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Seeing as I'm far too bloomin' clever by half (well, a quarter then!). I decided to test this latest educational package out on two infants - it's aimed at 4 to 6-year-olds. However, despite the increasingly young average age of Europress Impact staff (some of the art department are only just out of nappies!) my search was bananaless.

So a minor compromise here: I roped in Wozza from Crash and Paul (the weird one with the baseball cap) from Sega Force - well, at least his mental age is about right!

Sitting the "young ones" down in front of the C64, I loaded up the first of six Shoe People activities: Trampy Visits His Friends. Here Trampy goes on a horizontally scrolling journey, stopping to identify objects. Depending on which of four friends he's visiting, this involves choosing from four given words, choosing the first letter of the object, or spelling the word (either shown briefly before or not).

You should have seen my two little cherubs' faces light up when they saw the nicely animated Trampy bouncing happily along the road. But they looked a bit worried when they had to work out what the objects were. Some of them are really indistinct - the book looks just like a slice of cake!

Pixie Paul looked totally bemused when he came to the spelling - "Can I put my Mac spellchecker on this?" Wee Wozza got 'em all right though and was delighted to see the two shoes waving back as a reward.

Next it was Charlie's Big Day Out, where Charlie the clown (on his day off from designing Crash!) performs a sequence of tricks (blowing his horn, pulling rabbits etc) which you have to repeat 'Simon' style. On the hardest of three levels you have to determine what trick comes next in a repetitive sequence. Again, some of the icons are indistinct, but once you've worked out what's what there's no problem. Another initially confusing aspect is that after a sequence which you're meant to repeat, you're asked "Which trick did Charlie do next?" - surely it should be which did he do "first"?! It's all great fun though, with some lovely animation of Charlie.

My two little lads also enjoyed Sgt Major Sorts It Out. This involves sorting coloured blocks and shapes onto four shelves by pointing Sgt Major's stick (controlled by the space bar and return instead of joystick),

Get it sorted and the Sgt Major raises his flag and tells you how long you took. This led to intense competition between my mini-reviewers, with self-proclaimed champion gamer (pant) Paul getting the record time - "Can I put it in the Zzap high scores?"

Wellington Goes To The Park aims to teach number recognition and simple addition by the well-known "balance the scales" method - only here it's a see-saw. A multiple-choice answer is selected after counting the blocks/dice dots/numbers on one side of the see-saw.

It's back to letter and word recognition in The Great Alphabet Robbery, where anagrams (anything up to six letters on the hardest level) must be solved. The easiest level simply involves matching single capital and lower-case letters. Get the answers right and the policeman catches a burglar; too many wrong and he escapes!

One slight niggle here: when presented with the letters 'c' and 'a', Smart Alec Wozza typed in 'act' - only to be told the correct answer was 'cat'. No wonder he threw a tantrum!

The final activity, Margot's Colouring Book, is more fun than educational. It's a very simplistic art program where you can draw your own sketches or colour in any of five Shoe People pics. Hardly a sophisticated utility, but very enjoyable.

It's a nice addition to a comprehensive package which really is superbly presented with plenty of skill levels for each activity and some really lovely animation of the well-known cartoon characters, accompanied by jolly ditties.

The educational aspect is based on sound tried-and-tested methods, teaching everything from the earliest number/word recognition to addition, logic and spelling.

Yes, there are a few minor faults, but early learning can be made a lot more enjoyable with The Shoe People.