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If you fancy yourself as a joystick wizard, if your reflexes are on the microsecond side of sharp, and if you want a multi-screen multiple-challenge game that could easily last you all day (we spent about seven hours completing the game), you could do worse than consider Aztec Challenge.

In spite of the length it's not an Adventure - just a series of seven very different tasks to be completed successfully. The scenario is that you're an Aztec selected as a human sacrifice, your only chance being the successful completion of several challenges. None are easy, all are fun.

Each player (one or two) gets five lives with which to complete each stage: use them up and you're back at the start of that stage (though thankfully you're not dumped back to the beginning of the game). You first run a gauntlet of your erstwhile pals chucking spears at you (joystick down to jump over them, up to duck under the spears). If you make it to the temple you dodge tumbling boulders as you pant up the (very long) stairs to the entrance - joystick right and left.

Once inside you have to negotiate different rooms with various hazards like bits of roof falling in, saws appearing out of the floor, chasms opening up... Here your bloke is running like a loony anyhow, and your joystick is used to stop him and have him leap over obstacles. Beyond that, there's the neighbourhood vermin to vault over, everything from snakes and scorpions to iguanas and sludge. Then you're at a tile-hopping problem, with some tiles booby-trapped. Beyond that is a lake full of piranha fish to swim through. And finally there's the real pig of a problem, a bridge with one, two or three steps missing: joystick up to make your running Aztec leap three steps, left for two, down for one. The gaps come so quickly that you need really acute reflexes to make the right movement.

And that's the seventh and final stage... except that you now start on phase two, where everything happens much more quickly. Get through that, and it's all quicker still. And then you do it all again by night.

We took all day to get through phase one, and it's riveting. See all the different uses of the joystick? Very neat. And with a couple of exceptions (notably the unconvincing vermin) the graphics on each stage are really excellent, especially in terms of attention to detail: the wall hangings in the temple rooms are positively Art, the Aztec's loin cloth flaps convincingly (if demurely) while he runs, his feet go like crazy, the piranha swarm in like... well, like piranha. Sound for that one is also great, though on the whole the designers went rather OTT on the soundtrack; it gets boring after a while.

Ignore the graphics on the cover, by the way, which feature a young lady with overdeveloped mammaries being chased by a smiling gent with bulging loincloth, bottled tan and silly hair-do. It's all sadly irrelevant.