The trouble with you is that you're constantly being goaded into undertaking crazy challenges from Blenkinsop and his cronies. Fair enough, you did present them with Guinevere's shoelace - which totally ruined Sowerby-Jones - but Quetzicoah's toothpick? Is there such a thing? Well, it's up to you to find it - and quick.

Such is the batty background to Jim MacBrayne's third adventure game, The Mission. The first two were created and placed in the Public Domain. Now Jim has decided to go commercial on us. A text only adventure, The Mission bears a striking resemblance to the old Infocom style.

The screen layout is very clean with the room location shown at the top of the screen. Text is plentiful, well written and humorous in places. The parser is very good accepting just about everything I threw at it. It recognises ALL, AND but not IT. You can RAMSAVE/LOAD, script a hard copy to the printer, change the screen colours, define the function keys and so on. Short-cut keys such as Z for 'wait' are welcome.

The puzzles are very ingenious, frustrating, maddening but always, in the end, very enjoyable. In fact, some of the puzzles remind me of Infocom's Steve Meretzky-school of puzzling: you know, the tear-your-hair-out-and-collapse-in-a-fit-of-anguish type!

Jim should be given a rather large pat on a back and a rather large drink for his work on The Mission. For one man to develop his own adventure system, then produce an adventure of the calibre of The Mission is pretty darned impressive. Buy it, enjoy yourself and then write to Jim and demand a sequel.