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"Ooh yummy," I thought when I saw this game for the first time. Some time ago I played a console game called Columns. It was such a riot I prayed that someday it would appear on the C64. Well, this ain't Columns but the idea has been ripped off a treat. Unfortunately, they forgot to rip off the playability with it.

The game is a Tetris variant. But instead of manipulating falling shapes, you have to shuffle combinations of food around. Basically, there's a rectangular pit in the middle of the screen, and a group of three food items falls to the bottom where it comes to rest. While it's on its way down, you can move the food left and right with the joystick. All you have to do is position the tasty little blighters so that they fall in a straight line of three similar items of food or more. When this happens they disappear, leaving you more room to carry on. If you're hopeless and the food stacks right up to the top, it's game over.

Where Columns and Stack Up differ is in the orientation of the falling food. In Columns, the food combinations were vertical and this worked brilliantly. However, in Stack Up the grub is horizontal and for some reason this doesn't work a fraction as well. This reduces what would have been a game of skill to one of luck. I feel Stack Up is a title destined to be played three or four times then forgotten.

It's always the same, isn't it? Someone gets hold of a brilliant idea, shuffles it about a bit, and ends up producing a pile of crap.