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The cassette was attractivey boxed in a large black carton with a picture of a viking's head on it. Inside the cassette itself was housed in a plain cassette case. Included was a 48 page booklet of instructions which was well written and informative and as a plus was also entertaining. It is well worth reading the book first.

The cassette loaded first time every time and in fact is guaranteed to load or a replacement given. Loading takes about four minutes during which time you are presented with another picture of the viking's head in stunning graphics plus the program title. And it is well worth waiting the four minutes. The adventure gives graphcs and text windows rather like The Hobbit. Every location has a graphics display though some use the same display; these are beautiful and of course are in full colour.

The difference between these graphics and those of The Hobbit is that this program shows all the characters, including yourself, and these also have movement. I have included some sample screen displays, though these fail to do justice in black and white without movement. These were obtained by the copy command, not available with The Hobbit.

When fighting, characters are seen to strike at each other with swords or axes and on being given, say, the command DRINK WINE, you can see the wine bottle tilted to the lips.

A feature I liked was that, when killed, the game does not end, you go to hell and more or less have to start afresh.

It would be possible to spend many happy hours with this program just enjoying the superb graphics and trying out different commands. There are in actual fact six quests to carry out which must be completed in sequence. These all involve finding special objects lie a word or a ring. The quests take a lot of thinking out and involve getting help from other characters who therefore need to be kept in with.

All the commands are easy to use and the program appears bugfree (I have not yet crashed it). There appears to be many, many locations of which I have so far only visited twenty or thirty. There are thirty-six main characters and twenty-one different types of object. Communication is very good and allows fairly sophisticated inputs such as THOR SELL ME AXE FOR 20 CROWNS. Minor spelling errors are automatically corrected for you.

A save game facility is included, which I always find useful on games of this length.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this game and I think it is streets ahead of the available opposition and, although the price will be considered by some to be very high, I think it is excellent value for money.