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The standard of budget software seems to be varying quite a lot these days. On one hand there's a small number of games that make full price titles look overpriced, but at the same time there are still a lot of budget games that really ought never to have seen the light of day.

Then, on the other hand, there are games like Thingy and the Doodahs which are neither incredibly good nor incredibly bad and which make a poor reviewers life hell because you can't rave over them or indulge yourself by giving them a good drubbing. So what do you say about them?

Well, the plot of the game goes like this: Thingy (a little sprite type person with an idiotic grin) has gone and broken his Spectrum and has to replace it with a new one before his parents find out. The only way for him to do this is to go of in search of the money to buy a replacement (just £60 apparently - do Americana know more about Amstrad's plans for the Speccy than they're letting on?), and this will take hm on a journey around some 200 locations, including rooms in his house and the neightbouring countryside.

As usual though, there are monsters out to get him. In this case, it's a bunch of creatures known as Doodahs which come in various types. There are Whatsisnames, Thingummybobs, Whachamacalits and So-and-So, and they're all equally deadly.

Thingy is a good old fashioned maze game with £1 coins as the objects that you've got to collect. It's not badly done, but it does look fairly dated - most of the passageways and monsters are small character-sized blocks, making use of the UDG facility, so the game looks reminiscent of others that you could have bought three years ago. It's not fast and furious, but dodging around the Doodahs and the passages of the maze is quite complex in places and the author has clearly put a bit of thought into the layout of all the rooms.

I can't really recommend Thingy and the Doodahs one way or the other. It's not such a bad game that you'll regret every penny you part with to buy it, but neither is it the sort of game that is ever likely to be remembered two months after you bought it. The word that describes it best is 'average'.