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With Acornsoft's Snooker for the BBC Micro there is a strong temptation to spend most of the game walking around the monitor stroking your chin and chalking an imaginary cue. If you can persuade a cigarette company to donate some free samples, so much the better. This game is a taste of the big time.

The green ball, in order to stand out against a green table, is coloured light blue. The brown is pink and it throbs noticeably to enable you to distinguish it from the pink ball. The cue, which you construct by pressing the appropriate keys, grows in the direction of the shot rather than behind the cue ball.

Snooker is short on visual prompts but the booklet covers most eventualities. The ones it omits present themselves soon enough.

Snooker's cue is an implement of limited precision. Its length gives you strength in the shot, its angle gives you direction, and you can select topspin or backspin to actually play the ball. But the direction is not always exactly what you imagine it to be, and your judgement of strength is practically useless because strange things happen when the cue ball strikes its object.

Cannons of exaggerated violence send balls all over the table from the mildest shot. Topspin and backspin are apparently transferred from the cue ball to the ball struck and the mayhem is even more pronounced. It is possible to play a subtle shot with great gentleness but this seems to have more to do with luck than skill.

Otherwise the game proceeds easily enough. Nomination of colours is straightforward; when you've potted a red, a bar at the foot of the screen shows you what has been pocketed, and token sound effects can be ignored.

You can refine the direction of your shot by changing the order of commands with which you build your cue (or, presumably, by using a joystick - I used an ordinary keyboard).

One quibble - when the white goes down you aren't allowed to determine where in the D to position it.

Snooker is a shadow of the real thing, but fun nonetheless. Over time its main shortcoming will be the difficulty of making it into a game where skill counts, but that will only really count against it with people who know how to handle a cue. For anybody else it is probably as good a way of mis-spending your youth as any.