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"Ah-ah-ah-ahah!!!" The cry of the man raised by apes, creeper in hand, swinging through the forests of the jungle. I found myself making almost the same sort of noise after a few moments of playing Martech's game Tarzan too. But it wasn't because I was really getting into it. The noise I was making was "Ar-ar-ar-argh!!!"

Tarzan sucks. Big time.

I'm tempted to just leave it there. It would be a short review and it would obviously leave you, the reader, with quite a few questions. And so, I will, with a heavy heart, endeavour to explain just how much Tarzan sucks. But the difficulty is that this is the type of game that, if you're starting to enjoy retro gaming and collecting, comes along and takes all of the wind out of your sails. The fact that this was a full price title - and yet "somehow" managed to avoid being called out for being worse than a magazine type-in - makes it not only bad, but depressingly bad. It's worse than you could ever dare to dream, only of any interest at all to those who only accumulate the very shoddiest of software. And in all seriousness, I don't believe that a game can be this bad by accident. This sort of horror can only come from the mind of an evil genius with a mission to put people off computer games for life. With that in mind, even if you're willing to give Tarzan the benefit of the doubt, you might want to really pause for thought before you load it up.

Let's turn firstly to the strange, somewhat lyrical instructions requesting you "travel without stint" through "the myriad life of matted vegetation". This gobbledygook can basically be boiled down to you being on a quest for seven "gemstones". You have to collect these because the chief of the Wamabo said you have to, and has kidnapped your girlfriend (or "she who he had won by the might of your steel thews", according to the barmy narrator!) to motivate you. Indeed, the game starts with a picture of her chained up. To what look to be two bizarrely smiling rocks.

And then it starts...! A bizarre green screen monochrome mish-mash of trees, vines, animals, arrows, natives and caves, none of them in any way discernible from the other. Your Tarzan character, associated naturally enough in print and celluloid form with agility, strength and sexual prowess, is here depicted in the fashion of a squat, slightly stooped, skirt-wearing specimen of manhood. The game plays like it's in super slow-motion, and you could easily fire up a musical rendition of Chariots Of Fire to complete the effect if you wished too because the game plays in absolute silence.

Ever found yourself squinting at five "things" occupying the same 16 x 16 pixel block? Thought not, because most games, and particularly those in the category of "graphic adventures" don't tend to go for 0% ratings for graphics. Here, the only thing resplendent about the graphics are their confusing and indistinct qualities.

But then, Tarzan is no ordinary game. It's not just aiming to score a 0% rating for graphics, it's aiming for a 0% rating in all categories. The incomprehensible instructions, silent running and graphics so terrible that it's often impossible to tell where your character actually is are merely the appetisers. The main course is to deliver the sum total of nothing for both playability and lastability. So try jumping. You'll find Tarzan doesn't actually jump; it's more like he does a forward roll. On the spot. Through the air. Without actually moving.

Now let's add the hazards that you need to avoid. In their quest for the zeroes, Martech must have plotted out the game with the following suggestion: "Let's have arrows appearing out of thin air a few millimetres from Tarzan's torso, so that there's absolutely no possible way to avoid them. And let's make any collision with a nasty, arrow or anything else, freeze Tarzan in position not only it's passed all the way through his body, but for a good few seconds longer. Perhaps for just long enough for a second nasty to also reach him."

If that hasn't completely killed off all playability, then try this for What You Have To Do... You meander throughout the game - with no sense of real purpose - from flick-screen room to flick-screen room. Enemies pick you off without warning in the 'edges' of the screen you're leaving, or immediately you move into a new area. Tigers (that look more like oversized raccoons) plod from left to right and the odd black-skinned native also tries to do you in by running through you. Controlling Tarzan is by way of five keys - QWOK and P to fire. However, whilst Q and W for left and right are simple enough, O and K for up and down move you through the arches that appear on some screens, but also double as both jump and crouch! You can be transported through arches without warning just by standing near to them and attempting to avoid an enemy.

And if you think this can't get any worse, you haven't even heard the half of it yet. Clearly realising that providing graphics for collectible objects might result in a reviewer at least awarding the game a few points, Martech decided instead to use... squares. Yes, a gemstone is presented as... a square. A rope is presented as... another square. A monkey is presented as... yet another square. (Don't worry, you can tell what they are though, because the game prints 'ROPE' in standard Basic text to help you!)

In a final move of stupefying idiocy, Martech decided the ideal key to pick up any object was... O! Yes, with the entire Electron keyboard to choose from, and already using key O for up (near an arch) and O for jump (not near an arch), they went with O (near an object) to pick it up. And how about using an object you've already picked up? O again. "But how is the game going to decide whether the player wants to go up, jump, pick up an object or use a carried object?" someone asked. And back came the reply: "That's an academic question, son, because no-one will play this game for long enough to realise that it can't."

The instructions for Electron Tarzan may well have been written (by some wasted hippies) for a different version of the game, because they talk about a bizarre sun and moon feature that does not exist. Instead you get an energy meter and, in perhaps one of the laziest coding decisions ever taken, the game renders this, and your score, in the standard Basic text font.

And yet, even this pales in comparison to the gemstone quest. You have three days to complete it, and these days are, essentially, lives. There's no real indication of when one day dies and another begins and, when your energy drops to 0% on the third day, you get no 'Game Over' message. Instead 'QUEST COMPLETED' is plonked on the screen right in the middle of the 'action'. There is no death sequence, no high score table and certainly no explanation that you have in fact failed. I presume that, if anyone indeed completes the game, you get the exact same message.

Tarzan is simply a game of pure evil and it clearly should never, ever, have been released. But, alarmingly, The Micro User thought much different. It praised it for "some of the best graphics and animation I've ever seen" and called its postage stamp playing area "visually impressive". A&B Computing thought it to be a "well-coded" conversion of the Spectrum original and concluded, "Tarzan is going to win Martech a good number of new friends". EUG however thought otherwise, calling it "difficult, doomed and a damned mess". I couldn't have put it better myself.

Oh, wait a minute, that last one was my own review in EUG.

You don't think it sounds too bad, and you want it? Maybe you think there might be a half-decent BBC version of it on the flipside? (There isn't!) Well, funnily enough, you'll probably have no difficulty at all getting hold of this one. Expect to pay around £1 or, better still, offer to pay someone the postage simply to get it out of their house.