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What is the Bad Tempered Thing, how do you boil Slimies, and where does Terry Wogan fit in to all this? The answer's beneath the Trap Door.

Not that long ago, programmer Don Priestley wrote a computer game based on the Popeye comic strip and cartoon series, and for the game he came up with some new techniques that created some of the largest coloured sprites ever seen on the Spectrum, as well as masking techniques that almost made you forget about the Speccy's attribute problems. Unfortunately, the Popeye game didn't set the world alight (though I thought it was excellent!) but now Don Priestley and his mega-sprites have reappeared at the helm of the first game from the new Piranha label, The Trap Door, based on a new children's series, produced by Terry Wogan's own production company, and due to be seen on television this autumn.

The main character in the series is a blue blob-like fellow by the name of Berk. Berk is the servant of the Bad Tempered Thing who ives in the upper regions of the castle whilst Berk rushes around in the castle cellar doing the Thing's bidding (which normally means getting his meals - worms, boiled slimies, that sort of thing).

Also tucked away in the cellar is the Trap Door, beneath which lurk all sorts of weird creatures. Some of these things can actually help Berk in his chores, although others are just plain awkward.

In the game, you are in control of Berk and have to complete the tasks that will get shouted down to you from upstairs. This involves looking for, and also making use of the creatures that will pop up from the trap door just about every time you open it. Along the way you'll have to solve some of the most devious and imaginative problems that you're likely to come across in an arcade-adventure. What, for instnace, do you do with the bullet if you haven't got a gun and how do you make the bird lay eggs? Fortunately, Berk has a friend called Boni, a disembodied skull who can provide the odd bit of advice if you're not sure what to do next.

The playing area down in the cellar isn't all that huge, consisting of barely a dozen screens, but, as with the Popeye game, one of the things that makes the game so enjoyable is the 'layered' effect that allows you to move characters and objects not just up/down and left/right in two dimensions, but also into and out of the screen to create a real 3D effect. So, although the number of individual screens is quite limited, there is a lot more than can be done than in most other games. There are passages and staircases that you can wander through, and a number of objects that need to be positioned carefully in order to complete your tasks.

But the main feature of Trap Door is probably the quality of the graphics and animation. Berk himself is a sprite of not inconsiderable proportions, but some of the monsters that pop up out of the trap door are larger than anything that I've ever seen drawn on a Spectrum screen, and yet they move around the screen smoothly and without any attribute problems. The animation is so good that it's fun to just sit and watch all the action in front of you. One of the nice things about the television program is the way that all sorts of little creepy crawlies just wander about doing odd things irrespective of what the main characters are up to, and this has been carried over into the computer game so that you can have Drut (a small yellow blob) chasing worms around the screen while Berk is busy trying to do something else. This adds to the atmosphere and makes it feel almost like a real cartoon world.

Don Priestley's earlier experiments wth this type of game haven't been wildly successful, perhaps they fall rather awkwardly between the two types of arcade and adventure game (and also because the animation techniques are so costly that a 48K memory doesn't do them justice). But hopefully, with the publicity surrounding the TV series people will take a close look at Trap Door and enjoy it as much as I did.