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I live driving in my car...

This is a management simulation, this is. Starting at the dawn of automative technology, you are the president of a car company. By your financial wizardry and expert marketing nous you are supposed to create the next General Motors. [Hurrah! - Michael Moore] You design cars (hooray), you build factories and sales offices (hmm), you hire and fire workers (yawn!) and assign them to different individual projects (big yawn), you get drowned in tedium by setting their wage levels (zzzzz), you have to set the budgets for your marketing sped (aaargh) and then, three years into the game the computer mysteriously builds a level eight factory for you in Mexico along with minus 86 sales offices and your modest annual profit of $3,000 or so becomes a $4.5 billion loss and you have to start all over again. (Picks up computer, thinks about smashing it against wall, looks round, realises everybody is staring, sits down.)

I hate this game. I despite it. I hate its stupid control system. [Hang on - 'insipid control system'? - Ed]. For example - and you really only need one example - different parts of the game use different key letters to represent the same command. So instead of learning to move speedily around the various screens, you end up peering at the screen and trying to decide which of the many letters in the command you're trying to use is the one you have to press as a key letter. Nnggh, as JD would say, were he here. [Which I am, of course, and not, for example, on holiday on deadline week. Or anything - Ed]

Worse still is the way in which the game forces you to perform every action repeatedly. The running of the company is broken down into tasks as I described earlier, but as the years roll by, the tasks don't change to keep you interested. No, they just have to be repeated more often so that what once bored you when you had to do it for one sales office now crucifies you when you have to do it for twenty - step by painstaking step. It's simply no fun. Detroit promises interest and then destroys every last bit of it by its awful control system.

Don't mistake me for somebody who doesn't like management sims either. I'm a Railroad Tycoon fanatic. I'm a Sim City but. Theme Park has had me doing metaphorical back-flips with joy. But this stinks. It stinks of cash-in. It stinks of small-minded greedy people who have looked over the shoulders of other people's success and thought - how can we get out grubby hands on some of this money? The authors of this game must know that it's tedious. Don't buy it. Don't encourage them. Don't let them get away with it.

Uppers: Designing cars is good.

Downers: Any good management sim should relieve you of the basic day-to-day tedium of running your railway, or city, or car factory or whatever, leaving you to get on with the fun of building, researching, skimping on safety features and making pots of cash. But Detroit doesn't. It revels in its numbing ability to bore.

Rather than playing this game I suggest you go down to your local technical college and enrol on an accountancy courses. It'll probably be cheaper and you're likely to have a far more interesting time.