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You may well have played Ranarama on an 8 bit system, or perhaps you remember the amazing yellow and blue frog in the ads. Either way, you will be pleased to hear that Hewson has marked its entry into the 16 bit arena with an excellent conversion of this arcade/fantasy adventure.

For the uninitiated, you play the part of the miserable apprentice sorcerer Mervyn, who has unwittingly turned himself into a frog while trying to brew a potion to improve his hideous looks. As if this wasn't enough, he has also just managed to escape from an invasion of warlocks, who have take over all his lovely dungeons.

The only way out of his unfortunate predicament is for Mervyn to blast his way down to the lowest dungeon, destroying all the warlocks en route.

It is only by reaching the lowest dungeon, and defeating the most evil warlock of all in ritual magic combat that he stands an unearthly chance of finding the right potion to turn him back into his original ghastly self.

The rooms of each dungeon are viewed in close up from above Gauntlet style but only appear once you enter them. The name starts in the top dungeon where things soon start to hot up. First there are hordes of evil creatures, brought into existence to guard the warlocks.

Then there are the generators that create vicious weapons such as spinning knives, and finally there are the warlocks themselves.

As luck would have it, some rooms have symbols engraved into the stone floor. Called Floor Glyphs, they come in four varieties being the Glyphs of Seeing, Travel Power and Sorcery.

The Glyph of Seeing gives you a map of all rooms and doors (including invisible ones) thus far explored; it even shows you the position of the warlocks.

Travel gives you a side view of the dungeon and allows you the opportunity of travelling up or down to another level.

Using the Glyph of Power unleashes a powerful bolt of energy fatal to most creatures that are likely to be in the room with you.

The Glyph of Sorcery is the key to increasing your magic powers, both offensive and defensive. There are four types of magic spell - Power, Offence, Defence, and Affect. You start the game with weak version of each and, by defeating Warlocks, you can collect enough runes to upgrade the potency of the spells while on a Sorcery Glyph, giving you at least a fighting chance on the nastier levels to come.

As you would expect from a Hewson game, the graphics have been upgraded and enlarged to make full use of the ST's extra facilities.

For a game of this type, the action is surprisingly fast, although you'll need to plan and map your way through the deeper dungeons to stand any real chance of success.

Ranarama on the ST is an impeccably coded, finely balanced mixture of arcade and fantasy adventure.

A thinking person's game, but one which will delight all devotees of the genre. It's well worth checking it out.