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George the Plumber may rank among the best drip fixers in the business, but this time he's got a pretty tough job on his hands.

The water temperature in the boiler is rising rapidly and liable to blow a stop cock any time. George must plumb a relief pipe from the valve at the bottom left hand corner of the screen to the boiler in the top right corner.

Easy? Not quite. First, you must identify and fetch all the right bits of piping to weave your way around all the boulders littering your path.

Then there's the ghost of George's former employer who harbours him a grudge and is out to get him a bad name by stopping him from completing the relief pipe in time.

Control of George's speedy little feet is via the keyboard or joystick. If you use the keyboard, pieces of pipe are picked up and laid in place by positioning George over the piece of pipe and pressing the Space bar. The Fire button replaces the Space bar when using a joystick.

All the pieces of piping - vertical and horizontal straights as well as all the bendy bits - are laid out in order at the bottom of the screen. An indicator at the top of the screen tells you which George is carrying.

Should George get carried away and lay too much piping, the F1 function key gives him a spanner to undo what he's done and F3 makes him put a spanner down again.

All the while, the pressure gauge at the right of the screen is rising and the bonus decreasing. There's even a warning tone to let you know when it's going to blow.

At each of the 99 levels of increasing difficulty, George is given a stick of dynamite to blow up those awkwardly placed boulders.

George has three lives per game and is given a bonus life for every 40,000 points which are scored at the rate of ten per boulder plus the bonus which depends on the speed of the relief pipe completion.

Initially, this seemed lacklustre. But it's not. George has the kind of appeal that grows on you.

The first few levels are fairly easy to cope with but they soon get harder and as the boulders are randomly placed, no two games are the same. It's also a game of instant strategy; there's not much time to choose which way to build the pipeline. And once George starts, there's no going back.