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After all the ballyhoo about The Dark Crystal, I was expecting something pretty amazing from a game of the same name. This is the latest release from Sierra-Online.

I tested the version for the Apple II, and since it is a 'Hi-res Adventure', meaning you get pikkies as well as words, it's best if you can play it on the colour telly. In monochrome, it loses most of its appeal, although since it's American the colours are all funny. And in a game based so closely on the original that it uses the film's promo-shots, this is poor.

It is an adventure game in the great tradition, since apart from the pictures it functions in the same way as the first adventure. That was written in Fortran on an IBM mainframe in about 1960 and the Dark Crystal is quite faithful to the original.

You are Jen, last of the Gelfling race, which was exterminated by the evil Skeksis. They control the land with the aid of the powerful Dark Crystal, damaged centuries ago when a shard broke off and was lost. Now, you must find the shard, heal the crystal and defeat the Skeksis, before the planet's three suns can reach conjunction.

The game comes in a shrink-wrapped package with a flimsy cardboard backing. The program is on two disks with a covering storybook-cum-manual.

Also included is a poster from the film.

The protection given the disks isn't enough - a sharp-ended accident wouldn't do them any good. There's no pocket in the book for storing the disks, and as you're instructed to copy the play-disks so the masters just sit around and get dirty!

The most visible feature of this game is the pictures - the earlier games in the series included some pretty effective scenes but these are really good. Perspective is well-handled, and the figures look real.

Getting the game up and running couldn't be simpler ... you shove it in the drive (gently!) and boot.

The first picture on screen shows Jen sitting on a rock playing his pipes. From then on it's up to you.

The game is the sixth in the Sierra-Online Hi-res Adventure series, and uses the same code as the previous ones. Normally this would be an advantage, since the principles of the game would be understood by an experienced player.

Perhaps it's familiarity with the principles of adventures, or maybe it shows just how susceptible I am to the ad-man's hype, but frankly I found it more frustrating than its fore-runners. It also seems arbitrary to the point of farce at times.

One classic example is the time I was spotted by a bat with a crystal eye. It took only one bat-sighting followed by a few turns later by the appearance of one of the Garthim (Invincible Nasties) to hammer home the point that Bats Meanz Garthim.

I got killed that time, needless to say.

Anyway, after rebooting and retracing my steps from the map I had drawn so carefully, I was spotted by a bat. I was only two moves away from the hill where the Landstriders grazed, so I headed for it and arrived just in time.

The picture of the Landstriders appeared, so I knew I'd got there, and then, sure enough, up came a singular Garthim (What's the singular of Garthim - Garth?)

To my intense displeasure, I then discovered that actually being in the presence of a whole bunch of Landstriders - who get their kicks in life by kicking the life out of Garthim, makes not one blind bit of difference. You wind up just as dead.

I won't give away any more hints, mostly because I can't think of any. The strategies for dealing with adventures are fairly well documented, and in most respects this one differs little from the rest.

In an adventure game there are very few situations in which an operator error can cause a problem.

In the case of The Dark Crystal, the need to load each picture-file from disk means you could confuse disks, causing a 'file not found' error. The same problem could occur when you move from one disk to another.

In both cases, and presumably in other situations, the program gives polite and clear comments which explain what the machine thinks might be happening. Even if not dead accurate, these messages are close enough to give you an idea of where to look for the problem.

It certainly never crashed, no matter what I did.

I haven't seen the film yet, but I hoped the game would give at least a faint flavour of it. I don't believe the film is as dull as this game rapidly becomes.

My main objection after a few hours' playing is that the situations presented are far too inflexible, and the responses of the other actors are too limited. There's more than one way to skin a cat but in this game there seems to be only one way to tackle any given situation that arises.

The marketing given this program leads you to expect that you'll be almost living the story when playing it. But sadly, only the words and the pictures are similar to the big screen version.