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Suspend your disbelief. These really are screenshots from an Amiga game. I think it's fair to say no-one thought this could be done, but Readysoft have come up with a faithful translation of the laserdisc arcade game. True, a few sections of the original have fallen by the wayside, but by the large - and certainly where it counts - Dragon's Lair does the business.

Starting out on the drawbridge, Dirk the Daring, sets out to enter the castle to rescue Daphne, the girl from the Listerene advert. Dirk may not be the brightest of boys, but immediately we come to one of the most serious flaws of this game. Every time he tries to cross the drawbridge he falls down the hole in the middle. Your participation in Dragon's Lair is limited to the occasional move on the joystick. There really aren't many clues from the game to help you along and there's no feeling at all of real participation. That's the way it goes, right throughout the game. So you're left like one of Pavlov's Dogs to fumble your way through the beautiful animation by trial and error.

I said it was a faithful translation, and that applies to the awful gameplay. If the gaming equivalent of one player snap even deserves the term. It also faithfully translates the enormous price, so before you fall in love with what you see, remember you need a Meg cartridge and £45. It's not worth it, not even for a brilliant interactive cartoon - for that is what this is. I found it nothing less than irritating, and nothing more than pretty.

Some of the scenes will astonish you - the chessboard scene, for example, which actually involves some playing - but you can only be amazed once. Then, of course, there's the other big problem - six disks and back to the start every time Dirk gets knobbled. Readysoft are in no way to blame for this, any more than they are for Dragon's Lair's wooden gameplay. Compressing 130 Megabytes of sound and graphics into any game is an amazing achievement. That's what Dragon's Lair is, but who wants to buy an amazing achievement. I'd rather have an actual game if it's all the same to you.