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Savage Pond is the micro equivalent of a TV nature program. You know, the type that comes on just when you're eating your supper and treats you to scenes of various animal life chewing up various other forms of animal life in gory detail.

You're a tadpole in a pond, and you must eat to stay alive. If you survive long enough, you graduate to frog status, and snap up dragonflies instead of amoebae.

In the first stage of the game, you swim up and down the pond, avoiding the hydra on the bottom and (later) the jellyfish at the top.

The occasional worm falls into the pond, and you must snap it up before it disappears at the bottom of the screen. Once you've eaten five worms, a beetle grub appears. Don't shake it by the hand, eat it.

While you're being greedy, a dragonfly is flying back and forth above the pond dropping eggs into the water. These you must also eat before they have a chance to hatch into very nasty tadpole-eating nymphs.

This live-and-let-die policy is continued throughout the game. After a while the screen changes: hey-presto, there's a frog on a lily-pad. Pressing the space-bar makes her stick out her tongue, with fatal results for any dragonfly that's in the wrong place.

Meanwhile, radioactive waste has been dumped into your watery home. The sides of the pond become contaminated and contact with them causes instant death, In later stages of the game, the radiation has an unpleasant effect on some local bees, who make life very difficult for our froggy friends up top.

There is a lot to this game. My only grouse is with the control - the tadpole is frustratingly difficult to manoeuvre in confined spaces. Otherwise I heartily recommend a dip into Savage Pond.