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I trumpeted the news last month about Interceptor's new game Warlord, echoing their boast that the graphics would be "far superior to anything that's gone before". Well, the good news is that the graphics *are* pretty fancy (though more about this in a minute) and, even more important, the game itself isn't too bad either.

Warlord throws you back to Celtic times and has you meeting up with various Celtic deities, each of whom will grant you a gift in return for a small favour. What these favours are I shall naturally not reveal, though I have to say that I would have preferred it if they hadn't been quite so obvious. For example, if you come across a hare struggling in a trap, you're bound to FREE HARE, aren't you? Oooops! Me and my big mouth...

When you do come across a really tricky puzzle, it's likely to be a linguistic one, and that for the simple reason that Interceptor Games insist on you typing in "clever" things like 'Jump into the boat' rather than 'Enter boat' or whatever. This is all very well, but it's rather frustrating not being able to solve a puzzle when you're rightly convinced that you know the answer and the only that's holding you up is the vocab. I admit, however, to a certain perverse pleasure in overcoming problems like this - and I suspect that others do too.

About those graphics, though... You'll see some examples of them on these pages and there's no denying that they're quite special. I don't, however, think that they're all that great an advance over previous Interceptor pics, almost all of which have been truly excellent from the word go. The another annoyance is that since they're stored as a series of drawing routines (rather than as whole bitmapped screens, which would of course be impossible in the memory available) they do take some time to draw.'

Luckily, they only flash up when you first enter a location, but you have to be careful when you want to recall a location text by typing LOOK, since this will force you to endure the picture drawing all over again. The best thing if you want to check out the contents of a location is not to type LOOK, but to dodge into the adjacent location and back again, which will of course reprint the desired description on the screen without boring you with the graphics first.

The other thing about the graphics is that there aren't an awful lot of them. However, what you get in quality you have to make up for by cutting the quantity.

I have been known to be rather harsh on Interceptor games before. Let me just say that if you like lots of text, they're not for you. Descriptions are extremely brief, there aren't that many puzzles to solve, and some of their games have been fit for only a couple of hours playing unless you're a complete amateur. However, I have to admit that Warlord looks like being one of their best yet. Armed with rod and staff, I was still battling it out after three hours, which, when you consider that Forest At The World's End yielded its secrets in under 50 minutes, must say something for Warlord.