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The Happiest Days of Your Life is another conveyor belt Firebird title put out presumably on the scatter gun marketing technique which can be roughly translated as 'surely one of these things will sell if we put enough out there'.

It's not easy to get much idea of the game from the outside box: 'clear your name to avoid a thorough caning' and 'screen pictures shown may be different machine versions of game' is all you get. The former doesn't make it sound very exciting (except to masochists who may try to lose). As to the pictures, I can say that they are exactly like the Spectrum version of the game.

It's a sort of Skool Daze minus originality meets Wally games with marginally inferior graphics.

Your objective is to wander around the school and environs picking up objects putting down other objects and by putting objects with other objects to get further objects.

For example, putting a tape in the tape recorder gets you a recorder 'running' which may be useful in conjunction with he computer.

There are things spinning around, things bouncing up and down, things wizzing from side to side - all of them sapping your energy. Some places seem to restore energy levels and most of the puzzles require logical association of objects ie taking the betting slip to the betting shop sounds a good idea...

Graphics are fair, quite big, quite chunky though with a sublime disregard for attribute problems that not even Mikro-Gen could equal. It isn't badly programmed but there really isn't anything exciting about it. On the other hand it is a budget title. If you absolutely must have another Wally style, collect-the-bits game I've seen worse and this is cheap.

Label: Firebird Author: Martin Sherlock Price: £1.99 Joystick: various Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Graham Taylor

***

Wally meets Skool Daze, reasonably proficient jumpy runny collecty thing. Cheap but, overall, little originality in evidence.