'Pit' your wits against man-eating tomatoes

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Imagine the scene — your keyboard slowly cooling down from white heat, your joystick wilting from the tension and your monitor reeling from the bombardment of electrons.

Suddenly you find yourself in a mine, and there's obviously no-one else down there. You are given your objec tive - the quest for buried treasure. It is easy enough to get at, so where's the challenge?

Well, I've neglected to tell you about the ferocious tomatoes and the pot-bellied dragon, probably due to all the lighter fluid or equivalent required to breathe fire!

> In The Mine, you have a side view of the shaft, and you control a particularly 'hunky' character who wanders around it, looking for buried treasure.

The program pits (no pun intended!) its wits against you in the form of giant man-eating tomatoes that rush after you.

The real enemies though are the squat, pot-bellied aardvark look-alikes known as the fire breathing dragons. They run up to you and spew death all over you.

> Your only defence against these menaces is the'neutraliser' which, when activated near the menaces, starts to shrink them until they finally disappear.

However, a more dramatic way of killing is to cause the rocks to fall, smashing down on any menaces in hot pursuit.

This is the best version of the arcade game "Mr. Do" that I've seen, although the market isn't exactly flooded with them.

> The quality of the animation and the detail of the graphics is quite superb, especially the mushrooms and the Aardvark clones.

The program includes a hall of fame for the top scores and offers the user a choice of using the keyboard or the joystick to control the character.

The cassette is, as is usual from this company, beautifully packaged with very comprehen sive loading instructions includ ing details for disc and Econet users.

> The program is recorded twice on one side of the tape. I had no problems loading it. All things considered, this is a program for small-time games dabblers and arcade addicts alike with many fascinating gimmicks and features.

Philip Tudor