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Remember Software Invasion? A couple of years ago, they were the leading BBC games software house, but over the last year or so, they've been very quiet. Well, they have returned to the software scene with a game title, Stairway To Hell - grotesquely imaginative, huh? Well, I booted the disc eagerly to see what they've come up with.

The familiar logo of an exploding sun popped up and disappeared equally quickly to reveal a screen full of playing instructions. Apparently, this game consists of 15 screens in which you control a little man down through the various caverns to the earth's core in order to ultimately fight it out with the devil himself! How could you resist a challenge like that?! I quickly pressed the space bar to play the game.

Up came a picture of a system of tunnels and various objects flickering their way across the screen. In fact, it was a platform and ladders game! So what can I say? The picture of the caves is rather nicely done in Mode 1 and there's quite a variety of nasties to contend with but the animation left a lot to be desired, the sound effects could have been a lot more imaginative, characters could have been much bigger and there's too much flicker. In any case, platform and ladders games went out quite a while back as I remember. Is Software Invasion trying to bring them back, I wonder?

Shingo Sugiura