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Remember that song at the end of Roy Castle's Record Breakers? "Ooh-ooh-ooh dedication... Mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm dedication... Ooh-ooh-ooh dedication... That's what you need..."? Well, that's what you're going to need in spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs and jokers if you want to make a go of A320 Airbus. If you've got a few spare months of time, by all means give it a go - but be warned. Most of the time probably won't be spent on the flight simulator, but poring over the masses of air charts and rules and regulations of flying and navigation that are supplied with the program.

The basic 'game' - though the term doesn't really fit in this case - involves progressing from student pilot to captain flying an A320, a commercial plane flying around Europe, North Africa and the Near East. You have to spend so many flying hours before you are promoted, and you have to take special test flights to go up a rank. One crash at any rank, or a poor performance on a test flight, means automatic demotion.

The main way the challenge increases is that at the lower ranks there are plenty of automatic functions to help you on your way (all of which are apparently true-to-life), but by the time you make it to the senior levels you have to do virtually everything yourself. This means having to understand all about radio beacons, ILS approach charts and other aviation stuff, not to mention make sense of the masses of supplied maps, all of which make about as much sense as the final episode of Twin Peaks. Very realistic, I'm sure, but the instructions on how to use them are scandalously brief, and next to useless.

In fact, the manual is the program's real downfall. For a subject as complex as this, it needed to be very clear, but while it gives the impression of being comprehensive it is actually a mess. It skims across important points leaving you completely bewildered and throws out jargon faster than an Open University course on insurance. Worst of all, the diagrams are appalling - instead of one decent clear annotated picture of the cockpit, tiny pieces of it are very fuzzily reproduced and briefly explained.

I don't know whether the flights are all in real time (the manual, of course, neglects to tell you) but it seems that way - each game takes an awfully long time. Once you're up in the air, and on course, there's very little to do until you reach your destination, except try to make sense of the charts and avoid other aircraft.

What else is there to say? Well, the graphics are good enough, with the usual pretty featureless landscapes you get in flight sims, though it's a bit of a shame that the cockpit bears little resemblance to the poster of a real A320 cockpit that comes with the program. The sound is impressively authentic, though.

All in all, so it comes across as an accomplished, admirable piece of programming that, being the nearest thing to flying the real Airbus the sensible side of £50, should appeal to committed aviation and flight sim buffs. I found it boring as sin though - to the point of being unplayable - and I suspect that'll be the case for most of you out there too.

Okay, so it's impressive in its attempts at authenticity, but this one is strictly for the real aviation buffs. Definitely not light entertainment - arguably not really a game at all - and not really that good an introduction to the subject matter either.