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You play the role of Sinbad the sailor in this fantasy game from Virgin. This time his quest is to convert his evil enemies to the peaceful way of life.

These baddies float through the air and with the aid of your flying carpet, you must convert them by touching them. But don't touch them twice as they still possess enough malice to knock you to the ground and drain your energy.

Once you've converted all of them without getting too battered in the process, you go on to a journey through an asteroid storm! You must control the carpet to avoid direct collisions with the asteroids that come hurtling towards you. When you manage to come out of this, the process is repeated with another type of enemy. The game ends when your energy goes down to zero.

The fast flicker-free multi-coloured graphics are very good. The way in which asteroids spinning on their own axes increase in size as they come hurtling towards you is especially impressive.

This game doesn't follow any standard Pac-Zap-Invader type theme and the instructions claim that there is a special surprise reward at the end of the journey.

Also, but more mundanely, the game comes with a trendy Virgin inlay card, but unfortunately none of this hides the fact that the game is only of average quality. In fact, because there are effectively only two different screens to master and the basic idea of the game is so simple, the game quickly becomes repetitive and boring.

Coupled with the blunder that neither the energy nor the score is shown on the screen when the game is being played, and there are no extra options such as sound on-off, freeze or quit, Sinbad can only be described as mediocre.

If you've seen any of Virgin's latest offerings you'll know that, at last, they're going up in the world. Sinbad is a fairly good arcade style game and it bodes well for the future. Though the game's graphics are simple, they are effective and the programmer has made nice use of the Beeb's sound facilities.

The cassette inlay promises you something "refreshing different" and, I suppose, Sinbad is at least original in parts. But it's also pretty boring. The first screen - turning the platforms purple - can be quite challenging, but it's not very interesting.

The second screen is not even original - dodging a meteor storm in space must be familiar to every games player. Not a game I'd want to return to very often.

The game doesn't live up to its inlay. In fact, I found it tedious in the extreme. For a start, it had a very annoying tune.

This was a great pity because the idea behind the game is very good. The graphics aren't bad either.