A lot of work has gone into this. A special Character set has been designed, to give better formed letters with proper ascenders and descenders. The instructions are good; controls simple and fairly easy to use. Unfortunately, the result is a rather slow and laborious exercise.

There are four stages of question, each with five difficulty levels - though this I gathered from the printed instructions, not the program. In the first two you choose letters from those displayed to fill gaps; in the other two, you key in letters to make up a word. It has a 1,000-word vocabulary. However, sometimes the choice throws up stupid questions - e.g. choose the missing letter in m*p from a or o. It could be either!

This happened enough times to become annoying. At one stage the word was "opp*sition" and there was only one letter offered. Then at stage three, it gives you one letter of a three-letter word and you guess the rest. Try "e**" with only four mistakes allowed! The answer was "eye". That sort of question can be bl**dy difficult!

B.J.