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Space - the final frontier. I'm a big fan of Star Trek me, so anything to do with space and all that googly stuff gets me really excited.

So... you remember Space Quest, don't you? Course you do. That was the time you, humble 'brain the size of a peanut' interplanetary janitor, managed to save your planet Xenon (now where have I heard that name before?) from certain death by Vohaul's secret Star Generator. Woo!

Vohaul sounds just like my kind of guy, actually. He's slimy, fat, purple (personally I prefer green) and really, really gross. And he's got a plan. Unless you manage to blitz him in time, Xenon's going to be invaded by thousands of genetically engineered life-insurance salesman synthetically designed to make the life of every single citizen a misery. Oh no!

Oh yeah. And if your skimmer hadn't crashed on the way to the labour camp Vohaul's picked out specially for you, you wouldn't be able to do anything at all about it. Luckily, if you're clever enough, you can make it through the planet Labion, back to Vohaul's asteroid fortress and try to *stop the plan*.

Action's presented in typical Sierra style. You wander around the 3D environment using your joystick and typing in commands (to pick up objects and so on) just as in a normal text input adventure.

According to the back of the box, the graphics are in "incredible 3D". Erm... well, we all know what 3D is like and this isn't it. You *can* walk behind bushes and tress, but they look more like a pile of spinach (yeuch - really hate the stuff) than a shrub. I know you can't have brilliant graphics if you want a decent amount of memory devoted to the gameplay, but you don't need to have badly defined blobby sprites instead. You can see from Lucasfilm's Zak McKracken just how much detail you can cram into this type of game; it takes just one look at blockland to see Sierra haven't done as much.

Yeah, yeah, but what about the game itself? Well, I suppose it's OK if you like dying a lot. As for me, I'd rather spend the afternoon with a couple of tons of billy-goat spare ribs in BBQ sauce than spend an hour or so getting killed every time I find a new location! So what if you can save to disk! Looks to me like they just ran out of ideas for a more interesting storyline.

Personally, I didn't go a bundle on this one, but if you liked the first Space Quest, you'll probably find something to enjoy in it. 3D and movement is a fair bit faster than the original (though the controls are still a bit fiddly now and then) and the parser's adequate. If you can stay alive long enough, there's plenty of puzzles to solve, but once you've died 56 times in the first half hour, does anybody really care?

Unless you're really into the Space Quest theme, take a long look at this before you fork out 20 quid. It may have nice presentation and a glossy box but when you get right down to it, it's just... well, your average lizard's toenail sort of romp. And who wants that, when you can sell a few buckets of snot for an extra fiver and buy a nice, shiny copy of Lucasfilm's Zak McKracken instead?