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Daphne has to be the dippiest woman on the planet. She's gone and got herself kidnapped again. Can you believe it? The woman is a victim. She might as well walk around with the words "kidnap me" tattooed on her forehead. And where was her husband, Dirk the Daring, while all this was going on? He was poncing about in the woods pressing flowers, that's where. Typical.

In Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, the voluptuous Daphne was whisked away by Mordroc, a man with evil in his heart and getting his nuptials on the brain. Dirk eventually managed to track her down and disposed of Mordroc by inflating him like a balloon and popping him with his sword.

In this latest Dragon's Lair installment, The Curse Of Mordread, Daphne's been abducted by Mordread, Mordroc's sister, who has vowed to get her revenge on the Howard and Hilda of cartoonland. It's now up to you, as Dirk, to get her back.

Dragon's Lair III is another cartoon adventure from Readysoft, the company who gave us the Space Ace trilogy and Guy Spy - see the review on page 64 of this issue. Previous incarnations of the Dragon's Lair saga were characterised by fantastic animated sequences, but were so lacking in gameplay that they hardly seemed like games; all you had to do was watch a brief animated sequence and twitch the joystick or press the Fire button to make Dirk react to events in a certain way. Get it wrong and you lose a life, get it right and you move to the next scene.

Instead of offering you something radically different, Dragon's Lair III just offers you more of the same, with 27 different animated sequences to plough through. If you get the movement or timing wrong, you end up getting stuck on the same animation and - because the game has a linear structure - you're given no opportunity to try anything else. Before you realise what's happened, you've turned into Rip Van Winkle with both you and your ST covered in cobwebs. It's that dull. At least there's a save game option and with only three lives to play around with, you really do need it. Another drawback is that the game isn't hard drive installable, so you spend a lot of time waiting around while it accesses one of the seven disks.

The game is controlled by either the joystick or from the keyboard - your ST lets out a little bleep every time you make a move during an animated sequence, so you know you've done something even if the sight of Dirk getting his face chomped off by a bat tells you otherwise. Graphically, the game can't be faulted - the colours are incredible - and the sampled music and effects are pretty good too.

Nothing's changed. Dragon's Lair III inherits all the limitations of its predecessors. OK, so it's got great graphics and sound, but the gameplay is so lame you might as well go out and hire yourself a Disney singalong video for the afternoon.

If Readysoft could combine all the wondrous animation with a game you could actually play, they'd have a surefire smash on their hands. Unfortunately, however, Dragon's Lair III they don't.

Wonderful Disney-style graphics and some great samples making the most of your ST's capabilities.

Sadly, gameplay is so limited that things can quickly get very tedious.