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You've got to hand it to Electric Dreams - they certainly know a thing or two about capturing the very essence of a big movie and squeezing it into the humble C64.

Give them a blockbuster like Aliens and they bring out a computer game with atmospheric graphics, tense gameplay and a good dose of on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Give them a gigantic turkey like Big Trouble In Little China, and what do you get? Yep, a Big Heap of Little Chinese Rabbit Droppings. No-one can accuse them of not being faithful to the original!

The plot is standard Fu Manchu hokum with a lot of twaddle about green-eyed girls and a villainous Mandarin called Lo Pan. You've got to infiltrate Bed Pan's underground hideout, beat up a lot of Oriental nasties and rescue the girls. While you're doing it, you can ask yourself whether the Chinese ever get tired ot being typecast as either rice-picking peasants or evil meglomaniacs with long fingernails.

Your task force comprises three characters - the macho Yank Jack Burton, the Martial Arts expert Wang Chi (don't say it too quickly!), and the mystical magician who floats around on a cloud, Egg Shen. You can switch control between the three at will, and while you're moving one, the other two will follow automatically.

At the start, each character is unarmed, and so in combat Jack Burton uses his fists, Wang his hands and feet, and Egg fires magic bolts from his fingers. In practice, however, the combat sequences are all remarkably similar, whoever is doing the fighting.

Play commences, somewhat perversely, by hitting the Pause key (this isn't indicated in the instructions!) and then moving your gang of three leftwards across the screen. The first level is set in the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. You can tell at once it's Chinatown because there are Chinese hieroglyphics on the walls. Otherwise the scenery is made up of endless brick walls and empty storefronts. Realism? My hat, you can almost smell the chop suey.

For quite a while you watch the threesome amble through this uninteresting landscape, looking for some action, until at last you spot a threatening assailant approaching from the left. From the way he's prancing up and down on his tippy-toes he's either a deadly kung-fu assassin or Rudolf Nuryev. But ol' Wang isn't going to pass up the chance of a bit of one-two, whoever the guy is. A couple of kicks to the head, and the ballet dancer vanishes in a puff of smoke. Either that or he hops off the screen cowardly.

Sometimes the henchmen carry guns, sometimes little sticks, and in between there's lots of walking past brick walls. Eventually, though, your team arrive at the sewers, where the yellow bricks are replaced by blue ones, and a few pipes have been thrown in for good measure.

The same motley collection of baddies awaits in the sewers, the combat is an uninspired as before (but then, with only three fighting moves, what do you expect?), and now you've got the problem of the sewer monsters to contend with.

There are large Chinese dragons which lunge out at you from empty doorways. You can't kill them, so you'll have to jump over them. This doesn't seem to make very much difference on the whole, and slowly but surely your three heroes lose energy and die. Game over.

Hang about. Where are all those swords, guns and potions you've heard so much about? Where indeed. Maybe they're all hidden in Pun's headquarters, if you ever get there. Maybe they got left out due to memory restrictions (joke).

So, there you have it, and, as Barry Norman might say, you can keep it. A licensed game based on a lemon, and coming out six months too late, Big Hype about Precious Little is a dull, insipid little game, a pale imitation of the kung-fu beat-'em-ups we've all grown to hate.