Any company calling itself Superb Software is asking for trouble. And as I waited for The Island to load (waited as in ate a sandwich, enjoyed a cigarette, scribbled on my notepad, looked at my watch, sighed, cursed, sighed, etc) I felt my hostility threshold get lower.

Some twelve minutes later the title screen and instructions appeared.

The Island comes on cassette with a shoddy looking inlay without pictures or instructions. The initial title screen looks good, an outline map of some unspecified island with the title in impressive script. Two screens of instructions follow, then you're into the game.

You are a competitor in a round-the-world motorbike race and your immediate problem is to cross the island. You have limited supplies of money and petrol (and commands) and a very limited amount of time to succeed.

This, alas, is where the disappointment occurs. The Island is billed as "an interactive graphical adventure". On a 64K machine with built-in high resolution graphics and sprites you (and I) might expect great things.

What you see is what you get, and what you get is block graphics and line after line of print statements. Very repetitive they are too.

Second major criticism. The commands you have available are listed in the instructions and they do give the game away a little (what do you make of Embark and Disembark?)

But it is the syntax of the commands that spoils things. How do you take seriously a game that requires you to enter 'verb...noun' with only three letters in each?

For example, to look at the sign, you enter 'Loo sig'! To push your bike southwards you enter 'Pus sou'.

Each move takes several minutes' game time, more if you are pushing. I won't reveal how long you have to complete the game because that is probably the only surprise you'll get. But it isn't long.

Definitely not recommended. This is the kind of thing that was just about acceptable in the dim past of computer games. Commodore 64 owners have a right to expect better for their machine.