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You can keep your Kevin Costners and Patrick Bergins. You can hold onto your Richard Greenes rather tightly, and you can even hide that fellow from the British Telecom ads of a few years back in the cupboard under the stairs and swear blind you haven't one in the house even though the inspector's registered it on his handheld detector and besides you've foolishly left a bow and several arrows hanging on the washing line.

As far as I'm concerned, the only Robin Hood worth the name was Errol Flynn. Who could possibly disagree that the 1938 film with Errol battling Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy of Gisbourne is the best ever swashbuckler to hit the silver screen? Only incredibly stupid, tasteless, cloddish people with no sense of grandeur and all the cinematic appreciation of a dead penguin. But enough of this ribaldry - on to the game.

In Robin Hood: Legend Quest, the game, and not the famous Michael Curtiz film of a similar name but without the subtitle and a big 'The Adventures Of' before the main character's name, Maid Marian's been locked up in Nottingham Castle by the Sheriff. Cue lots of running, jumping, opening of doors and shooting things as Robin attempts to rescue her. Yes, we're talking platform antics here, with the castle being divided into rooms by the simple expedient of bunging a locked door in your path whenever you try to go somewhere interesting. So you have to collect various keys to open the doors, to fight the villains to dodge the traps to grab the keys... and so on. You don't know which key opens which door, so hilarious complications can ensue as you run all over the place trying to find the one you've just unlocked.

Robin Hood is littered with friendly features to keep the game flowing along. For a start you can fire on the run - a stab at the fire button and Robin draws his bow, pauses a moment and lets go. Secondly, and most importantly, the game does away with all known physical laws and allows you to change direction in mid-jump, grab hold of ladders as you fall past and leap back to safety if you run off the end of a platform, not to mention surviving three nasty wounds before losing a life. Very slick. Once you switch your brain into This Does Not Reflect Reality mode, playing Robin becomes a dreamy, fast-paced and not at all annoying affair. Unlike some platformers, where you have to edge forwards to see if there's anything nasty waiting, with Robin you can just charge about at a healthy lick, loosing arrows at knavish rogues and springing over midget guards with gay abandon. Tremendously swashbuckly. (But no swordplay, though.)

The presentation has been given a good polishing as well. Robin insists on grinning out of the screen at you after leaping about for a bit, and whenever an arrow hits its mark, it explodes in a lovely glittery bang. There is also a load of useless but enticingly valuable treasure to lure you into exceptionally dangerous parts of the castle. Tragically, the whole effect is struck with great force and crazed rather badly by the game being a Speccy port. And a Speccy port with a horribly jerky screen at that. The thing is, aren't CPC games supposed to be in colour...?

Graphics 65%
Clear and detailed but as colourful as a dog's-eye-view of an outstandingly bland macintosh.

Sonics 60%
Usual chip music but some jolly nice crunchy spot effects. There are some clicky noises too sometimes.

Grab Factor 88%
Easy to pick up. Equally easy to put down, but if you've loaded it, you might as well play it.

Staying Power 78%
Grates when you get killed and a chore to go back through earlier levels. Lots of incentive to keep at it.

Overall 79%
An excitingly addictive platform game which will seize you in a nasty headlock until you beat it. A pity they didn't do a proper CPC version.