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The hype states, though not is so many words, you can be a rock star. This isn't strictly true. In Rockstar Ate My Hamster, you, in fact, are the manager of a group of rockstars. It's your job to take them from the bottom rung to a leading charting, groovy rock band like Def Leppard or Cinderella.

The first thing you have to do when forming a band is to find the various members who will make up the band. You and your sidekick, Drop Dead Clive, are pictured sitting in front of a TV set, which flashes up pictures of famous personalities like Ted "Newsagent" Nugent and Michael "Wacky" Jacko. It also tells you exactly how much it costs a week to keep them going. When you've chosen the right number of artistes (from a solo effort to a four piece, the choice is yours), you then choose a name that for you, sums up rock and roll in a short phrase, that brings out the entire essence of the band as well as being catchy and different. Like Def Leppard or Cinderella.

To start with, you have three basic options. You can stick the group into a studio and force them to rehearse (from one to five days). You can shove them on the road for up to a week, doing anything from pubs to stadiums (budget allowing; of course, stadiums are expensive to book for one night, and you start with only £50,000) with variable ticket prices. Or, you can go for a bit of publicity. Publicity can be either good or bad, but as Clive has a habit of pointing out, any publicity is good publicity. Unless, of course, a stunt goes disastrously wrong, and you're left with headlines like "Rock Star Dies In Nuclear Holocaust". Lose all your band members this way and it's game over.

The same applies when you run out of money. The bank balance drops when you pay wages, buy equipment or book venues or rehearsal studios. It goes back up when you run a successful tour, or when your records are selling well.

Yet, you can release records. After a short while, the phone will ring and a record company will ofer you a recording deal, which will either by amazingly fab or terrible. Accept it and you can record an album, followed up by the release of singles, each with a video if required. Get a platinum selling album and you've cracked the game.

Easily CodeMasters' best yet. Nice graphics, a good handful of interesting tunes and good use of sarcasm in the charts (Cindy Cleavage with her hit, 'Give Me Back My Shirt'). Fun, but due to the small number of options, a little short lived.

Amstrad and C64 versions should be available as you read this, and funnily enough, so should the Spectrum version. They all feature the same gameplay, but the C64 should boast better sound and the Amstrad version should have better graphics.