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The sliding block puzzle has a lot to answer for - particularly now that it has been let loose from its rightful place at the bottom of Christmas stockings and deemed a suitable subject for computer games.

Diablo is a game based on the sliding block principle, and evidently designed as mental exercise and a break from blasting the universe to bits or mingling with pixies. Unfortunately, and this comes from someone who enjoys "mental puzzle" type games, it's boring.

The screen portrays a squared grid (12 across by 10 down), each square with a section of "track" on it. A ball runs along the track, and your job is to keep the track continuous by moving the squares so that the ball always has somewhere to move on to.

As the ball completes one square, that piece of track is wiped off the screen; the object is to clear each pattern from level one upwards each time, or "random" screens, which are freshly generated each time.

But that's all there is to it. It would have been nice if the grid/sliding block idea had been varied much more over the screens, so that completely different challenges were presented in later stages, but frankly its appeal palls fairly quickly.

Besides which, what on earth is a game of this type doing on the Amiga in the first place? Diablo is the sort of game that just might have been called "ingenious" on the Spectrum two or three years ago, but it's certainly no advertisement for the Amiga's capabilities.