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Trench is a version of the end part of the first Star Wars film, specially adapted to fit the BBC.

You're in a spacecraft, whizzing down a trench carved into a planet's surface. You have to get to the exhaust vent down which you can drop a missile into the heart of the planet, and explode it. Along the way you avoid the vast numbers of assailants and lasers.

The game is very hard. So hard that I lost interest after the first ten or fifteen failures. The graphics are good, I'll give it that much, but the game is so difficult that I thought at first that level 1 must be the hardest not the easiest. When I tried another level I found that where things had been just impossible before, they were now ridiculous.

All of this may well encourage some of you. Many micro users are now finding that most games are too easy, and I suppose for those people this program will be nothing short of manna from heaven.

For me, the worst part was being unable to fire at anything. You can't fire until your battle computer is engaged, and unfortunately that doesn't happen until you've successfully made it some way down this version of the valley of death.

The game is interesting, in that it uses a convincing 3D effect to show the trench along which you are flying. It's done by showing the trench as a series of boxes (each with one side missing) fitting inside each other. By switching these boxes the impression of movement is given.

I was also a bit disappointed to only have one go per game. Just when I was starting to get the hang of it, I'd be shot down.

As I said at the start, the game is far too hard for me, but may therefore prove to be an exciting challenge to others. Like the other Virgin games I've seen, the instructions are excellent, the packaging is sensible and the cover is misleading. Another interesting biographical note on the programmer here too - he prefers sound and graphics to number-crunching facilities. There's not a lot of sound in Trench, though the graphics aren't bad.

It's a pity that he seems to have overdone the difficulty to make up for an oversimple game.