flooz has flowed through just a few pipe sections, you're deemed to have won; everything else is a bonus. With time on your hands, you can fill almost every last square on the grid, curving the pipes, crossing them over each other and discovering all the hidden bonuses that you gain as a result. By level five however, things start to become more limited. Grids start with certain squares filled in and unavailable, and with other squares occupied by 'reservoirs' which will slow the flooz down if you connect your pipeline to them. The only catch being that they have to be connected in a certain way, and so you'll need to make sure you lay your pipe pieces in such a way that you can connect to them as they require.

By level nine, things start to get really challenging, with the pieces themselves requiring the flooz to flow through them in one direction only. Now you have to consider whether the piece you have placed not only fits into the layout but is facing in the appropriate direction. And so it continues... More and more surprises are introduced, making the sheets ever more tricky to complete.

The only real criticism that you could level at the Electron version is that it's monochrome. Everything else about it is simply brilliant. A game like this depends on split-second timing. Many times when you are playing, you forge some sort of plan to lay out the pipes in a particular order to maximise points and increase the chance of completing the minimum distance. However, when the flooz starts flowing and the dispenser stubbornly refuses to give up the piece that you need to complete your masterpiece, you have to abandon your plan. Any piece that can connect will suddenly do, so it's vital that you can race that cursor over to the grid square in the nick of time. I've lost count of the number of times I've snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in this sort of way. And the game engine never lets it down - it's all written in machine code and reacts instantly to game controls.

The grid fills the whole screen and, perhaps even due to the monochrome screen, the graphics are detailed and easily identifiable. Even when they need to convey a lot of information, like "this is a one-way only bonus pipe section", they do so with extreme ease. In a very welcome feature too, the game has absolutely amazing sound - the instantly recognisable Pipe Mania theme blasts through the Electron's speakers on interrupt on the title page, and the same riffs and tralalas of the Amiga version have been replicated throughout the action. Even the "Game Over" sequence is fascinating.

David Lawrence's care with the conversion is positively Herculean. You might have thought that the most Electron owners could expect would be the basic Pipe Mania game. But the game also includes not only an Expert mode, but a two player co-operative play option.

To turn to the Expert mode first, this takes exactly the same format as the Basic mode but gives the player two dispensers instead of one. Instead of pressing RETURN to lay a piece, you hit + to lay a piece from the top dispenser, or > to lay a piece from the bottom one. This introduces a whole new level of skill into the proceedings.

As for two-player co-operative play, well playing Pipe Mania with a friend is often hilarious and frequently descends into shouting within a few seconds!

With so much to get your teeth into, Pipe Mania is truly one of the Electron's greatest games. It's got it all - great graphics, super sound, gripping gameplay and it even has a password system. Every four screens you complete presents you with a password so that, if the flooz hits the fan, you don't have to go all the way back to level one. And finally, there's even the odd bonus game between levels, in which you have to build up mazes from a crane that drops pieces into the grid. Very tricky, and completely inconsequential to the game proper, but it provides a very welcome break and is yet another sign of the true quality of this title.

Pipe Mania came on a BBC/Electron flippy (Yes, as you might expect, the BBC version is even better!) cassette in a decorative cardboard box and sold for £9.95 in the early Nineties. These days it seems to fetch between £10-£12 second hand, and it was also included on Superior/Acornsoft's compilation Play It Again Sam 16, which tends to command about the same price.

There were so few games for the Acorn machines that many readers had begun to take anything written by Acorn User with several buckets' worth of salt by this point and yet one could sense genuine enthusiasm in their praise for it. In addition, their reviews chimed with the hundreds of accolades that almost every version of the game picked up and, even though it was released very late in the Electron's life, it shifted a fair few copies. The concept itself of course endures even to this day. There are probably people heavily addicted to the modern smartphone version of it within a few miles of where you're sitting as you read this. But, of the BBC/Electron version, it was "truly original and a refreshing change" according to one review. "No-one's collection is complete without this," another.

I can only echo each of these quotes. If you see it, get it! It's excellent.