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Gardening is a hobby that I have always looked upon as being quiet and relaxing, and although the theme of this game is garden flavoured, no-one could describe it as quiet or relaxing.

While the fairly lengthy program is loading, up comes a rather nice, interesting picture to hold your attention, the quality of which made me very hopeful of things to come, and I certainly wasn't disappointed.

After selecting joystick or keyboard, one or two player options, you find yourself in control of Robbie the robot, who you can move rapidly in eight directions all over the large playing area. From the bottom centre of the screen starts growing your prize flower with the wonderful name, Thrygodian Magga Chrisanthodil.

There is a garden wall on each side of the screen in which there are many recesses, and in these appear randomly the various sprays and items such as grow-bags, watering cans, etc for bonus points.

Play commences with an invasion of Intersellar Space Slugs, who wiggle their way slightly diagonally up and down the screen, so that no matter what height they start at, if left undestroyed, they will all finish at the prize flower, which starts to shrink back down when more than one slug settles on it. They must be destroyed by guiding Robbie to the appropriate spray the wrong one only stuns them temporarily) making sure Robbie doesn't come into contact withe them or he loses one of his five lives. He clicks very neatly on to the spray can, if lined up O.K., and then can fire left or right with nice squeaky, puffy sounds. If you can manage to keep the flower pest-free for about four minutes, regardless of score, you will be rewarded with a nice tune and some nice graphics as the flower blooms in all its glory!

But that is the easy part; after each blooming you pass on to the next stage. The Slugs are now joined by Scuttling Leeches, and they sure can scuttle, moving at 45 degrees up and down they are very hard to avoid and hit, and of course the slug spray won't kill the leeches, so you are constantly changing sprays.

Again, if you can keep your flower clear for three to five minutes, another blooming will take place, and you can pass on to the third stage where the attack is mounted by the leeches and Menacing Midges, which have a fluttering, unpredictable kind of movement, and needless to say, require yet another type of spray.

Skill will once again bring a more difficult stage, where you are presented with all three kinds of bug at the same time, and changing cans while avoiding pets is quite a challenge.

Throughout the game, you are randomly presented with the chance of many bonus points by picking up fly-swots, fertilizer, etc, but this means dropping the spray can and leaving the plant and Robbie undefended. Fortunately you can ignore them until your skill reaches a high enough level and you start to worry about highest scores.

If you get through five stages, the music becomes more interesting and you may well face even more horrors, but that is for you to find out, because I'm afraid that is as far as I have got, and pretty exhauting it was too. I achieved a high score of twenty odd thousand but that seems almost secondary to the enjoyment that this game gives.

The number of graphics and their speed (the spray even expands three times as it moves across the screen) surely must mean the game is written in machine code.

In conclusion, this is the best game that I have tried, extremely well written, very entertaining and addictive and I thoroughly recommend it. The only fault I can find, is that if you have to use the keyboard to play instead of a joystick, you may find the keys used are a bit close together as they are all in a line next to each other on the left hand side of the keyboard, and I think would have been better with the right hand on the right side of the keyboard.

But in the face of such genius it's rather a petty complaint. The cassette fly is attractive and well documented, and for £5.35 completes a very worthwhile addition to anyone's games library.