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Where could you meet kangeroos, vampire rabbits and prawns? Give up? The answer is in Quack-A-Jack, a zany new game from Severn Software.

As Red Jack, a famous pirate duck (hence the name of the program), you find yourself in a strange dungeon. Your prison is littered with valuable gold coins and weird eggs. Get the coins and eggs to score points.

If you fail to collect an egg within a certain time limit, it will hatch a fearful winged monster, the Terraductile (shouldn't that be Pterodactyl?). This zooms across and destroys you. Initially there are five eggs to collect, but later on this number increases dramatically.

The chasers (there are 16 different ones, including burgers, prawns, micros and ice-cream cones) together with the stationary cooking pots continually make life difficult, you must avoid them at all costs.

The Toy Room - those teddies look mean! - is just one example of the humour in this program, and they're not joking either!

Your weight crumbles the flagstones as you move off them, to make impassable gaps. These gaps can be lethal later on, if your passage to an egg is blocked by a balloon or ghost. In a real emergency (i.e. frequently) a whole horizontal row can be moved left or right, enabling you to get off an 'island' you may have created by mistake.

The graphics are colourful and very well done. The programmer has also given each chaser unique movements. Control keys are easy to use: a 'pause' feature is provided as well as a Hall of Fame. On-screen instructions are a virtual copy of the cassette insert, but fortunately you can skip through them before each game. Each new screen brings a different little rhyme. There is one serious bug however: if you start a hard game (press option 2 - start at screen 6), you start with a 25,000-point bonus!

All in all though, an addictive, exciting and challenging game which is worthy of a place in anyone's software collection.