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When I was in the salad days of my youth, I enjoyed curling up with a copy of a Biggles or Jennings book. Nowadays, it seems, most 12-year-olds idle away their time reading Jackson and Livingstone Fighting Fantasy adventures. How I longed to see Biggles on TV, but never did.

Today, however, many youngsters' dreams are answered as Fighting Fantasy has now reached the screen, all be it on a computer monitor. Rebel Planet was the first of this type of adventure I had seen. It is a far cry from the likes of Rick Hanson or Sphinx Adventure, as fans of Fantasy role playing books will realise.

The adventure takes place on a merchant space craft called Caydia and three planets in the evil Arcadian Empire. Your task is to locate resistance rebels then destroy the invader's Queen computer, before it destroys you.

As with many other adventures, you spend most of your time collecting artefacts to solve the problems you encounter on your journey: But there the similarity with other adventures ends. You have to cope with a dispenser on the space craft, into which you must regularly insert a card.

A digitised relation of K9 shuttles around while you are on the good ship Caydia. You also have to manage to advance or retard time to ensure you don't miss your transport.

To be successful you must deal with various random conflicts which have to be resolved in order to continue. That is not to say that battle is always the best course of action. For instance, an Arcadian guard needs to be paid rather than killed, and the patrols should be avoided at all costs, especially if the odds are against you.

It is also worth talking to any character you meet as even Arcadians may give valuable information. I really enjoyed the live feel of the game generated by the character movements, even if I found them a little irritating to the general solving of the adventure.

My only real criticism of this adventure - once I had made the quantum leap from the usual fare I come across - was the dire lack of location description. Hence I still feel that Rebel Planet lacks a lot of the atmosphere which you would find in the book.

I also found the parser rather limited, but having said that, I am looking forward to seeing the second in this series: SEAS OF BLOOD. All in all, a good romp which I would recommend to anyone who would like a deviation from the usual.

* * * Second Opinion (By Janice Murray) * * *

Rebel Planet is an unusual adventure, and this alone makes it worthwhile considering. However, the poor location description and the lack of good command parser may put off some adventurers. If these were improved slightly it would make a tremendous difference to the game.

Pendragon