"The supreme collection of Spectrum arcade games" reads the blurb on the cassette inlay for this compilation tape. Unfortunately, I just didn't share Turtle's enthusiasm for the collection. At a time when you can buy compilations including the likes of Lords Of Midnight, Pyjamarama and Brian Bloodaxe for under a tenner, Turtle Software's offering of games from the Pac-Man era just isn't in the same league.

There are six games on the tape, and most of them load in about sixty seconds, which will give you some idea of their size and complexity.

The first, Aliquid Simplex, casts you in the role of the map Dr Hilfe, who must search his laboratory for parts of his monster's body before the lab burns down. The lab is a Pac-Man style maze, around which are scattered the monster's limbs, and through which various pieces of lab equipment wander, trying to kill the good doctor. Fairly basic stuff, though the graphics are of a reasonable standard and the 'revolutionary two channel simulated music' is actually quite good.

The only problem was that I couldn't seem to collect the monster's limbs. Whenever I got near to one in the maze, it would just sit there blocking the way and getting me killed by passing bunsen burners. As far as I could tell, there was no way of collecting the limbs (except for one occasion when I passed over one and it vanished, but it was just the one occasion out of many).

Spraymania is the second game, in which you can control four different spray cans in order to kill off four types of creature. This is the sort of game that gave the early budget offerings a bad name. It would be easier to play but for one of the creatures which moves so quickly that killing it becomes more luck than anything else.

3D Blood Dungeon is a maze game that seems to consist of several rooms which are all absolutely indentical.

Snakes Alive has potential, it's one of those games where you manoeuvre a worm around a number of screens and must avoid retracing the path left by its tail. But, as with Spraymania, the speed of the game spoils its playability - a supersonic worm is pretty hard to control, believe me.

Side two of the tape starts with what I felt was the best game of the lot. One Man and His Job. This is quite a good dodge and collect game, with small but clear graphics (similar to those of Lode Runner) and would probably make a reasonable budget game if it had more than just nine screens.

Moons Of Tantalus is by far the best game graphically, but seemed to be lacking in content. You are supposed to drive a small moon buggy back and forth to refuel a space shuttle, and at the same time to protect the buggy from attack by aliens. However, despite driving back and forth any number of times, the aliens didn't score a single hit (or even a near miss) on the buggy, so that all that to-ing and fro-ing soon became a completely uneventful, repetitive chore.

I don't mean to be unduly harsh on Turtle, since they seem to be a small, well intentioned, semi-professional outfit, rather than a large company cynically attempting to make a quick buck, but I honestly can't recommend The Epic as a good buy. It might have been once (about a year or so ago!), but there's so much high quality software around these days that you can afford to look around for better.